You have to give the Portland Timbers credit. They just keep finding new ways to make the impossible possible.
This week, instead of coming out half asleep and playing themselves into a huge deficit which they have to furiously rally back from, the Timbers snatched the first two goals and then pressed the self-destruct button on set pieces, of all things, the only area of defending in which the Timbers have been at all competent this year.
Throwing away a commanding 2-0 lead to lose 3-2? That’s new.
Of course, the biggest and most gut-wrenching moment from this game happened in the first ten seconds of the 100 minutes of soccer that would be played on a glorious day in Toronto.
Will Johnson’s season is over. The Timbers’ captain broke his leg on the first real play of the game, a bang-bang challenge in which both Johnson and Mark Bloom went sliding into a challenge that left Johnson prone on the turf of his hometown club for almost ten minutes before he was stretchered off.
It’s horrible when a player gets hurt. Catastrophic injuries are one of the worst parts of sports, there’s no questioning that. Johnson’s life is all about Opening Day, 2015 now – though it remains to be seen how realistic that goal is.
Over the last two years, we’ve seen Will Johnson grow in stature over games, becoming bigger and bolder and more possessed with each passing minute, each passing challenge, each passing bout. That’s when Will is at his best. That’s why he was the Supporters’ Player of the Year last year.
After ten seconds of this game, he just looked very small. Injuries are awful at any time, but Johnson has a newborn baby right now and his team are in the middle of a playoff chase and a Champions League campaign.
At least he was saved from the indignity of what was to come over the next 90 minutes.
Because despite watching their captain go down, the Timbers jumped out on a discombobulated and disenchanted TFC to the tune of a 2-0 lead inside first half hour.
Diego Chara – who was fantastic and will have to play the biggest four games of his life if the Timbers want to make the playoffs – came tearing out of midfield to block a pass from center-back Nick Hagglund. The deflection fell to the red-hot Fanendo Adi, who made no mistake to give the Timbers the lead.
Even if that was Adi’s only contribution, and it wasn’t, it would have been better than Maxi Urruti, who failed to register a single noticeable touch in his thirty-odd minutes on the field.
Portland made it 2-0 just minutes later. Chara sprung Valeri down the byline on a broken corner play, and Valeri’s driven ball in front was deflected in quite spectacularly by Steven Caldwell for an own-goal.
At this point, Toronto should have been broken. Facing virtual playoff elimination without three points, 2-0 down, and already emotionally ragged to exhausted from the firestorm of a year gone by, the Timbers should have coasted to victory from their cozy halftime lead.
They didn’t of course, because they’re the Timbers, and they just can’t or won’t play a complete games. This is a team that just fails time and time again to handle themselves professionally.
That’s how Toronto got back into the game. A cross that Hagglund climbed over Darlington Nagbe to head in cut the lead to one, and then a play that will go on the all-time Alvas Powell dumb play montage set up Toronto’s second.
As his man was headed irrevocably out of bounds, Powell shoved him in the back. Michael Bradley’s cross skittered on through the middle and was popped in by an unmarked Hagglund at the back post.
But we expect shocking defending from Powell. Diego Valeri, on the other hand?
As the game was ticking into stoppage time at a deflating, but still useful 2-2 – Valeri, who knew full well he was sitting on a yell0w-card suspension, launched a frankly absurd challenge with little to no upside that resulted in the suspension-inducing yellow-card, and then, Bradley’s whipped in ball that whiplashed a stranded Donovan Ricketts and bounced into the net.
Some are calling it the biggest win in Toronto’s MLS history. After all they’ve been through, it surely was special. Anyone who saw Bradley’s reaction, kicking the advertising boards after a thunderous celebration, or heard the long-suffering BMO Field faithful in a frenzied sort of tizzy might agree.
As we say, there’s few elixirs quite like the 2014 Timbers.
Michael Bradley – who hovered around his fallen childhood friend Will Johnson in mutual pain – was fantastic. He deserved his moment, even if it never should have happened. And that’s what TFC did to Portland the week before the return of Jermain Defoe.
After this one, turning on the defense isn’t even an applicable outlet for everyone’s unmitigated aggravation. Set piece defending, which was terrible, is a team venture. So is ceding control of the game so totally and completely in the second half that the Timbers’ forward never completed a pass.
Rodney Wallace’s miss will get some run this week, and no doubt, he should have put his chance away. Despite having acres and acres of space all afternoon, this game wasn’t Wallace’s finest hour.
But if the Timbers’ really needed to blow a three goal lead, they would have done that.
Powell and Valeri cost their team with totally unnecessary fouls. So now Portland goes into their final visit to Buck Shaw Stadium next week sans Johnson and Valeri, and depending on what Vancouver does against Real Salt Lake, a small margin of error with which to play. If Portland had put Toronto away, they could have written “Port” into the playoff bracket – but that wouldn’t have been entertaining enough.
Though you have to think, if that’s what a very average Canadian team can do to the Timbers, how bad must Vancouver really be right now?
When the music stops, our last image will either be of good Portland, or most probably, crazy Portland. The fact is, Portland hasn’t won three games in a row at any point this year. This was possibly their only chance at a great stretch this year. That chance is gone.
Nothing can surprise anymore about the Timbers 2014 season. These guys are who they are.
Which is nowhere near as good as they should be.
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