Bruce Arena, Oscar Pareja and Pep Guardiola have a WhatsApp group going, messaging each other all the way through Sunday’s MLS Cup final. The common thread of their chat is Caleb Porter, whom all three have clashed with at one point or another. If their sentiment towards the Portland Timbers boss could be summed up in emoji form, it would be a little, red angry face.
OK, so Arena, Pareja and Guardiola probably aren’t WhatsApp chums, but the three rival coaches’ run-ins with the Timbers boss illustrate how Porter polarises opinions. But after clinching Portland’s first championship title in their 40-year history Porter has vindicated much of the bluster and hype he generated for himself.
Ever since his days at Akron, Porter has been regarded one of US soccer’s finest young coaching talents, with this Portland Timbers team the manifestation of his skills. He might be abrasive, he might have made a habit of moaning at referees and snapping back at media, but his MLS Cup success underlines why so much has been expected of him for so long. His emotion after the final whistle hinted at the dawning of his passage on the man himself.
Porter made a number of tactical alterations that built his team’s momentum towards the end of the regular campaign and into the post-season. Specifically, the call to switch to a three-man midfield paid off – with Portland winning seven of eight games since that decision was made. Porter’s fingerprints are all over this year’s MLS Cup trophy.
Of course, the Timbers’ arc wasn’t always so steadily upward. There have been false starts under Porter – even going back just a few weeks, when Portland weren’t even assured of their play-off spot going into the final fixture of the regular season. According to the gossip column, he was close to losing his job.
Now Porter must be taken as an example of how the American coaching system can work. By beating the Columbus Crew on Sunday, he became just the fourth coach to win MLS Cup and an NCAA title – along with Arena, Sigi Schmid and Steve Sampson. In the Portland Timbers he found the right club to make his way at – and in that sense his success was produced with a tinge of good fortune – but it had been a long time in coming. GR
MLS Cup final 2015 probably didn’t do a lot for the league’s global ambitions
Maybe the world wasn’t watching 27 seconds in, when Diego Valeri made the most of a monumental goalkeeping blunder to open the scoring. Or when the linesman failed to spot that the ball had drifted a yard out of play before the Portland Timbers added a second goal. Or when Adam Kwaresey dropped a high ball at the feet of Kei Kamara, giving the Columbus Crew a much-needed lifeline. Maybe it wasn’t watching at all. It might have been better that way.
If MLS is indeed looking to position itself as more of a global interest, an MLS Cup final between the Columbus Crew and the Portland Timbers probably wasn’t at the top of their wish-list. Liam Ridgewell – a man best known in England for wiping his backside with a wad of bank notes – doesn’t quite command the same appeal to European fans, for instance, as someone like Frank Lampard or Steven Gerrard, and so Sunday’s game was always likely to be something of a difficult sell beyond MLS’s boundaries.
And yet a clash between Columbus and Portland represented the best of the division – or at least, it should have. It’s unfair to take every big MLS game as a referendum on the state of North American soccer, but the general quality on show at Mapfre Stadium was poor. Any outsiders watching – with the match given top-billing on Sky Sports 1 in the UK – were most likely left less than impressed. Lazy stereotypes won’t have been dispelled by what was offered up.
The passing was substandard, as was the defending, with all three goals the result of utterly dismal goalkeeping or man-marking. This wasn’t the showcase of some of MLS’s best talent so many had hoped for, as post-game reaction focused on mistakes rather than magic. Both Columbus and Portland are good ball-playing sides, yet there was no sign of that on Sunday. A display of technical excellence, this was not.
But poor quality is still better than boring, and you could never accuse Portland’s win over the Crew of being dull. In fact, the topsy-turvy nature of Sunday’s match provided the ideal conclusion to a play-off series that will go down as one of MLS’s most exciting – and wildest – ever. If soccer is an entertainment industry, MLS certainly doesn’t lack in that respect. Britain’s most popular TV show is The Great British Bake Off – in which bakers are pitted against each other over 12 weeks to see who can make the spongiest sponge – so by that measure the MLS Cup may not have looked so bad. GR
Crew SC were stunned by their own weapons
In the Eastern Conference finals Columbus Crew SC famously led for all but nine seconds of the series — after Justin Meram’s record-breaking early goal had rocked the Red Bulls back on their heels in the opening seconds of the first leg.
By the time Meram asserted an all-too-brief influence on the final his team were already two goals down, after Portland did to Crew SC what the hosts had done to New York — bully them out of any ideas of territorial dominance, right from the start of the game.
Crew SC and New York between them had been the league’s most possession-orientated teams, and Columbus in particular had demonstrated a preference for playing the ball out from the back. It’s an admirable, but always something of a high wire act against effective pressure teams, and while that’s not the trait you’d most readily associate with Portland, on Sunday afternoon it was enough to panic Steve Clark on the league’s biggest stage.
Afterwards, the Crew SC goalkeeper was predictably distraught about being caught on the ball by Valeri in the first minute of the game. And he was certainly not consoled by the fact that but for his saves in the second half, including one point blank block from Nat Borchers, Portland could have been out of sight well before the final whistle.
Columbus competed valiantly and Kamara’s goal for them was a direct result of his harrying, as he refused to accept a lost cause with so much time remaining on the clock.
But whether he was hampered by the heavy bruises on his foot he’d picked up in training the previous day, or whether Borchers and Ridgewell were doing such a good job of nullifying his threat, Kamara would drift out of the game in the second half. Meanwhile at the other end Fanendo Adi would not get on the scoresheet for once, but performed his usual trick of offering himself as an outlet every time the Timbers rapidly transitioned, which was often.
And in those phases of the game too, Crew SC could have been forgiven for recognizing the moves. Where Tony Tchani and Wil Trapp were marginalized for Columbus, Diego Chara and even a defensively-inclined Darlington Nagbe, were earning the ball in midfield for the Timbers and pushing it up the field with precision, to keep Columbus off-balance, where they stayed. GP
Portland Timbers have shown how to negotiate play-off soccer
With victory in the MLS Cup, the precedent has been set. From now on, teams struggling for regular season form will point to one example as reason for hope. If the Portland Timbers can do it, then we can too. Indeed, Caleb Porter’s side provided a case study of how championship-winning momentum can come to any team, no matter how late.
Heading into the final game of the regular season, the Timbers could have finished from second to seventh in the Western Conference. Ultimately they finished third after a campaign which had posed many questions of Porter and his side. For a long time, things didn’t look so rosy in the Rose City. Sure, there was the four-game winning run over May, but there was also the four-game winless run over July and August. It wasn’t until mid-October – and, appropriately, a 2-1 road win over Columbus – that the Timbers found their groove.
MLS Cups are now harder than ever to win, and the Timbers did it the hardest way possible. They had to get through a knockout round penalty shootout against Sporting KC, then past the Vancouver Whitecaps after a goalless home leg. They survived the conference final against Western champions FC Dallas, too, and against the Columbus Crew they played – and won – their sixth game in just five weeks. Momentum carried them through.
When fatigue should have taken hold in the latter stages at Mapfre Stadium, Portland actually seemed to get stronger. When Columbus should have been pressing hard for a late leveller, it was in fact the Timbers looking the more dangerous. Porter’s side managed to find a channel that somehow defied everything that was thrown at them.
So many players got hot at just the right time towards winter as everything else got cold. Nat Borchers, Jose Villafana, Diego Chara, Diego Valeri, Rodney Wallace and Fanendo Adi all found form when it was needed most, with the latter in particular a driving force. Porter, too, demonstrated his ability in the post-season, showing a great deal of tactical flexibility and versatility in games against Vancouver and FC Dallas. Those who doubted his credentials have little to fall back on now.
The Timbers showed how the play-offs can work, whilst also underlining how the regular season tells us little about the odds of who will win the whole thing. Depending on which way you view it, Portland either worked the system as it was meant to be worked or completely undermined it. GR
Wide players let Berhalter down
The post-game press conference with Gregg Berhalter and a near catatonic looking Michael Parkhurst (experiencing the dismal aftermath of his fourth MLS Cup defeat) was predictably gloomy, though Berhalter did his best to accentuate the positives, or at least not point fingers for the negatives.
Yet tellingly, the one area where he did sound critical was when he answered a question about width by stating that he didn’t get what he needed from his wide players.
Ethan Finlay and Meram were meant to be the key to getting at an organized Portland defense — players with the pace and skill to stretch teams on the counter. Yet bar a couple of runs from Meram in the first half, before he faded badly, the two were non-factors in the match.
Finlay in particular was utterly ineffective. Some of his comments in midweek had irritated Portland’s Villafana to the point that afterwards Porter would note that he hadn’t needed to say a word to the Timbers wing back. Villafana shut Finlay down completely, and it was no surprise when he was subbed out in the second half, nor when Meram, who’d briefly sparkled on the other flank at the end of the first half, was also subbed out.
Meram faded badly as the Crew’s attempts to force the issue again early in the second half, merely resulted in a comfortable Timbers defense keeping them at bay. This was the time for Finlay and Meram to open up the game, but it ended up being left to Cedrick Mabwati, Crew SC’s playoff supersub, to try and force something. Mabwati was, as always, confident in taking players on, but at times showed more sense of industry than purpose. That could have been said of the whole Crew SC team of course. GP
