The month of May was the Timbers’ 2012 season in a nutshell. We couldn’t score, and we couldn’t finish the game. We lost, but only at the very end. Up until, we allowed a team of amateurs, organized and coached by a USMNT has-been with a beef against the league, to beat us on our own home turf, it was an undefeated month. It was the month we moved off the bottom of the Western Conference, putting Dallas and LA beneath us. Now it tastes like defeat, and it was so close to going so well.
This past Saturday, at 7PM, we were on the brink of the turning point of the Timbers’ season. After beating Chicago and drawing with Columbus and Houston, we were on a decent run of form. We were moving up the table and somehow, some way, the playoffs were only four points away. We were about to start our first Cascadia match of the season, at home against a Vancouver side that had started hot and shown some signs of settling into mid-table form.
In the first 45 minutes of that game, we saw much of what we’ve seen all season, or at least since mid-April: solid defending, good goalkeeping, adequate midfield play (with some nice moments) and absolutely terrible play up front. As soon as we hit the final third, we slowed down, as if we were making sure that Vancouver could keep up. They’re the ones that are supposed to be that polite. Our service was poor, our finishing worse. Still, if Kris Boyd can do anything, other than force own-goals, it’s poaching from mistakes, and he got another chance and buried it to put us up 1-0.
For most of the game, we looked like a team barely deserving of a 1-0 win. We weren’t stellar, but we had the better chances and by far the better possession. Once again, we did nothing with it. We depended on our opponents to fold for us, and for 85 minutes, they did. When Darren Mattocks’ shot hit the back of our net, it was both against the run of play and entirely expected. We invited it by refusing to put a temporarily inferior opponent away. As we pretended to be shocked at another lead squandered, time ran out and we settled for another point, and another two points lost.
The follow-up to that implosion would be as kind as one could hope for – a cup match against a glorified pub team from California, coached by a loudmouth who was once a very good international player. Eric Wynalda is proof that ex-players are often good at nothing else. He is not a good commentator, and he is not a good coach. The fact that he beat us on Wednesday is not a testament to him or his players – it is a measure of our own weaknesses. We peppered Cal FC’s goal with shots, 37 in all. Fifteen of those were on target, mostly weak efforts aimed straight at the goalkeeper. Kris Boyd missed a penalty. He didn’t have a penalty saved – he missed the target high. He is the easiest one to blame for the embarrassment of this loss, but he has plenty of company. Jewsbury, Alhassan, Nagbe – they all have to own part of this.
Ten minutes from the end of the Vancouver match, it could have been so different. If we would have held back that one decent effort from Mattocks, or if Nagbe could have buried the gift of a chance he had in front of goal himself, we would have taken the three points against our Cascadia rivals. We would have led the Cascadia Cup standings by two points over both Seattle and Vancouver. We would have climbed further up the standings, and remained in striking distance of the playoffs. And this is a shoddy, meaningless prediction of an alternate universe, but I think we would have won the cup match too. The importance of that win to our offense and their confidence would have been huge.
So now, we look back at May and decide what to think about it. Yes, we got six points in four games, a lot more than we picked up in April. Yes, we went undefeated in the league. But we also scored all of 3 goals in those four matches. We have to consider at least the Columbus and Vancouver draws as points dropped rather than picked up. And we capped it all off by losing to Eric Wynalda and his club of misfit toys. One of these days, we’re going to have a result that I can’t call “mixed” or “tainted”. Bring on June – maybe the break will do us good. RCTID.
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