BEAVERTON, Ore. – Following a 2-2 draw on June 11 against FC Dallas, in which the Portland Timbers gave up two first-half goals before setting a then-club record with 30 shots to rescue the point, head coach Caleb Porter said his team’s defensive woes would be fixed.
Fast forward four months, and not much has changed.
Despite adding Designated Player center back Liam Ridgewell a month after the Dallas game, Portland’s defense is still costing them valuable points just as the MLS Cup playoff race is heating up.
And their most recent performance was almost a mirror image of that early June game against FCD.
On Sunday against the San Jose Earthquakes, the Timbers fell behind 2-0 just after halftime and once again set a club record for shots (32), the third most in MLS history, in a frantic comeback that ended in a 3-3 draw.
In fact, in the seven games since Ridgewell was inserted into the starting lineup, the Timbers are statistically worse defensively than they were in the 18 games without him. With Ridgewell, Portland are allowing an average of two goals per game; without him that average was 1.8.
For Porter, however, it’s not a matter of his defense putting in overall shoddy performances. He said they’ve been burned mostly by bad mistakes in small windows of the game.
“That’s the main thing is to correct those little mistakes, which became major mistakes, critical mistakes, in the game that cost us the result,” Porter said Wednesday at the team training facility. “Other than that, the last two games were very good performances.”
Heading into the San Jose game, Portland were coming off only their third shutout of the season in a 3-0 away win over the Vancouver Whitecaps. The Timbers' previous two shutouts came against Chivas USA, the last-place team in the Western Conference.
But on the Quakes' first chance of the game in the 21st minute, against the run of play, Chris Wondolowski scored on a rebound off the post from a Shea Salinas shot.
On the Quakes’ second goal, center backs Pa Modou Kah and Ridgewell appeared to miscommunicate on a clearance, and Cordell Cato blasted home the mistake. San Jose’s third goal came on a long cross from Salinas to a wide-open Wondolowski, who headed past a flat-footed Donovan Ricketts as neither Modou Kah nor Ridgewell came anywhere close to the Quakes' only consistent scoring threat.
For the game San Jose had just 12 shots, four on goal.
“It isn’t like we’re getting run out either from a defensive standpoint,” Porter said, pointing out that those kinds of mistakes have been the theme of Portland’s defensive woes all season.
Does he feel like it’s an aberration? Perhaps just bad luck?
“Sometimes you start to think, ‘Wow, we always seem to have these critical errors,” Porter said. “But you look around the league, and a lot of teams give up goals in the same situations. I think what’s disappointing is we dominate that much and you play in a way that should mean a win, I think it highlights those errors even more so.”
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Diego Chara, the Timbers defensive leader in midfield, echoes Porter’s sentiments.
“More than anything else it’s been about the errors this season, and that’s what’s costing us points,” he said Wednesday through a translator.
Coupled with the Timbers' high-flying attack, Porter said the stats are telling an overall positive story. He said the focus this week is moving on from the last game, but he also added that they’ll work on identifying on film where the mistakes are happening and try to put players in similar situations in training to try to alter the trend.
“It’s not like we’re just going to just toss off the mistakes, but at the same time I think overall I’m encouraged by how we played the last two games, both sides of the ball, from an organizational standpoint,” Porter said. “So I’m not going to harp on it too much, but definitely we’re going to analyze those situations and try to correct it in the next game.”
Dan Itel covers the Timbers for MLSsoccer.com.
