After waffling in the summer grind of the Major League Soccer season last year, the Portland Timbers entered the fall with their playoff destiny hanging very much in the balance.
Very far away from the Western Conference championship they would eventually win, the Timbers were a team that had only won one time in August and relied on a badly hobbled Diego Valeri to come off the bench and rescue a point against Chivas USA in their second September outing. Before a crucial Friday night NBCSN game at home against the Colorado Rapids, Caleb Porter made two decisions that altered the course of the Timbers’ slowly fading season and quite possibly his own bright future.
They were named Jack Jewsbury and Futty Danso.
For much of the year, the Timbers’ defense had been in flux. The opening day back-four consisted of Ryan Miller, Mikael Silvestre, Andrew Jean-Baptiste, and Michael Harrington. David Horst, Danso, and Jewsbury all featured at some point, as did the newly signed Kah and Alvas Powell.
To be quite honest, Porter was scrambling for answers – to the point that Sal Zizzo had started two games in a row at left back. Jean-Baptiste, already fraying Porter’s nerves, was dropped after a particularly wondering display in LA against Chivas, and so in came two club veterans with a lot of character and a lot of heart: Jewsbury and Danso – perhaps the two most beloved Timbers ever who haven’t been blessed with overwhelming skill.
And immediately, it worked. Something clicked. The Timbers rode an early chipped goal from Valeri to the three points against the Rapids, keeping the game tight and compact.
All of the sudden, no one could score on the Timbers. The team kept a clean sheet in four of the last five regular season games, didn’t lose once, won the West and a Champions League berth, and ended up going to the Western Conference Finals where everything unraveled on a Sunday night in Salt Lake.
But that was defense – those last six games of the year. The Timbers didn’t need four goals to win a game, they only needed one – so it didn’t matter that Jewsbury and Harrington were both slow and not dynamic attackers. It didn’t matter that neither Kah nor Futty were brilliant players. They both played hard and had impeccable chemistry.
And the Timbers rode that deep into November.
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Of course that 2013 team, particularly the eleven that made up the first team down the stretch – Ricketts, Jewsbury, Futty, Kah, Harrington, Will Johnson, Diego Chara, Rodney Wallace, Valeri, Darlington Nagbe, and Ryan Johnson – will forever hold a special place in Timbers lore.
What they did was magnificent. But almost everyone was united in the belief that that back-four would have to be improved on. Whether you thought their success was the result of catching fire at the perfect time as a testament to their individual fortitude and character or whether it was just a plain fluke, most everyone knew that wouldn’t be the back-line going into the 2014 season.
For one thing, Silvestre was coming back. The Frenchman only had eight games in a Timbers uniform, but – for seven and a half of those games at least – he showed his worth in a thoroughly impressive way. Silvestre, marshaling the jumpy Jean-Baptiste for the most part, led the team to a streak of seven games unbeaten before tearing his ACL against New England.
Silvestre, despite his age, played with an air of invincibility and assuredness that was impossible to miss. It’s present in Liam Ridgewell too, though Silvestre played a more elegant, and less mobile, to be sure, game.
We never heard much about Silvestre from the Timbers leading up to the season, though he figured to be a starter. Silvestre was living in and loving Portland, and seemed committed to the team.
In the meantime, Portland had found their man to shake up the back-line. Out of the Timbers’ frequent South American stomping grounds came Norberto Paparatto, a 30 year old defender from the Argentine first league. With no English, few friends, and a new continent to adjust to, this was the guy the Timbers decided to throw into the fire from day one.
Silvestre was disposed of. Apparently, there were physical, and quite bizarrely, mental problems. The team thought Silvestre was expendable. It was a far cry from Porter’s last preseason press conference of 2013 when he said confidently, “You don’t sign Mikael Silvestre to sit on the bench.”
The move was Paparatto. David Horst, a serviceable backup, was also dispensed. So was Jean-Baptiste, in exchange for Steve Zakuani. Apparently they too were surplus to requirements.
One sure-fire starter, and two decent backups, gone. All, it would seem, in exchange for Paparatto.
And the great Paparatto experiment was fine, until it wasn’t. Paparatto’s increasingly obvious deficiencies, both with the ball at his feet and with his foot speed, were ruthlessly exposed in one of the most aggravating games the Timbers have ever played, that 4-4 home draw with Seattle in April.
After the Seattle game, we saw a return to the Futty – Kah back-line, and for the most part the four that did so well in 2013. Over the next six games those players were employed, the Timbers gave up only 1.5 goals per game – not the best, but if the Timbers gave up 1.5 goals per game every game this season, they’d be very near the top of the league.
It was around this time that Danny O’Rourke was brought in for cover in all positions, and Caleb Porter “discovered” Jorge Villafana, despite the fact that Villafana had played for Porter with the Olympic national team and had been with the team for four months prior to the point when he was forced into action after Alvas Powell ended his second reign this year by destroying a Columbus player and getting the obvious red card in Timbers history.
Futty was dropped after a tough outing in that wild game against the Crew, which was understandable, expect when you consider that his understudy at that point was – you guessed it – Raushawn McKenzie.
After Futty was brought back for a midweek game against Chivas – in which the Timbers secured their first clean sheet of the season – and then was subsequently dropped for more McKenzie and total capitulation against Vancouver at home in which the Timbers lost 4-3, you knew something was up. Futty hadn’t even been named to the bench for the game.
And that was because he’d been traded. To Montreal. It was a move that cleared the cap space needed to bring in Ridgewell on a DP contract that, reports are, pays him 1.3 million dollars per year.
Now, I like Ridgewell. I think he’s quality. He’s a quality, starting center-back. Problem is, the Timbers had a player in Silvestre was just as good if not better than Ridgewell for more than one million dollars and a DP spot less.
Ridgewell was a panic move. There’s a reason that there has only been three DP defenders in the history of MLS, and it’s this: The upgrade from the average DP defender over the average MLS defender is significantly less that the upgrade in DP attacker over average MLS attacker.
You get more juice out of upgrading to a guy like Landon Donovan or Thierry Henry than you do upgrading from an average center-back to Ridgewell.
There’s also this: Does Porter know who his best defenders are? As he did against San Jose this weekend, Porter will just roll with the unit from the previous weekend if they did well, and yank players if they did poorly.
This year we’ve seen Porter make Powell his left-back. Then for a time it was Villafana, then amazingly enough O’Rourke, interspliced with Jewsbury who has again fallen out of favor. Powell is the man now, but remember that Porter started him against Seattle, let him play himself out of the lineup in the biggest game of the year, then put him back in and let him play himself into a loan at Sacramento after his calamitous performance in that game, before reinstating him for the stretch-run.
We’ve seen McKenzie go in and out. Same with Paparatto and Kah. Futty too, when he was here. It’s as if when one player messes up, Porter turns to the bench and says next man up, like his defenders are simply in a rotation.
Porter is not a defense first coach. He doesn’t seem to have a good feel for how to manage his defenders, and that lack of chemistry, cohesion, and unity has absolutely destroyed his unit. GM Gavin Wilkinson also deserves some credit here, for a number of personnel moves that weakened the defense.
Of course Kah and Ridgewell looked like they’d never played before on Sunday – with the exception of that Vancouver game, they had never played together before. I think it’s great that Powell and Villafana are fantastic attackers, but they both are lacking defenders. The fact that Porter needs offense from the fullback positions as badly as he does simply speaks to how bad the defense is in the first place.
Portland was set up this year with a quality unit on defense – middle of the road in MLS. But by continually searching for the perfect formula they stumbled upon last year, they’ve given up thirteen multi-goal games this year when they only conceded eleven home goals all of last year.
Which is to say, the numbers almost make it seem as ugly as it has been at times. And that’s even after the first two months, when the defense was more or less fine aside from the Seattle game. But as Porter got more and more desperate, the defense got worse and worse.
I believe Porter is an attacking savant. The Timbers attack is absolutely phenomenal, albeit sans a forward most of the time Maxi Urruti is playing. If you compare where this team was when Porter came in almost two years ago – or even where it was at the stuttering beginning of this season – that’s a mighty impressive feat. But there’s another shoe, and it’s dropped ten or twelve times this year.
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Big picture, of course, players have to play better. Especially at home. That 25 game unbeaten streak is so far away now, Providence Park is quite possibly the best venue for opposing teams to play in in the league.
There doesn’t appear to be any way back for Kah, for example, from this Saturday’s debacle. A team leader in his 30’s who has the sixth highest salary on the team at a very handsome-for-MLS $245,000 this year cannot play like Kah has this year.
As for Paparatto, the jury is still out. He’s a decent player who will get better as he adjusts to the US, but he has weaknesses that will be exploited more and more as teams get to know him. In any case, the Timbers need to bring in another costly, starting caliber center-back in the offseason to pair with Ridgewell going forward. Decent depth – like, dare I say, Futty and Horst – would look good too. But the fact that there’s no easy answer speaks to the depth of the problems.
Preferably this guy is going to be someone with a lot of MLS experience. Hopefully this year is a learning experience for Porter, for Wilkinson, and for the franchise. There are reasons the Timbers’ defense fell to pieces and is currently residing at the psychiatric word at Providence.
These things don’t just happen overnight.
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