This One Oozed The Fear From the Start
[Portland Timbers 3 : 3 Vancouver Whitecaps (4 : 5 Aggregate)]
I had a very bad feeling about the whole thing, even as I walked through the carnival atmosphere outside PGE Park. The Portland Timbers’ worst-to-first revival, which earned our beloved local football team the United Soccer Leagues’ Commissioners Cup and a bye to the First Division semifinals, was just too good. The blinding autumn weather was too nice—the North End basked in ridiculous glare and a degree of warmth that would have inspired mass shirtless male dancing in any English ground. Damn it, this was not football weather—we needed a fine mist and a damp chill and encroaching end-of-season darkness to put the affair in the proper dramatic light. This pseudo-tropical crap would fool someone—specifically, I feared, the Portland Timbers—into thinking they were about to have a good time. And the vibe coming out of the two-legged series’ first match, wherein the undistinguished Vancouver Whitecaps connived a 2 : 1 home victory, positively vibrated with portentous dread, like the first half-hour of a Hitchcock movie.
Everything—everything—felt wrong. The Timbers Army was too happy and sounded too good as it sang “O, Canada”. The Timbers players bounced around and pumped their fists like over-eager schoolboys. A goal down against the seventh-place team in the league, yet convinced the tidal surge of passion from the Army and the rest of the 14,000 home fans would propel them to the Final—they were keen, understandably, but too keen. Too keen.
And, yes. Just a few minutes in, the Whitecaps skinned us down the middle for an easy goal, and then we needed not two but three. That’s the thing about home-and-away series. Like carbon accumulating in the atmosphere for 200 industrialized years; like drunken and ill-advised text messages; like the tattoo you thought would look cool when you were 19: the scoreline from the first match is indelible, and no amount of attack-minded bustle can change the unforgiving math once your side falls behind.
After looking positively dreadful for most of the first half—beaten to every 50/50 ball, offering little in the way of ideas, lucky to see a screaming shot clang off the crossbar—the Timbers woke up and came at ‘Caps, red in tooth and claw. By the half, they scored twice to set up an effective 45-minute mini-game for the championship berth. Attacking into the green hell of the North End, the home side climbed all over the outlanders, but could not finish. In the course of a rare ‘Couv foray into the Timbers’ end, the referee—an incompetent clown, but then, what do you expect?—awarded the Whitecaps a free kick just outside the area. The villainous Martin Nash, brother of the richer and better-looking Steve, converted this gift into a lasered strike inside the far post.
Bad comedy took over from there. You’re playing a team composed of hulking, over-muscled Canadian lummoxes and yet their smallest player is the guy called “Moose”? You end up playing with six or seven forwards and yet can’t get the final ball in? You send on a substitute who immediately whacks in a beautiful goal and then you end up in a near-handbags confrontation with the goalkeeper over who should return the ball to midfield and then the referee—an incompetent clown, did we mention?—takes the ball and walks it back to the center spot at agonizing pace? A substituted Vancouver player virtually crawls off the field in the final minutes and yet your guy ends up with the yellow card when he tries to hurry him off? You’re screaming for penalties and begging for fouls and disputing everything the linesman says?
That’s just never going to work out well.
And so it ended—the best and most promising season in Portland Timbers history, vanished at the final whistle of a hectic and nonsensical game that, contrary to soccer stereotype, featured entirely too much scoring. If anyone cared to notice, the result provided an object lesson in why it makes little sense to determine soccer league championships with playoffs. In this sport, the two formats—league play and knock-out cup competition—are separated by differences not just in degree of intensity, as in other sports, but in fundamental kind. League play rewards breadth, depth and long-term quality—that’s what makes it interesting. Cup play rewards guile and one-off tactical success—that’s what makes it interesting. High time for North American soccer authorities to recognize that they are undermining the integrity of their results by hybridizing two distinct forms of the game.
As I walked out of the stadium, I found consolation in the streams of green-clad fans ebbing away into the streets of Goose Hollow and Northwest. The Timbers will go on. As for this campaign, let us quote Prospero:
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