Women's college soccer- Santa Clara v Virginia Tech

I tuned into the replay of this match to see what Santa Clara,  a standard rival of the women Pilots,  looked like on the field in the NCAA playoffs.   They weren't bad,  holding the Virginia Tech Hokies scoreless through to penalty kicks which Tech won for the right to advance to the final eight.   Most interesting to me was that Chugger Adair , a Portland Timbers' forward during the 2002 season was coaching Virginia.   Adair played twenty matches that year,  coming off a strong year with his previous club, but only scored two goals in the season.  As best I can tell,  he retired afterward,  so Portland was his last berth as a player.   I may be repeating myself,  but I am always interested to see the impact that the Portland Timbers past players, coaches, and others have on the game--it goes far beyond our small, wet corner of the known universe.   

The Portland Timbers:Belief Beyond Reason

Tonight was grim, a hard confrontation with truths we don't like.   The Timbers Army and great tifo and clever chants and a football organization that recreated itself in less than a year,  nearly the proverbial 'blink of an eye', are not enough to carry us through to the Promised Land in a quick march.  

The game tonight was instructive,  whether or not we wanted instruction.   Our crew played their hearts out,   weathered two goals being called back and kept pressing on, pressing on so as not to leave the pitch without making their mark.  

But in the end Robbie Findley's goal stood up to throttle Portland's attempt to come back from their 4-2 loss in Salt Lake.   It was bitter medicine for the Timbers who have demonstrated that they can scrap their way back from the shadowed edges of many games.  Tonight they were not able to put their magic to work.   They had more shots, great set ups, but not on frame.  They were able to assemble clever attacks, but they were also nearly undone by bad passes and RSL set pieces.  In the first ten minutes of the match,  RSL was clawing at our throats with free kicks.   This was  recognized as an issue to address, but we didn't minimize the challenge in the game.    

Portland Timbers 2013 was a championship run from left field---totally not predicted by the previous year's results.   The hard work of Caleb Porter and his entire team- top to bottom- has been transformational.   We can expect that next  year's season will run true as an arrow to the MLS Cup. The absolutely wonderful season we've been provided this year suggests that our club has a vision designed to take us to the summit.

Now this is a sodden pitch...

Fratton Park in Portsmouth England was drenched recently during a match between Pompey and Wycombe Wanderers.  My wife's cousin is a Pompey fan and sent the link to this match.   Recalls for me the Timbers match some years back when PGE Park was the locus of a violent weather cell.   Thunder and lightning and torrential rain, though not enough to stop the match.

This phenomenon may seem like an adventure to some, but in the realm of football management,  it's a terrible problem. Grass pitches can't be maintained adequately during a fall-winter season with torrential rains. For our club, FC77 this became clear about three years ago when we had negotiated the use of a wonderful grass pitch in outer Southeast Portland.  The problem was that we had a very high (for a small non-profit) obligation to pay cash for use of the field.  Our calculation had been that the use by league teams would generate the revenue for the bulk of the field cost.   However torrential rains caused cancellation of many games and the equation no longer worked.   Extreme weather events such as the downpour in Portsmouth will kill the traditional field use in the fall and winter.

Futbol,  like everything else in the world,  is being affected dramatically by real life weather conditions.
As someone said in the comments from Fratton Park, "At least they kept the bar open".   Does this feel like the Titanic?   At least we can drink as the ship slips into the wash…..

Portland Timbers- standing on solid ground

With last night's defeat of Chivas in LA,  the Portland Timbers are Western Division champions and the team which has ticked off many achievements as this season unfolded.  They have the fewest losses by a substantial margin at five.   They have the broadest crew of 'gunslingers'  as five players have seven or more goals. They have a goalkeeper in Mr. D Ricketts who has been like a shapeshifter ---regularly materializing in front of shots despite the laws of physics.    They have a defense which is centered in The Gambia but also has had heroic work early on from young players like Andrew Jean Baptiste and experienced players like Mikael Silvestre.  ("The Gambia" is so Oregon. Just like The Dalles).  Outside defense was a source of troubles a year ago.  This year Harrington and Jewsbury have given up very little and have created much.  They have a midfield which is intelligent,  skillful,  and unrelenting.    Will Johnson and Diego Chara are the Engines of Disruption and Cohesion both.   Like the two-faced gods in ancient cultural lore,  they both destroy opponents' attacks and seek the unfolding 'moment of joy' in which a pass arrives in the sweet spot of danger-to the opponent.    With the addition of Diego Valeri who epitomizes the ideal game,   the increasingly herculean contributions from Darlington Nagbe,  the physically hardened but joyful style of Kalif, and the insertions of Zizzo and Zemanski at the right moments,  the team has eaten up hours of time while plotting its next attack.   And there  is more praise to offer--Monsieur Fred,  Valencia, Kocic and the mercurial Urruti have all been contributors to a magic season earned with grit and hard work but also with a vision.  Porter's vision made real.   "We play as a team."  

The press coverage of the team has been massively improved since the early years when any mention of futbol was likely to be a truncated 4pt text addition to a page of 'really important sports'.  At the same time as this pic shows, the coverage has a long way to go.   Would a story on the Ducks football team misidentify a key player in a caption when the team was winning a Division Championship.   I think not.   And Diego deserves to be recognized--he works too hard not to be.