The end of the Futty Era came curtly and sadly on Monday morning, as the Portland Timbers shipped their longest-tenured to Montreal for a second-round draft pick.
The end came after one more shambolic defensive performance against Vancouver, one that Futty, ironically enough, wasn’t involved in. The move is about clearing cap space and increasingly flexibility for a summer purge that the Timbers’ are readying to save their spiraling 2014 season. It wasn’t about shipping a beloved Timber because that beloved Timber couldn’t cut it.
But this still hurts. Futty, besides being an integral part of the Great Wall of Gambia and just about every good Timbers moment since 2009 – one of the last remaining links to the USL days – was a romantic sort of fan favorite.
He was the guy who defined the Timbers’ sum-is-greater-than-the-parts, team-matters-most mojo that defined the team at their best and set them apart from so many of their rivals up and down the West Coast.
You could always count on Futty finding his way onto the field when it mattered most. Portland has played over 100 MLS games and Futty appeared in 60. And yet, he played and scored when then-Jeld-Wen Field was christened on that magical night in the rain against Chicago.
He played in all four of the team’s playoff games. He scored Portland’s first ever-MLS goal against Seattle, and their last playoff goal against the Sounders too. You had to admire the guy. He never had incredible physical skill, he never had any one attribute you could point to and say, “That’s what makes him a great player” – well, except maybe his ability to play forward in stoppage time to try to rescue a last-minute result.
He finishes with 100 league appearances for the Timbers across all competitions. His last game was the Timbers’ only clean-sheet of the 2014 season. You could have surmised that there was something up when Danny O’Rourke made the bench before Futty on Sunday night, but trading Futty?
He was the Timber. He was well liked and respected by everyone within the organization. Loved, certainly, by his line-mates.
It’s a devastating trade for at least Pa Moudu Kah – who, it should be noted, consistently turned in his best and most measured performances when playing alongside Futty – and Donovan Ricketts. And that for a team already short a little short on the unbreakable camaraderie that flourished in 2013.
Futty, in many ways, was a security blanket. He was so familiar, so unmissable, as his #98 shirt was suggest, that even though he wasn’t the best defender, he was a comfortable one.
I’ll always remember Caleb Porter reinserting Futty, along with Jack Jewsbury, into the Timbers’ lineup for a Friday night home game against Colorado last year with Portland stuttering in fifth place and in danger of falling out of the playoff race.
You know what happened next: The Timbers started ripping off 1-0 wins, won the Western Conference, and made it within one step of MLS Cup.
Everyone has great Futty memories. Few loved playing for the Timbers more than this guy.
What hurts is that Futty and Mikael Silvestre were the two best center backs on the Timbers’ roster when training camp started in January. The story goes that last year the two wise old veterans got into a playful argument when Futty stated emphatically that Portland was the best place to live in the world.
Silvestre had his doubts. Later, when he was released by the Timbers, he stated he and his family loved living in Portland so much that they’d stay in the city for the foreseeable future.
The Timbers’ front office felt like this was a necessary step to move forward in this landscape of this season. Taylor Twellman reported within an hour of Danso’s trade that Portland has a $2+ million dollar offer on the table for Manchester City and former England center-back Joleon Lescott that would make Lescott the highest-paid defender in the history of MLS.
Landing Lescott – not at all a done deal at the moment – would soften the blow of losing Futty. But the Gambian will always be missed.
Futty was Portland’s only tradable center-back. No one would take Kah – who around three times as much as Futty – Rashawn McKenzie isn’t good enough and doesn’t make enough money to make the move worthwhile, and Norberto Paparatto is untouchable with his MLS struggles. Thing is, Futty is a good player. Not a great player, but he’s certainly quality enough to start in MLS.
If the Timbers could have kept him, they absolutely should have. Lescott or no, this is the bitterest of pills to swallow. Now, Futty reunited with Troy Perkins – though you wouldn’t wish the Impact on any player right now.
But Montreal know they need some luck right now, and whenever the Timbers were leading a charmed life in the last four years, Futty was at the heart of the good times.
That string of 1-0 victories over playoff teams last fall fall into that category – or how about when Futty was planting Jack Jewsbury free-kicks into the back of the net week after week in early 2011? In a sports world where we see person after person as bad news, Futty was good news.
The Timbers are moving on – and this is why watching a once-successful team lose is just the worst. All of the sudden, the players who were once good enough get sent away with impunity.
In a perfect world, Futty Danso would have retired a Timber. But this world sure ain’t perfect, and so Futty is packing his bags and maybe pleading with Kah to give him a crash-course in French.
30 years from now, young kids will walk into Providence Park to watch the home-team, and pick out one or two #98 jerseys. They won’t know who Futty was. But they need only ask, and a smile and a story is sure to follow from anyone who was around at the beginning of the Timbers’ big-league journey.
Farewell, dear friend. Good luck.
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