Portland Timbers head coach Caleb Porter said Tuesday night’s CONCACAF Champions League match against Olimpia in front of a hostile crowd in Honduras would be a crucial test for his side.
In a phone conversation with MLSsoccer.com leading up to the game, Porter said he expected the Group 5 finale to be not so much a match between the Timbers and Olimpia but one pitting the US against Honduras.
And after suffering a 3-1 loss at Estadio Tiburcio Carias Andino in Tegucigalpa that squandered the Timbers' commanding Group 5 lead coming into the game, Porter called it a “worst-case scenario” after surrendering two goals in the first four minutes.
“We talked about all week, the first 15 minutes, it’s always crucial when you’re on the road you’re playing a team that knows they need two goals,” Porter told the media after the game. “We knew they would be aggressive, we knew they had a good attacking team with good individual players.”
Yet the Timbers seemed unprepared in a nightmare start that resulted in goals by Romell Quioto in the second minute and then two minutes later by Anthony Lozano. The Timbers would pull one back in the 52nd minute thanks to a long-distance goal from Ben Zemanski, but they again quickly conceded two minutes later on another Lozano goal.
They came into the match needing a win, draw or even one-goal loss to advance. Even a 3-2 scoreline would have been good enough to advance, and the two teams finished tied atop the group but were doomed thanks to Olimpia’s away goals in the head-to-head series, having scored twice in the Timbers' 4-2 win at Providence Park.
“At this level, to win these types of games in these types of situations, it has to be better,” Porter said. “The process of evolving as a club takes time and it takes experiences like this. Unfortunately we suffer today, but we’ll be better next time we’re in this situation.”
And it was very much the conditions that Porter talked about and that Olimpia head coach Hector Vargas said would play to their advantage after their loss to Portland on Sept. 16. Porter said Olimpia handed out 20,000 free tickets to the game, and the crowd showered the pitch with water bottles at times and lit smoke bombs in the final minutes. The Timbers lineup consisting of a mix of first-choice and bench players managed just 12 shots, a far cry from the 23 they fired off in a scoreless draw in MLS play Friday against Real Salt Lake.
“We weren’t surprised by anything we saw,” Porter said. “We just didn’t deal with it as well as we should have. For me, it goes back to the first five minutes, conceding two goals. That was always going to be a very important part of this match, and we didn’t manage that part of the game well, and we didn’t manage the game well when we went 2-1, we conceded again.”
The result is yet another setback in what has been a challenging season for the Timbers following their Western Conference regular season championship last year. They now face a must-win game Saturday against FC Dallas and must also count on a Vancouver Whitecaps loss or draw to advance to the MLS Cup Playoffs for a second straight season.
“Obviously with this game we were in a great position, but we knew also we had a game on Saturday that if we won we would have a chance to get into the playoffs,” Porter said. “We rested seven players but we still felt we could get the result, at the end of the day we fell short and now we have to focus our energy on Saturday and put this behind us.”
Dan Itel covers the Timbers for MLSsoccer.com.
