Chance Favors The Prepared

After a good performance, and a bit of luck, in our win over Sporting Kansas City last week, Timbers fans started to believe that maybe the bleeding had stopped, and the ship was on its way to being righted. We were going on a long distance, but relatively soft, road trip after that win, all the way to Montreal to face the expansion Impact, a team in very much the same position we were in last season.

It’s too easy to blame our loss there, 2-0 on two second half goals, on bad luck, or on the physicality of an admittedly somewhat brutish Impact team. Yes, we lost Troy Perkins when a boot caught his face and caused several gashes that forced Joe Bendik into his first action of the season. Yes, our first concession was a very questionable penalty. And yes, had Troy still been in the game, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been caught out the way that Bendik was for the second. We can’t allow those bits of misfortune to hide the fact that we were the second best team in the park on Saturday. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Bad luck and bad calls decide games when good play fails to do so.

And let’s not forget the pitch. Montreal’s barely concealed concrete is the worst surface in MLS, and should never have been approved. It was a choice completely motivated by the league wanting big crowds, and was made with utter disregard for safety or the quality of the game.

Still, before any of those pieces of luck happened, Montreal created by far the better chances in the first half, missing twice from inside the box in very finishable positions. We created almost nothing before the break, and were too often satisfied with passing practice in the defensive midfield, poking forward with every fifth or sixth pass before meekly retreating back to our end.

There were signs early on that maybe we would get something going. Newcomer Steven Smith, a former teammate of Kris Boyd, made an attempt to link up with a rushing Boyd in the opening minutes, and all of us sat up and took notice. Unfortunately, that promise just wasn’t fulfilled in the remaining eighty minutes of play. Smith was adequate – a compliment compared to most of what we’ve seen from our fullbacks in 2012 – but showed us nothing particularly special. Mike Chabala and his hunger for the ball were missed.

Overall, it was a lackluster performance, and though we didn’t necessarily deserve to go down the way we did, we deserved to lose. We came to an expansion team with five points from their first eight games, a team with the worst defense in MLS, and we not only failed to score on them, but allowed them a number of good chances to score on us.

It’s a long season, a fact I find myself repeating after every one of these disappointing losses. But it gets shorter every week, and the playoffs get farther away. We are back to a deficit of five points between us and the fifth and final playoff spot in the west. Any momentum we gained by beating KC has dissolved. Luckily, we have another relatively soft opponent coming to Jeld-Wen this coming weekend in the Columbus Crew, and another chance to start something before the rest of the pack moves too far off to see.