Category: Soccer

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Soccer Thorns

I Was 12 When the Thorns Won in 2013

Photo by Nikita Taparia

I didn’t watch the first Thorns home game live; I didn’t see them claim the 2013 NWSL Championship. I keep joking that it’s because I was, like, 12 at the time, but I need to stop doing that because I literally was 12. Or rather, I was 11 when the season started and turned 12 halfway through. And although this “PTFC: From the Archives” series means I’m catching these matches for the first time, I can still reminisce about when I started following the team, about the shitty YouTube streams and what it feels like to grow up in a city that takes so much pride in women’s soccer.

I wasn’t really a “soccer kid” growing up; I played because my friends did, but just on rec teams (barring a brief stint with a club that was so small that we didn’t really get the benefits of playing club soccer). I watched the USWNT lose the 2011 World Cup Final in a penalty shootout to Japan—at the request of my dad, not because I knew anything about the team.

Regardless of my lack of investment at the time, I knew that women’s soccer existed in Portland: we launched a professional team in 2013, they were good, and people cared about them (and they cared about them a lot).

I didn’t get into soccer until the 2015 World Cup, until the Gals pulled out a 2-0 semifinal victory over a very skilled German squad and went on to win the final match within the game’s first 20 minutes, until Abby Wambach embraced Sarah Huffman on live television and someone watching with me commented that they looked like such good friends.

After the tournament, I turned to where I knew I could support women’s soccer more locally: the Thorns. I was enthralled by the energy of the Riveters, by the electric atmosphere at Providence Park, by players like Mana Shim who were like me in a way that I was still struggling to name. The culture around women’s soccer embraced community in a way that was unfamiliar to my just-out-of-middle-school self; there was a sense of “come as you are and we will welcome you.”

In 2015, I also started high school. I won’t go into all that here, but the change of scenery brought newfound freedom and friends, including people who were in the same unsure and messy place as I was. And while freshman year was downright unpleasant for the most part, it was healing to have people in my life who were in that same period of questioning—maybe not questioning, but coming to terms with a fact about ourselves that we’d tried to push away for so long.

Between friends and the community I found in women’s soccer, I reached a place where I could feel okay about being a lesbian. I discovered there is something powerful in solidarity. And I became an NWSL fan in the process. 

Because beyond the Megan Rapinoes—the big names who were unapologetic in their gayness—beyond the players and fans that crafted a space that was, and (for the most part) is, a bubble where queer people are free to exist, women’s soccer is fun. The NWSL loves to tout its parity and, while the same handful of clubs seem to be the ones in postseason every year, there’s something enticing about knowing that the last-place Boston Breakers can pull out two wins over defending champion FC Kansas City, even if FCKC wasn’t quite the same without Lauren Holiday. (While we’re here, let’s take a moment of silence in memory of both these teams.)

And there’s something captivating about the Thorns: adorned in red kits with the Riveters at their backs, cheering as Adrianna Franch pulls out a save that maybe shouldn’t be physically possible, or as Tobin Heath befuddles yet another defender. It feels fitting to see that same celebrity awarded to players who don’t have the international pedigree of Christine Sinclair—to Shim and Kat Williamson, Midge Purce and Emily Menges. There’s something fulfilling in the Riveters’ unwavering support for the Thorns and for each other.

I joined my high school’s newspaper halfway through junior year—I had a free period, and I’d heard good things about the class. For something I essentially started on a whim, journalism has redefined the lens through which I view the world and myself, providing me with a sense of identity that centers around saying what I believe in, and giving me the tools and platform to do so.

I began writing about women’s soccer last year. At the encouragement of a friend, I reached out to Tyler on Twitter and asked if Stumptown Footy would consider a high school student as a contributor. The rest is pretty well-documented online.

Writing about women’s soccer, elevating the stories of the people who play it (or in this case, my own story), makes me feel like I have a purpose in the world. Covering the Thorns is wonderful, but it’s also weird and frustrating to do something I enjoy and to know that it’s not—and probably never will be—a viable career. Nevertheless, this is something I want to do as long as I can, because the community we have in Portland is extraordinary. 

Within the players on the pitch and the photographers along the sidelines, from the artists and drummers and capos and yellers that make up the Riveters to the handful of us in the press box, Providence Park brings us together and makes us something bigger than ourselves.

Categories
Soccer Thorns

185

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Ed. note: this article originally appeared in the June 2019 print edition of Howler. Since the time of publication, obviously, certain facts, including the one big fact, have changed. We have presented it unedited. Enjoy!

Stripped down to its essential components, soccer is an incredibly simple game. The point is to put the ball through a specified rectangle of air, delineated by a set of goalposts, more times than the other team. So if you want to define who the best soccer players are, there’s one easy, reductively simple answer: they’re the ones who score the most goals.

Which means that at the international level, the best player of all time is retired American forward Abby Wambach.

Wambach scored 184 goals in her 256 caps, which works out to just over .7 goals per game. She scored her first on April 27, 2002, in a friendly against Finland, and her last on August 19, 2015, in a World Cup victory tour friendly against Costa Rica.

On the field, Wambach was a striker’s striker, about as pure a target woman as they come, her game centered around pace, athleticism, and strength. She was a masterful header of the ball, making what should be a blunt instrument look like a finely honed weapon, using it to score over and over, often in spectacular fashion. Off the field, she could be brash and occasionally guileless, epitomizing, both as a person and a player, the rah-rah ethos of American soccer: run fast, jump high, and never, ever give up.

It’s a curious thing, then, that just below her on the list of top international goal scorers is a soft-spoken, self-effacing Canadian named Christine Sinclair, a player who represents, existentially if not quite athletically, Wambach’s exact opposite.

Sinclair is quiet where Wambach was loud, shrinks from attention where Wambach has cheerfully done the cable talk circuit, leads by example where Wambach was known for curse-filled pump-up speeches. Sinclair is, well, Canadian. And if she breaks her American colleague’s record, she will likely stand in perpetuity as, by the most literal definition possible, the greatest international soccer player of all time.

Canada Soccer once sent out a tweet reading simply:

Christine Sinclair

It was probably an accident, but as with so many great inventions, that doesn’t diminish its perfection. Those two words, and the negative space left by all the words that are absent, capture everything you need to know about Sinclair, which is that she’s a player so good and so far beyond reproach that her name itself is content. It also perfectly encapsulates what she is to Canadian soccer, which is to say: everything.

I.

Canada, of course, that frozen expanse to the north, is a hockey country. This is important for our purposes for several reasons.

First: like the United States and Australia, Canada is a country whose women’s soccer team ranks much, much higher in the global pecking order than their men’s team (those countries’ men rank 25th, 42nd, and 79th, respectively, while their women rank first, fifth, and sixth). That all three of these countries are members of the wealthy Global North whose citizenries have quite different sporting obsessions than the rest of the world is probably not a coincidence when it comes to women’s soccer—these are countries with resources to put into girls’ and women’s sports, where girls tend to be pushed out of more culturally significant athletic pursuits and into soccer.

Second: in women’s soccer, the difference in quality between the top few teams and everyone else is much, much starker than on the men’s side. Picture men’s and women’s soccer as separate landmasses. One has a nice, broad continental shelf extending out into the ocean, while the other ends in a sheer underwater cliff dropping straight into the abyssal zone. In this metaphor, on the women’s soccer continent, the United States is on land, while a handful of others, including France, England, Australia, and Canada—the only teams that can realistically hope to challenge the Americans in any given match—are fighting it out on a narrow beach.

That relates to Canada being a hockey country in that even though the Canadian women fall into that narrow shallow zone, they are still well below the level of the top-ranked USA. There’s a long-lived rivalry between the two neighbors, but it’s an extremely lopsided one, mainly significant in that it tends to bring out bad blood on both sides. The last time Canada won was in 2006; the two teams have faced each other 25 times since.

All this is to say, first, that Christine Sinclair would only have been possible in a few countries on earth, but more importantly, that she has personally made Canadian soccer what it is.

Christine Sinclair is related—she’s not sure exactly how—to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (“His mom is like, my dad’s great-aunt or something like that,” she says). I’m not sure if there’s a family resemblance, but it’s easy to squint a little and convince yourself there might be. They have the same dark hair, the same bright blue eyes.

They met once, in the run-up to the 2016 Olympics, when the team was in Ottawa, and Sinclair reported being surprised that Trudeau knew who she was. The team posed for a group photo with the Prime Minister on Parliament Hill, and she gave him a jersey with his name on it.

II.

If you ever happen to meet the Canadian captain, don’t tell her that (the part about personally building the Canadian national team, not the Justin Trudeau thing). She’ll deny it, and when she does, it won’t be out of false modesty, or even genuine modesty, but real pride in her teammates. And of course, saying she’s done everything herself is hugely hyperbolic, and does a disservice to a lot of very good Canadian players. The plain fact, though, is that Sinclair is by far the best soccer player Canada has ever produced.

To be clear, I mean much more that Sinclair, who would be a legend regardless of what country she came from, is good than I mean that Canada isn’t good. It’s just that coming from where she comes from, she elevates her team in a way someone like Wambach, playing alongside a half-dozen other players deserving of various superlatives, never did.

The game that best illustrates what Sinclair is to Canadian soccer is their semifinal loss in the 2012 Olympics against—who else?—the United States. It’s the game that Sinclair herself identifies as the moment women’s soccer arrived in her homeland. “Looking back on it,” she told me, “it’s probably the first time that Canadians truly, like, cared about how we did.”

It’s not hard to see why it had that effect. Played at Old Trafford, the game was an instant classic, the two teams trading goals until literally the last minute before the final whistle of extra time.

“We waited a long time to be able to compete with the Americans on that stage,” Sinclair remembers. “To have Canada finally reach that level and be able to hold our own against the number one team in the world, blow for blow.”

What she would never point out herself is that she’s the one who scored all three of Canada’s goals, very nearly sending the game to penalties and making her one of just three players1 to ever score a hat trick against the United States.

She opened the scoring in the 22nd minute, running onto a lateral flick from Melissa Tancredi, taking one deceptively simple, perfect touch as she charged forward and beat Rachel Buehler, then another as she cut right around Kelley O’Hara. With her third touch, she threaded a shot expertly between a diving Hope Solo and the far post—her 141st career international goal.

Early in the second half, Megan Rapinoe equalized (with a fucking olimpico, of all things), and for the next 40-odd minutes, it was all-out war. Sinclair put Canada up again, then Rapinoe equalized a second time, then Sinclair put Canada up a third time. After a controversial penalty put away late in regulation by—who else?—Abby Wambach, the game headed to extra time with the two teams level 3-3.

Finally, in the 123rd goddamned minute, Alex Morgan took advantage of a moment of indecision by keeper Erin McLeod to head home a cross by Heather O’Reilly. The whistle blew. Canada’s gold medal hopes were over.

In the American soccer mythos, that final goal is remembered as a moment of classic USWNT heroism. A game that almost ended in heartbreak, saved in the final seconds because the gals just wouldn’t give up.

It’s all horribly predictable. The American women have won like this so many times, in so many big moments. In a movie version of the tournament, with the USA as the protagonists, you’d write it exactly like this, and critics would say it was a little on the nose.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t note that the officiating in this game was infamously one-sided, so I’ll unpack exactly what I mean by “controversial penalty.” It was the result of a questionable handball call when Rapinoe kicked an inside-the-18 free kick directly into Marie-Eve Nault. That free kick, in turn, was awarded for a bizarre time-wasting call against McLeod—after Wambach had spent the half counting out loud within earshot of the referee. There was also the missed handball call against Rapinoe earlier in the game, which I won’t get into.

For Canada, of course, the loss was crushing. But there were two positives:

  • They went on to beat France and win bronze.
  • Back in Canada, that vast, wild land where hockey reigns, four million Canadians saw Christine Sinclair score a hat trick against the US, and they saw how close her team came to beating the best in the world, and they began to see this tall, powerful woman as a national hero.

1As far as we know; there are two games where the US conceded at least three goals, against England in 1985 and against the Netherlands in 1991, for which we have no information on who scored (thanks to Jen Cooper for the stats).

Christine Sinclair has a Pomeranian named Charlie. She comes from a small-dog rescue near Portland, where she originally bore the name Cocoa Puff, something her owner says she “never envisioned [herself] calling a dog.” The name Charlie is a tribute to Clive Charles, the legendary University of Portland coach who played for the NASL Timbers with two of Sinclair’s uncles and led her college team to a championship in 2002. Sinclair would win a second championship with UP in 2005, two years after Charles’s death from prostate cancer.

Charlie’s favorite activities are eating, sleeping, and socializing.

III. 

Although being among the best in the world at a thing obviously requires innate ability, talent isn’t what anyone mentions when they talk about Sinclair. They talk, instead, about how she has always—in every moment she spends working on being a soccer player—dedicated herself to doing things as well as she possibly can.

“I love that I’ve had the opportunity to watch her,” says Mark Parsons, Sinclair’s head coach with the Portland Thorns, “because if I hadn’t, I would have thought Sinc was born to do this. And by seeing it, you realize this was man-made. This was all about her purposeful practice, her dedication, her preparation, her commitment. When other players missed the recovery, she’s doing recovery. When other players missed evaluating, watching films back, or practicing the shot [they] missed, when they miss it and they’re like ‘oh, it doesn’t matter, I’ll get it the next game,’ she’s doing [those things.]”

Sinclair’s training habits are a study in the pursuit of mastery. Like a concert violinist who spends an hour a day playing open-string exercises, or an Olympic weightlifter who practices snatches and clean-and-jerks with a broomstick, she has never stopped focusing on the most basic building blocks of her craft.

Thorns teammate Emily Menges described this to me. “We do touches sometimes for practice and it’s this close,” she said, standing a few feet away. “Little touches. It’s easy to be like, ‘this is boring, whatever,’ but every single one of her touches is absolutely perfect… Maybe I take a first touch and that’s what I’m worried about, is my first touch… But she’s very much like, ‘here’s my first touch, and then I have to make sure Emily has a good touch.’”

This meticulous focus, day after day, year after year, is what has made Sinclair one of the best of all time, and it has also probably contributed to her longevity as a player.

Comparing Sinclair with Wambach purely in terms of scoring rates, there’s a tortoise-and-hare dynamic. Wambach had a 14-year international career; this is Sinclair’s 19th year representing Canada. Sinclair started earlier, getting her first cap at just 16, and despite now being the age Wambach was when she retired, shows no sign she’s ready to hang up her cleats.

By this point in her career, Wambach had just taken a few months off from her club, the Western New York Flash, supposedly to focus on preparing for the 2015 World Cup—it was never clear why she didn’t consider the best preparation for a big soccer tournament to be actually playing soccer—and, perhaps as a result, showed up in Canada in what counted for her as very poor form2. Meanwhile, Sinclair has kept training and playing as she always has, and has stayed absolutely central to both the Thorns and the Canadian national team.

Several years ago, age started to take a toll on Sinclair’s sprinting speed, but where a lesser player might have kept grasping at the style she played at age 23 only to start slowly fading into obsolescence, she adapted her game, dropping into the number ten slot for both club and country. She still scores, but where before she preferred to charge toward goal at full speed, today she sits between lines and sets up her teammates with a final, immaculate pass as often as she shoots.

That positional shift has slowed down her scoring rate somewhat, but she’s still chipping away, inching ever closer to the record—and it’s arguably made her an even more essential piece than before for both club and country. It’s in part because she is perfectly content to step back, literally, from the front, that she has stayed one of the best in the world for so long.

2It has to be said here that not training or playing regularly with a team for eight-odd months and showing up to a World Cup capable of playing international soccer at all is still an incredible athletic achievement, one that says a lot about how good Wambach was.

Christine Sinclair is on a postage stamp. Designed for the 2015 World Cup, it also features Canada teammate Kadeisha Buchanan and Japanese keeper Ayumi Kaihori. Menges, her Thorns roommate on road trips, found out about this while the Canadian captain was recording an episode of a podcast called Arrow Living produced by Kendall Johnnson, another former Thorns teammate. It’s a wonderful scene. Johnson reads a list of Sinclair’s many awards and accomplishments, and when she gets to “you got a postage stamp of your face in 2015 for the World Cup,” Menges says, “no way!” in the background. A few minutes later, Menges announces she has bought her friend’s stamp on eBay. She still has it.

IV.

If Sinclair beats Wambach, her record will likely stand in perpetuity. To understand why that is, consider the fact that the top eight international goal scorers are all women. Iran’s Ali Daei, with 109 international goals to his name, is the only man with at least 100, a club that currently includes 16 women. Remember the two continents, one gently sloping into the sea, the other a rocky, craggy landmass surrounded by churning ocean?

Although both Wambach and Sinclair are among the very best to ever step onto a soccer field, the enormous volume of goals they have scored has as much to do with those rocks and crags—with the uneven, sometimes bizarre geography of women’s soccer—as it does with their skill as players.

Scorelines that are more or less unheard of in men’s soccer are fairly commonplace in women’s soccer. In the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying tournament this past fall, for example, the USA and Canada each won at least two games with scores of six or more goals to none; Canada beat Cuba, who did not score a single goal in the tournament, 12-0. Both Sinclair’s and Wambach’s goal tallies—along with those of Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Birgit Prinz, and many others—have had a big boost from those kinds of matches over the years.

The other factor to understand is that this kind of drastic inequality is shifting, if slowly and often painfully. A couple decades ago, the continent of women’s soccer was a tiny island; only a handful of countries even fielded teams, and those countries got enough of a head start over everyone else that they dominated the sport for years.

It’s because of this incremental but steady growth in the women’s game that no one is likely to come anywhere near 184 ever again. That World Cup qualifying tournament was a fluke for Canada’s schedule (somewhat less so for the US, whose federation is still happy to throw some real cupcakes into the mix of the dozen-plus friendlies they play each year); outside of official CONCACAF tournaments, where Canada is a big fish in a tiny pond, they’ve only won by more than two goals twice in the last three years. There is still a huge amount of inequality in the women’s game, but the federations that regularly field women’s sides now have enough real competition that there’s no reason to schedule friendlies against teams they’re going to drop a half-dozen goals on.

In 2017, Christine Sinclair was awarded the Order of Canada, her country’s second-highest civilian honor, something her Thorns teammates refer to as “getting knighted.” They learned about the award without any help from the woman who earned it.

“My teammates are dorks,” explains Sinclair. “They’re like, ‘do we have to call you queen now?’ So I try and keep those things quiet from them. I’d just hear about it all the time.”

V.

If you were to list the most important facts about Christine Sinclair, in order, her goal tally would probably be third on the list. The two facts battling it out for the top spot would be as follows:

  • Is one of the best soccer players of all time
  • Is an almost unbelievably nice person

Sinclair has earned the right to brag, to yell that she’s the best, to take selfish shots when she gets the chance. But if she was the kind of person who did those things, she would not be in the position she’s in.

Life—in sports, under capitalism, in nature at large—is a horrifically unfair endeavor. Success is determined as often as not by sheer random chance, and the rest of the time, the thing is fucking rigged.

In this context, Sinclair’s story has an almost religious resonance. Here is this person who got where she is by years of diligent hard work, by playing for everyone except herself, by care and kindness for the people around her. She is never arrogant, she hates the spotlight, she dotes on a little rescued dog named Charlie. She is outstandingly good. She is the kind of person you hope your children will be when they grow up, and not because she’s a world-class athlete.

In a few months’ time, this person could well be—by the most objective measure possible—the best soccer player in the history of the world. The possibility of this small, nice fact coming true makes our big and broken world seem a tiny bit less dark, in that way that soccer occasionally can when it fulfills its most noble aspirations.

Because she is who she is, Sinclair hates talking about the record. She sees it as a distraction, something that will mess with her game if she allows herself to think about it. Nonetheless, when reporters ask her about it, which we always do, she is unfailingly polite. As of a few years ago, she would always say that she didn’t know how many goals she had, something everyone around her believes to have been the truth.

Being just six goals away from Wambach, she can no longer block out that knowledge completely. She knows exactly where she stands. When I asked Sinclair if she cared about the record, she took a long pause. “I mean, I think so. I’m this close,” she said. “Yeah, I think it would be, like, a shame not to at this point… Just one of those things that nobody could take away from you.”

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Soccer Timbers

A Month (At Least) Without Soccer

Photo by Kris Lattimore

It’s been an awfully strange past few weeks in the world of sports.

Just two weeks ago, the Portland Timbers played against Nashville SC in their second home game of the 2020 MLS season. There were clear areas that needed improvement, but they won 1-0 and claimed an important three points before a challenging two-game road trip. Little did players know that those 90 minutes would be their final time stepping onto the field at Providence Park until at least late spring.

The coronavirus, formally known as COVID-19, is a virus that has, so far, infected over 250,000 people and killed more than 10,000. Over the past week, the virus forced nearly all sports worldwide to come screeching to a halt; people have been told to avoid large gatherings to prevent further spread.

After the Nashville game, the Timbers closed off their locker room to the media, instead opting to bring players to the press conference room individually. On March 12, MLS officials announced that its season, just two weeks old at that point, would be suspended for 30 days. A week later, the league pushed the timeline back even further, giving an optimistic restart date of May 10 with a training moratorium lasting until March 27.

“These are times that are very difficult,” head coach Giovanni Savarese told reporters via a video conference call on Friday. “Our generation hasn’t gone through this type of situation, so every day we have a new challenge, but the good thing is that everybody is in constant communication to make sure that we always know if someone is in need of something.”

The communication between players and coaching staff has been important, as players have been advised to stay in Portland. Through the Kitman Labs Athlete app, members of the Timbers can enter their exercises and communicate with one another daily while training at their respective homes. Players also have their own training plans, designed by the strength and conditioning staff, and have recently been given stationary bikes. The coaching staff is making every effort to keep in constant communication with each individual.

In addition to working with players, Savarese and the Timbers organization are in constant communication with the league office and other organizations throughout MLS in order to check-in and talk about any potential updates. At times over the past week, Savarese has even talked with other coaches and professionals overseas to gain a more global view of how teams are dealing with this crisis.

“We are making sure that we are seeing what the other clubs are doing and that we can share ideas, how to go in the best scenario possible,” Savarese said.

At this time, nobody within the Timbers organization has exhibited any symptoms of COVID-19. With limited state-wide tests, the team is making sure that players are only tested if it is absolutely necessary.

“We’re also very diligent to make sure that we only test players when we know that there’s something that might show some symptoms because we want to make sure that we don’t overstress the situation,” Savarese said. “We know there are many people that need the testing and that’s why we are making sure we communicate first and we’re thorough with each player. So far, thank God, everybody has been very healthy.”

While players have regimented training plans, all the coaching staff can do is constantly communicate with one another and go through game film. For Savarese, that means watching back the season’s only two games with excruciating attention to detail.

Savarese said that he organized the games into four halves. The ultimate goal, according to him, is maintaining the level that they played at in the first half against Minnesota United. His ideal style of play is one that is high-pressing, always on the front foot, and creative in possession. However, that style doesn’t always fit this roster, which is why oftentimes when the team opens up, they find themselves allowing too much space in the back that other teams ultimately capitalize on. Against Nashville, Savarese said that the team needed to be better on the ball in the first half, and mentioned that, in the second half, the team defended too deep.

“It was a game that we didn’t give up any opportunities to the other team,” Savarese said when asked to reflect on what he’s seen from the tape so far. “We need to be good defensively, but also be better offensively than what we showed against Nashville. I think there are many things that we can improve looking at each player, and I think these are times for reflection and it is important to do that.”

Now, the key word for the Timbers and every team throughout MLS is “adjust.” Within a week, the league went from a suspension of 30 days to 60. How quickly can organizations continue to adjust for a situation that has no known end-date? Portland’s coaching staff prepared plans to train on Monday in small groups, but that no longer is a possibility. What will happen when the league eventually restarts play? That much is still unknown, but, in the real world, these questions don’t even compare to the much bigger ones needing to be answered.

Near the end of the 35-minute conference call, Savarese addressed his own family, many of whom reside in Venezuela and Italy. He touched on relatives that are police officers currently working in the streets of Bologna, Italy. A cousin of his is afraid because of a neighbor that has contracted the virus. Savarese said that he makes sure to keep in daily communication with his family. These are worrying times, which is why he cannot wait for the distraction of soccer to return. The toughest part is waiting it out.

“Our hearts go out to all of those affected by this situation in one way or another,” Savarese said. “Either by sickness, by financial stress, by not being with their families close by. Our hearts go out to all of them.

“These are difficult times, times that go beyond soccer, and right now our minds are more on making sure we go through this difficult time in the best possible way.”

Categories
Soccer Thorns

“In the Old World, Everyone Had a Show.”

Photo by Kris Lattimore

Something I keep thinking about is how with the world on hold, the sport of soccer finds itself in a limbo state where the real thing has ceased to exist, but there is still a vast archive of past games, existing as a discrete, bounded entity with a series of fixed outcomes. PTFC plans to air some of those past games to fill the time while we all huddle in our houses and wait for things to get better.

The nature of sports—what differentiates them from all other forms of entertainment—is that the result isn’t predetermined. Despite our society’s current fixation on avoiding spoilers in everything we consume, there’s no other medium, if you want to call sports a medium, whose entertainment value depends so heavily on finding out an ending. Arguably, that’s the entire point. Thus, the act of watching soccer has undergone a complete ontological reversal, losing its essential sport-ness. No one has any idea when it might un-reverse.

There’s another medium, Vine, that has existed in this state for some time. Short-form video lives on, but actual vines, scripture-like, are a closed and unchangeable body of work. What’s more, since the platform itself—the “place” they once lived—is dead, their existence is mediated through human memory. What was originally a social and exploratory medium, a place we went to have new things thrust in front of our eyes, is now an archive that can only be navigated if we already know what we’re looking for.

This was never how we were meant to consume Vine, but this state gets at something essential about the form. All vines focus on a single idea, a single joke or visual gag. The best ones can be evoked with a single utterance: “look at all those chickens!” or “back at it again at Krispy Kreme.”

All the countless vines that didn’t gain a foothold in our collective memory? Presumably they exist somewhere as data, but they may as well be gone. There is a vast number of vine compilations on YouTube, and according to the naming conventions of the genre, vines that exist in this purgatory are termed “rare.” I find this a delightful turn of phrase, the way it implies that vines exist in a countable form like Pokémon cards or copies of a printed book.

Similarly, soccer games—not all of them, but the vast majority of all the games that have ever been played—are quickly forgotten, except, maybe, for two or three key moments. We mark the goals down, string together a highlight reel, and move on. There’s no way to search, say, for the time Kelley O’Hara cussed out Hayley Raso, or the time Tobin Heath got a cramp and begged a player on the other team to help her stretch her hamstring. Did those things even happen?

What’s even blurrier is what anything that happens in a soccer game means. We all remember that McCall Zerboni once stepped on Shea Groom as she lay prone on the ground in Providence Park. But why? Does that make her a bad person? What does the step, and our reaction to the step, say about us, or about the people closer to Zerboni?

In this specific sense, both Vine and soccer—especially women’s soccer, with its patchy history, its long stretches of slapdash recordkeeping—are, paradoxically, oral traditions. The data usually exists somewhere, but when a certain critical mass of data piles up, it ceases to perform its intended function of cataloguing events for later reference. The only way to find these things is to ask everyone you know and hope someone remembers.

This can be incredibly frustrating—if you’ve ever written about soccer, you know that a good chunk of the process is often combing through old game footage, looking for one specific moment you remember seeing—but I also find it rather charming. The sport of soccer is, to begin with, a factual event that happens, but in almost equal measure, it’s a thing constituted by our collective memory. Just as you can only play soccer with other people, you can only watch it, in any meaningful sense, with other people.

There’s a play called Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, that I was a little bit obsessed with for a while after I saw it, I think sometime in 2014. It takes place after the end of the known world, but it focuses on something apocalypse fiction usually ignores in favor of scenes of survival and aestheticized brutality, which is the question of how people would entertain themselves in that new reality.

It’s staged in three acts, the first two depicting the same band of survivors. We see them settle around a campfire and retell an episode of The Simpsons (“Cape Feare,” if you care) to pass the time. By the second act, several years later, they’ve become a traveling band of players who make their living staging the show. Over the years, the episode’s dialogue has mutated a little bit; it’s become clear which jokes were good enough to stick in people’s heads. The third act fast-forwards us a few generations into the future, where, after a decades-long game of telephone, America’s favorite yellow family have become the central figures in a quasi-religious musical production evoking Ancient Greek theater.

Once, all entertainment—reality itself, even—functioned this way. Things simply had to be remembered, or they were lost. But even things that were remembered never got remembered perfectly.

Homeric poets, like keepers of oral literary traditions around the world, didn’t memorize and recite epics verbatim—there was no “verbatim” to speak of, just a series of tellings and retellings. Things were half memorized and half improvised; no two poets would sing a given story the same way, and no individual poet would sing exactly the same thing every time. A more skillful poet would add more detail, use more evocative language. They also adjusted to what they thought their audience on any particular day would like (that’s why the Iliad is so packed with the names of characters who only appear long enough to get stabbed in a heroic way—once upon a time, each of those was a shoutout to some rich guy’s legendary eight-times-great-grandfather).

Maybe soccer isn’t quite as different from other forms of entertainment as we think. First and foremost, it’s about an outcome, suspense followed by revelation. That’s why we keep watching, week after week. But that’s not why we love it, I don’t think; we love it because it’s also about creating a collective myth, something that speaks to how we imagine ourselves and to how we imagine other people. In choosing what to remember, we are telling a story about who we are.

Categories
International Soccer Thorns

What Did it Mean? Looking Back at the 2019 World Cup

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Ed. note: this story was intended for publication in October 2019. Due to the vagaries of the media business, it never saw the light of day. We hope you’ll enjoy it as you practice social distancing.

France 2019 will be remembered as a big moment for women’s soccer, I think. In its wake, NWSL attendance experienced what looks—tentatively—more like a rising tide than a wave. In Europe, it catalyzed record sponsorships for clubs and leagues. The hype around it is part of what pushed longtime holdouts from the women’s game, including Real Madrid, to throw their hats in the ring. What’s going to be forgotten—what’s always forgotten about World Cups, on either side of the gender divide—is how much of the competition was brutally sad.

Inequality shapes everything about our world, so of course it also shapes the world’s game, much as we like to believe soccer is a sport that rewards talent, nerve, and perseverance above all. The mythos of the sport says that it only takes a ball to play, and that its heroes come from slums and favelas and banlieues.

And all that—it’s not not true, exactly. Fara Williams really was homeless for six years as a teenager. Nadia Nadim really did learn to play soccer while living in a refugee camp. We love those stories, both because they’re inspiring and because they let us believe soccer exists on a more egalitarian and meritocratic plane of being than ordinary life does.

But at a World Cup, where the teams competing run such a complete gamut from good to bad, rich to poor, the truth comes out. Inequality defines the competition. It’s rarely said directly, because it’s not a nice thing to say, but the majority of the field is always teams that stand literally no chance of winning.

As in every other facet of life, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger on the women’s side than on the men’s side. Plenty has been written on the subject of the massive and universal underinvestment in the women’s game, so rather than repeating any of that, I will simply say that the spectacle of this sport is something I find increasingly hard to participate in.

The social media zeitgeist takes on a specific tone any time there’s a particularly wild game, every tweet screaming “WHAT IS HAPPENING???” and “OH SHIIIIIT!!” I get that this is fun, and I genuinely take no enjoyment in pointing out that too often, at the World Cup, those moments involve teams beset with dysfunction. Australia-Brazil, which ended 3-2, was one such game—Australia, which fired its head coach less than six months before the tournament, edging out Brazil, whose federation has always chosen to pin its hopes on Marta rather than actually investing in the women’s game. The generational talents who have been let down by this sport’s power structures are far too many to name here.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

I could try to list all the other times this tournament broke my heart: the time France got to retake a penalty because VAR ruled that Nigeria’s keeper came off her line a fraction of a second early, and won the game as a result. The time Argentina, the worst-supported team in the tournament, came back from a three-goal deficit against Scotland only to have their hopes at a win—which would have sent them to the knockout stage—dashed when the referee cut stoppage time short.

But there is one moment that serves as the tragic, surreal nadir of the whole thing: Cameroon-England.

The social contract in sport rests on the mandate that losers must lose gracefully. So when things didn’t go Cameroon’s way against England, their reaction—not just complaining, but raging, crying, fouling left and right, looking like they were about to either start a fight or walk off the field—was more shocking than an upset win would have been.

It was the most bizarre spectacle to have taken place on a soccer field in recent memory, and the English press, especially, was eager to decry it as “DISGRACEFUL” and “SHAMEFUL.” The fact that the perpetrators were women no doubt worsened the shock to delicate sensibilities.

Taking a step back and thinking about the gargantuan disparity between these two soccer teams, though, you almost have to wonder that such displays aren’t more common. England is a team of professionals who play in a competitive league that recently received a £10 million sponsorship from Barclay’s. Meanwhile, the top-tier competition in Cameroon is one that has been described by Cameroonian journalist Njie Enow as “an underfunded domestic championship staged in appalling conditions.” These two teams compete under a common set of rules, but that’s the only parity that exists between them.

And as it does everywhere, sexism amplifies such inequality. Every women’s team is underfunded compared with their male counterparts. Federations spend money on the men hoping that investment will bring success, while women’s teams aren’t even noticed until they start winning—if they’re given a chance to play at all.

What Cameroon did was not sportsmanlike—but one effect of sportsmanship is to provide a glossy cover for the profound unfairness that shapes our world. At some point, we have to look in the mirror and ask why we value the appearance of cooperation and equality more than the conditions of players’ lives—more, in other words, than actual cooperation and equality.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

It is at least counterintuitive, and perhaps simply hypocritical of me, to use that moment, the spiritual low point of the World Cup, as framing for what came next.

Heading into the tournament, I did not know how I was going to feel about the US women, the team that, once upon a time, made me fall in love with this sport. The CONCACAF qualifying tournament back in October was an even bleaker showcase of inequality than the group stage of the World Cup, and if the USWNT’s utter dominance in women’s soccer wasn’t embarrassing enough, you may have noticed that this is not an era when it feels particularly good to be an American.

And then, come the knockout rounds, I found myself rooting for them—not resignedly or out of some sense of obligation, but really, from the depths of my heart, wanting this team to win.

If there’s one strictly soccer-related lesson from France 2019, it’s that the US remains, and likely will remain for some time, the best women’s soccer team in the world. It is not close. They had by far the most challenging schedule of any team, and hardly broke a sweat as they beat both France and England. None of the other supposed contenders—Australia, Germany, Japan—ever looked like possible world champions. There should never have been a question that the US was going to repeat their 2015 victory.

All this, of course, epitomizes the unfairness I spent the first half of this essay detailing. We live in the richest and most powerful country on earth, and our women’s national team is the best-supported in the world. We are Goliath and everyone else is David.

But the reason for that huge disparity doesn’t boil down to a simple question of GDP. Of course it does have to do with that, but it also has to do with the fact that 50 years ago, this country did one small thing right for American women, in passing Title IX, which made it normal for girls to play soccer at a time when that was illegal in many traditional footballing countries.

In simply giving girls the opportunity to play sports, this law converted our huge population into a huge player pool, something you can still see in the USWNT’s incomparable depth: the 2019 roster comfortably contains two full lineups that would be in the top five in the world. That says something about who we are as a country, or at least who we aspire to be. I have never had a lot of patriotic feelings, but I’m proud of that.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a version of earth where women’s soccer is just as popular as men’s, where poverty doesn’t exist, where people can live how they want to live and be who they want to be regardless of where they were born, what they look like, who they love. We do not live in that world. We live in a world where the president of the most powerful country on earth has openly bragged about committing sexual assault.

And in this world, the US women’s national team—the whole institution, but especially this particular US women’s national team—is a rare and special thing. It’s a comfort.

Earlier, I wrote that soccer doesn’t exist on some higher plane where injustice vanishes—and our women’s national team is subject to the coarse vulgarity of sexism and homophobia and racism and everything else. But watching them win the World Cup, it felt like they were above all that.

The 2019 USWNT was the best, on the field, that they have ever been, and I hope it’s not too corny of me to say they were the best off the field, too.

That clip of Megan Rapinoe saying she wasn’t going to the fucking White House? That clip was a month old by the time it blew up on social media. We should never have been talking about it. But so help me, I liked it. The virality of that moment was intentional, and not in a way that benefitted her or her teammates—but she handled it with remarkable grace and composure.

For the first time in their history, this team was not concerned with projecting an image of family-friendly wholesomeness. They swore in public and celebrated with abandon. They were, as a group, incredibly gay. What they projected, instead of the traditional dumbed-down, for-all-the-little-girls-out-there image, was one of strength and outspokenness and pride, as 23 women who play soccer.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

And whatever base stupidity anyone tried to level at them simply bounced off, because they won, and did it in an absolutely clear and irreproachable fashion. Win like that, and you’re untouchable. All the nonsense about the goal celebrations, all memory of our idiot president tweeting at Rapinoe, faded into background noise as they sprayed Budweiser on each other and yelled “I’ma knock the pussy out like fight night!” in unison (it’s a Migos song).

This is the paradox sports present us with. They exist firmly in our mercilessly unfair reality, but at their best, they involve a suspension of disbelief that lets us forget that reality. I hope, without much optimism, that by the next World Cup, our reality might be a little less unfair. But even if it’s not, this tournament is the kind of space that’s much too rare—one where sometimes, good guys win.

Categories
Thorns Timbers

Questions and Answers with the Rose City Review: One Day Too Early

Well, that was some bad timing.

On Wednesday night, full of optimism about the start of the Thorns’ preseason camp and also willing to talk about the start of the Timbers’ season, we held our first question and answer thread over on our Discord server.

Since then, the sporting situation in Portland and around the world has changed drastically. Still, how Kyle feels about Eryk Williamson or how we all feel about Amandine Henry will not change just because some dumb virus is reshaping society as we know it.

With that in mind, here are a few of your questions from Wednesday’s Q&A on the Rose City Review Discord.

(Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity.)

Which former Thorn is the most likely to return to the team?

Do not take this as a prediction or as actual reporting, but I know the Thorns would love to have Amandine Henry back. The question is whether she has any reason to ever come back to the States (or, as we’re calling it now, STATES). It’s probably not impossible, but don’t get your hopes up.

-Katelyn Best

I would say probably Haley Raso still, just because of her connections here. But I don’t see it as being particularly likely that anyone is returning.

-Tyler Nguyen

Who is your favorite player on either team who may not necessarily be the best or see regular minutes?

For me, that has to be Marvin Loria. I am convinced that Loria has what it takes to be a starter-level player in MLS. He is fast, creative, and a hard worker. Of course, he is also injured pretty regularly, which is why we rarely saw him later on during the 2019 season.

 

Loria may never get the chance to regularly start for the Timbers, as the team has been pretty dead set on using their DP slots on wingers and forwards, but I could certainly see him making an impact off the bench or in spot starts and either getting traded within the league or (more likely) sold outside of it. To me, the latter seems even more likely now that MLS has increased the amount of money that teams get from selling players on.

 

Of course, I would also be happy just having him stay with the Timbers and doing dope stuff like this.

-Will Conwell

I think for me, that answer is Eryk Williamson. He seems to be on the bubble between the first team and Timbers 2. I watched quite a bit of T2 last season and he was arguably the best player, controlling the game, and I think was in the top half of USL in assists a season ago.

 

In what I’ve seen of him when he gets first-team minutes, I think he has a lot of potential. He is smooth on the ball, and I believe would be a good creator. He can play as a No. 10 in the middle of the action, but he can also play as a connector in the No. 8 slot, which is what he told me that he envisions himself being.

 

I think we might see more of him in the future when it comes time to rest Diego Valeri during condensed stretches of play in the summer. If anything, his defense might need the most improving, but creativity wise he could help the Timbers when it comes to breaking down low blocks and be an overall asset to the first team.

-Kyle Pinnell

I’m super partial to Marissa Everett this year because of her skill set and the fact that she’s a Duck. I think fans should be into that stuff. She’s a smooth-passing forward, and there’s no reason that she can’t be a bench player on the Thorns for a long time.

-Tyler

Photo by Nikita Taparia
Is the Thorns’ youth movement perfectly timed or exquisitely timed? Which of the Thorns’ young players should I be frigging stoked for, and which will need some time or never contribute?

Take a huge grain of salt with this because I watch zero college soccer, but my understanding is that we should all be pretty fucking excited about Sophia Smith. She scored a bunch of goals at Stanford, but reportedly her intelligence, for a player her age, is off the charts. She might really be the mythical goal-scoring forward Thorns fans are always begging for—as well as having the technical skill and athleticism the Thorns coaching staff wants up top.

 

As far as timing? I’m not sure. As I’ve said in a few other places, the whole league is in a kind of purgatory right now as we wait for expansion to blow everyone up—that, plus Sinclair’s eventual retirement, is going to necessitate a rebuild within the next few years. That could mean Portland builds a new roster with their existing young players, or—possibly more likely—it could mean they trade them away post-expansion for some star power. Or, y’know, a mix of both.

-Katelyn

The youth stuff is funny because, yes, the Thorns are getting young in offense, but they’re also getting older on defense, and this club is constantly trying to refresh its roster. The new shit is that we have youngsters with pedigrees. That’s weird.

 

It will be great to see if we can have even better results teaching blue-chip talent instead of doing the usual miracle work with players who other teams didn’t see the value in

-Tyler

Who is Chris Duvall’s backup?

This is a good question and one that the Timbers seem far too likely to need to answer to at some point, given the early-season injury history among their defenders.

 

To my mind there are three different approaches that Gio and company can take here:

 

1. Flip a left back: just figure out which of Farfan or Villafana have a better right foot and move them on over.

2. Convert a center back: send Julio Cascante out there. He has done it before (I think). If he was not injured already, Bill Tuiloma would be another possibility in here, but as a left-sided player, playing him on the right would kind of fall back into category No. 1.

3. Get a little crazy: play a Chara at wing back. Or try out Renzo Zambrano out there. Why not?

 

Really, though, my bet would be Cascante.

-Will

Photo by Kris Lattimore
Does Providence Park or the training facility have super low doorways, or are there other reasons our team [the Timbers] is so damn short?

It is Diego Chara’s fault.

 

And, in a way, Kris Boyd’s.

 

Chara was the Timbers’ first big signing and, ten years in, is their most influential player. His success—followed by Boyd’s failure—has heralded an approach to player signing from Gavin Wilkinson and company that focuses on technique and ball retention. For Chara, his ability to win the ball, pivot on it, and take it around a defender with a simple juke are all amplified by his short stature, low stance, and somehow subterranean center of gravity.

 

Plus, the Timbers just signed his brother, who is actually even shorter. That can’t have helped their average height.

-Will

Does Gio-ball actually exist and did they play it at Cosmos? If so, was it because of him or despite him?

My understanding of Gio-ball is that it’s the kind of front-foot, attacking, high-press soccer we’ve seen glimpses of from the Timbers over the last month. Specifically, the first 30 minutes or so in the opener felt a lot closer to how I’ve always thought Gio wants to play than we’ve seen from the Timbers before. Obviously, it’s not an easy style to master because, as we saw, the defense has to be very disciplined to not get caught way out of position, but with more and more signings during the Gio era, one would imagine the team will continue to progress in that direction.

-Zach Kay

Is Andy Polo the fastest Timber? why don’t we EVER play him into space?

He’s definitely fast, and while I appreciate what he does in the middle third, he’s definitely shown that he doesn’t consistently have a killer instinct or top-quality decision making in the final third. Putting someone into space is really only useful if they can turn that advantageous position into a goal or an assist, so until he’s doing that on a regular basis, it makes more sense to use his athleticism for other things.

-Zach

I agree with a lot of what Zach said. Polo is fast, but he also only has one regular season goal in over two seasons which is not… ideal considering he takes up one of the attacking spots. He does need some better decision making in the final third like Zach mentioned because, ideally, wingers in a sit-back-and-counter setup would help combine and unlock the opposing defense, and if he is not able to do that often, the Timbers lack an advantage at one of their attacking options.

 

What has piqued my interest over the past month is how Gio is using him in the offense. In preseason, Gio played him in midfield a lot, which, as you mentioned, doesn’t take advantage of his pace or the space afforded. The wingers have also been tasked with playing an entire sideline. For example, Blanco and Yimmi both seem to be playing in the defensive third as much as in the attacking third, which takes focus away from what they are best at. This actually benefits Polo, as he is a decent defensive option, but on the offensive end, he is most important as an attacking winger, and that’s a facet of his game that he needs to work on.

-Kyle

Will Renzo Zambrano and Marvin Loria disappear again, or will they take another step this year?

I hold a ton of Zambrano stock, and (up until Polo started playing more in central mid this year) I’d been excited for him to be the first-off-the-bench CDM. The times he played next to Paredes last year really sold me on those two next to each other being the future of the Timbers central midfield. Obviously, there’s still some growth that needs to happen before then, but I would be very disappointed if he doesn’t get significantly more minutes this year. Zambrano also happens to be my answer to “who is your favorite player who may not see regular minutes”.

-Zach

I made it out to training today, and Gio mentioned Loria as someone who, when he returns to the team from his time with the Costa Rica u23s in Olympic Qualifying, would make an impact for the side. I take that, along with my general enjoyment of his style of play, to mean that he is in the Timbers’ first-team plans this year.

-Will

 

Categories
Soccer Thorns

Honesty Hour

Photo by Matthew Wolfe

This website is ostensibly about soccer, and I’ve been trying for a few days to write something about soccer, both for my own satisfaction and to soothe people’s worries that the new blog with the pleasant pink background and the bundle of roses for a logo will only be about the Portland Timbers.

I diligently logged on and spent some time watching Raquel Rodriguez footage. I took a few notes. I think she’s good! She seems like she could fill the No. 6 role the Thorns were hoping Andressinha would be able to play. Is that what’s actually going to happen? I have no idea. That’s about where my current thoughts end.

When it comes to writing about soccer itself, I have a pretty big mental block right now. There are too many sources of stress bouncing around in my brain, bumping into each other, amplifying each other. A lot of them are no doubt familiar to you, the reader, if you’ve been a conscious participant in the world at large over the last month. Others have to do with the specific niche this site lives in, and others still belong to me, personally.

There has been a lot of Discourse about who is and isn’t reporting on soccer in this city in recent weeks. I have plenty of opinions about that discourse, which I won’t get into here.

What I will say is that this will be my fifth year covering the Thorns, and none of those years has been quite the same, but what’s distinctly new this year is that I have a job with a schedule typical enough of a normal American office job that I won’t be able to go to trainings during the week to actually report on the team. I don’t know yet how I’m going to navigate that. I’m going to have to use postgame opportunities a lot more judiciously, but in part, I’m simply going to have to accept that I will know less.

That stresses me out, um, a lot? It stresses me out that preseason training started this week and I couldn’t be there, and it stresses me out looking into the future and trying to imagine myself working my way out of this mental block using a very different process from what I’m used to.

No one is actually yelling at me, but I do have a feeling like people are yelling at me. There’s a lot of yelling going on in general, and I also think a lot of people are looking around desperately searching for Thorns content and getting pretty upset at its nonexistence. There’s only so much I can do about that. There’s only one of me, and while I have two wonderful collaborators here in the Thorns Zone, we all either work or go to school.

We will endeavor to make our coverage as even as possible between the two teams here at the Review, but the fact is, gazing out over the whole incredibly sparse soccer media landscape, the Timbers are going to get more coverage. That’s just how things are right now. And yes, ultimately, that’s because of sexism, which I don’t like any more than you do.

The fact is, if no publication is willing to pay for a full-time soccer writer, nobody is going to be happy with how much soccer coverage there is, period. We’re going to do our best. I’m going to do my personal best. Nonetheless, I’m simply not a beat reporter; I edit corporate training documents and write about soccer as a hobby.

Another fact is that with the state of things, we don’t even really know how much soccer is going to get played, or when, or in front of whom.

This moment in time presents a similar challenge to all of us, to focus on what we can control and learn to let the rest go. I don’t touch my face and I wash my hands as soon as I get home; I will go to the preseason media day next week, assuming it happens, and take advantage of whatever other opportunities for reporting continue to exist for me, and write about my thoughts and feelings in this space. We’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other, y’all. While we’re at it, let’s try not to yell at each other.

Categories
Thorns Timbers

Announcing Questions and Answers with the Rose City Review

Photo by Kris Lattimore

Hello Rose City Review Readers,

With this website of ours having existed for a thrilling week and a half, the Timbers’ season underway, and the Thorns just having commenced their preseason, we would like to open the floor up to questions.

We want to know what you want to know. 

And, darn it, we want to answer what you want to know.

So give us your questions on the Thorns, the Timbers, Tyler’s current playlist, or whatever else might come to mind, and we will attempt to get you an answer.

How do you ask us these questions, you might ask?

Simple: join our Patreon, get on our Discord, and swing by the Q&A channel to submit your questions. We will try to answer them all in the channel before picking some on which to go a little deeper here on the Rose City Review.

Plus, once you are in the Discord, you can stick around and have a chat with all of us and your fellow Review readers.

All the best,

The Rose City Review

P.S. We will be answering questions on the Discord tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, so make sure to get yours in!

Categories
Soccer Timbers

Bigger than Soccer

Photo by Matthew Wolfe

The song may be slow, it may not encourage anybody to run through a wall, but what it lacks in tempo, it makes up for with a powerful message. 

Down when you’re lonely, I’ll pull you up

When life leaves you heavy when the going gets tough

I’ll be your shoulder, together we’ll run

Up from the bottom, yeah we’ll rise above.

“Never Give up on You,” the Nashville SC anthem written by Judah & the Lion, symbolizes unity; an anthem that encourages everyone to come together and depicts the ethos of the first-year MLS side. Its message is simple and enduring, and, after last week’s natural disaster in central Tennessee, carries an even deeper meaning.

That strength and unity is being tested just two weeks into the team’s inaugural MLS campaign, after a devastating tornado hit Nashville, Tennessee last Tuesday. The disaster reportedly killed at least 25 people, destroyed communities, and prompted the rallying cry “Believe in Nashville.” 

Trees uprooted from the ground in Nashville, TN | Photo courtesy of Jason Moles

The response from the greater MLS community, and the Portland Timbers organization specifically, came quickly. On Wednesday, the Timbers announced that $35 general admission tickets were being sold without any additional fees, and that $15 from each ticket would be donated to the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. Before the game on Sunday, the Timbers Army held a Tennessee hot dog cookout where they took donations to send to relief organizations in Nashville. And in the North End during the game, the Timbers Army displayed a tifo that read “Rose City loves Music City.”

It may have been the first ever game between the two sides, but at the end of the day, the 1–0 Timbers victory was overshadowed by the events surrounding the game.

“It’s our part,” Timbers’ head coach Giovanni Savarese said. “Our hearts go to all those that were unfortunately in that situation with the tornado in Nashville. We felt it was our duty to support them with the tickets and part of what is going to help those people that suffer. 

“That’s why we put something on our shirt, because we want to be a part of supporting all of them. I think it was a classy thing to do because you want no one to go through that and our prayers and thoughts are with those people that unfortunately went through this difficult moment.”

Diego Valeri also spoke about the tragic events in Nashville. “The Timbers organization is a mirror of what this community is about,” he said. “It’s about solidarity, always trying to help people that are affected, and it doesn’t surprise me. I think it was a great opportunity to show what this organization is about.”

Cleanup underway in Nashville, TN | Photo courtesy of Stephen Robinson

Playing in a game allowed players and fans the opportunity to take their minds off an overwhelming week, at least for 90 minutes.

Over the past week, some Nashville players helped Red Cross answer calls to raise money. On Sunday, the team wore patches on their jerseys that read “NGUOY,” short for Never Give up on You. Nashville superfan Soccer Moses even made the trip north, carrying a sign that read “Bless you Rose City #NashvilleStrong.”

“We understand even the impact in Nashville that this game is going to have,” traveling supporter Stephen Robinson said before the game. “Our players were affected, so it means so much, especially when the Timbers Army and the Timbers show how much it means to them as well. It really does add something to your heart knowing people actually care about this, and people care about what is going on outside of their town.”

Last Tuesday in Nashville, both the players and the community were hit hard by an unexpected natural disaster. The saying in Nashville has been “it’s bigger than soccer,” and on Sunday afternoon, that motto rang truer than ever.

During the week, Stephen Mason is a barber (he’s also a three-time Grammy winner with the band Jars of Clay). But when Nashville SC take the field, he takes on a different persona: Soccer Moses.

Stephen Mason, also known as Soccer Moses, prepares for the match ahead | Photo by Kris Lattimore

On the night of the tornado, Mason was awakened by debris hitting surrounding houses. His home wasn’t damaged, but the same couldn’t be said for some of his neighbors. After that night, the rest of the week became a blur.

“It feels heavy,” Mason said, reflecting on the damage that he has seen in his own community. “There’s a weight about it and an aspect that we know it’s going to take awhile. But, on the other hand, the response from the Nashville community is what it has always been. [We] rally, [it’s] intentional, generous, about service. They call us the volunteers, and I think you saw that in the response.”

According to Robinson, those in Nashville were only told to expect a strong storm, a common occurrence in the south. However, that prediction is what made it all the more jarring to take up to the sound of tornado sirens and phone alerts just after midnight.

Another traveling supporter, Jason Moles, recalled trying to keep himself awake after hearing that a potential tornado was 45 minutes away. When he woke back up, it was to the sound of his daughter telling him to get out of bed because of the sirens.

“When I saw the lightning flash green, you could see the shadow of the tornado, and I just ran through the house and yelled ‘everyone get down’,” Moles said. His family eventually sprinted to a neighbor’s house where they just made it down to the basement before hearing the storm touch down right outside.

Moles, who lives 30 minutes outside the city, said that while the shop that he works at is fine, the complex where he runs a soccer league got badly hit, and over $40,000 worth of goals were destroyed. What he saw in the days that followed was expected, but also staggering. 

“Everybody worked,” Moles said. “They had to turn volunteers away because there were too many people who wanted to help.”

All three fans made up a larger contingency of supporters, the Nashville Roadies, a group of traveling fans that made the trip up to Portland. They all agreed that the response from the Timbers and Timbers Army has been unprecedented, and more than they ever could have expected.

“We’re a new franchise, and we’re watching the Timbers franchise demonstrate how to lead, and how sports can really galvanize an effort,” Mason said. “We’re overwhelmed with gratitude because this is not on the radar for a lot of folks, this is across the country, and the fact that Portland intentionally leaned into this, it brought forward a commonality in our humanity and in our compassion.”

Some of Nashville’s visiting supporters prepare to enter Providence Park | Photo courtesy of Jason Moles

While the tornado affected the lives of every player, inevitably some players were hit harder than others. Earlier this week, winger David Accam posted a video showing windows blown in, and other areas of his house destroyed. Forward Daniel Ríos, who lives in a taller building, seemed to be even more shaken up.

Ríos remembered being woken up by his phone’s emergency alerts before taking a look outside from his top-floor apartment. He froze in his tracks at the sight of the tornado, but managed to get to the door as the large building swayed under his feet. 

“It’s not easy,” Ríos said while reflecting on that sobering night. “I have a lot of things in my mind right now, but soccer is my life, it’s what I love. Even with that tornado, I always have something on my mind, I’m trying to be focused like last week and today… I just try to deal with it and stay the most focused I can.”

Like any team, the players on Nashville SC have a group text. On Tuesday night, the messages were lighting up as all the players frantically checked in on one another. Midfielder Dax McCarty, whose home is located three miles from where the tornado hit, woke up in the middle of the night, but did not check his phone. On Sunday afternoon, he admitted that he wished he had. 

“I wish I would’ve been awake for that and been able to offer some help to any guys that needed it,” McCarty said. “But our team took amazing care of it, guys are there for each other. 

“In some cases, we’ve only known each other for five, six weeks and guys are already going to pick up guys at two in the morning to make sure that they are safe. You need to have that closeness as a group, that camaraderie. Obviously, it was a scary time and it’s just going to bring us closer as a community, as a city, and also as a team.”

By the next morning, Ríos said that he had received 15 different offers to stay in a teammate’s apartment or home. 

“It was overwhelming,” he said. “I was thankful for my teammates. It was late, like three in the morning, and they texted me and called me. The next morning, everyone knew about it, everyone texted me. I have such great teammates.”

Visiting Nashville supporters cheering on their team during the game | Photo by Kris Lattimore

Weeks ago, Nashville’s anthem was being criticized for being tacky; for being something pushed onto the supporters by the team. But, after last Tuesday’s events, that anthem holds even more of a meaning to those who belt it out after every home game.

“What does it mean to me?” Moles asked. “Everybody says it feels pushed, but what they don’t understand is that those guys, Judah & the Lion, are season ticket holders; they’ve been in our soccer community for a long time. When I saw that song sung the very first time at the stadium, scarves up through the whole song, I was in tears.”

Added Mason: “It’s the best of us captured in a song.”

The recovery process will inevitably be long and trying. With heavy hearts, all three supporters realize the challenge of the task at hand: rebuilding a city. But they all returned to the same point, one that gives them confidence. This is Nashville, a close-knit city that has been knocked down before, and has the resiliency to get back on its feet.

So, yes, Liverpool has “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and Minnesota United supporters belt out “Wonderwall” after every home win. But, for the club that presses broadcast audio to vinyl as a gift to the man of the match, it’s the slow, strong anthem that serves as a rallying cry for those in Central Tennessee.

“We now live by those words,” Robinson said. “We’re not going to give up on our town, our city, our club. The way the community has responded, the way everyone has responded, we’re not going to give up on it. As forced as the anthem may seem to others outside, to us it means a lot more now.”

Categories
Soccer Timbers

“We Don’t Need to Do Anything Offensively.”

Felipe Mora standing
Photo by Kris Lattimore

In soccer, it’s not uncommon to grind out a hard-fought 1-0 win at home. Sometimes, the opponent sits deep and parks the bus; gifting you the ball and daring you to try and break them down. It may not be pretty, but getting three points from those situations is no easy task and, generally, teams can feel good about rising to it. If one were to merely look at the scoreline of yesterday’s affair at Providence Park, this sort of match would be easy to imagine. A visiting expansion side that came to Portland with the intention of playing defense with 11-men for 90 minutes. Especially with the Timbers’ home woes last season as context, that sort of visiting gameplan is one we’ve seen work in Portland many many times.

“Well that’s great” one might think, “The Timbers have finally figured out how to break down a low block and take some points off of teams who come here and refuse to let them counter. That’s certainly an improvement from the end of last year, and it’ll be nice to prove to the league that Providence Park is once again a fortress.” There is, however, one unfortunate problem with this take: That’s not at all what happened yesterday afternoon.

Instead, we saw a Timbers side who started strong, scored an early goal, and then… just decided they were done attacking somewhere around the 20th minute. There was a lot of discussion yesterday about the Timbers not taking a single shot after the 24th minute, and while that stat is certainly staggering in its own right, there are two more that contribute to this narrative:

  • The Timbers took no corner kicks.
  • In the first 15 minutes of the match, the Timbers completed six passes in or around the opposing penalty area; in the remaining 75 minutes, only four.
Diego Valeri strikes an incredible volley to put the Timbers up 1-0
Diego Valeri strikes an incredible volley to put the Timbers up 1-0 | Photo by Matthew Wolfe

What do the professionals say?

Let’s check in with what head coach Gio Savarese said about yesterday’s attacking performance:

“We don’t need to do anything offensively. What we need to do, maybe, is in the second half, keep the ball a little more, try to move it. But the moments we were able to get in the box, we created opportunities. We created chances. That’s not something we need to work. Of course we work on a constant basis to be better, but it’s not a concern. We know that we’re a team that can score goals. The important thing for us today was to make sure there were no goals against and that we got a win and that’s what the guys were able to accomplish.”

It’s extremely reasonable that putting in a solid defensive performance was the team’s focus after their 3-1 dismantling at the hands of Minnesota United last weekend. I even predicted that the Timbers would win if they could hold Nashville to one-or-fewer goals in our Discord server (which you can get access to via our Patreon). However, a head coach saying, “…we created opportunities. We created chances.” after his team just went 65+ minutes without taking a single shot seems out of touch, disingenuous, or both.

And what about other players and coaches? Well, it seems they have a different opinion.

Portland Timbers captain Diego Valeri: “Being an attacking player, I’m happy to win a game 1-0 if one is enough to win the game, but obviously there’s a lot of things we have to improve to feel better on the field and the way the game is being played.”

Portland Timbers midfielder Sebastian Blanco: “To win it’s always important. Also, to get three valuable points at home. However, there is still a lot to improve on because we did not play a good match tonight.”

Nashville SC head coach Gary Smith: “I have no idea what their mindset and tactics were once they went one-nil up. I mean they’re the home side, I would’ve imagined that internally they’d had felt that they could have pushed on and won the game.”

Andy Polo battles with a defender
Andy Polo takes a blow to the jaw | Photo by Kris Lattimore

Do we need to do something offensively?

Probably.

On one hand, a team integrating multiple new-to-MLS attacking pieces struggling to create in March isn’t exactly news or cause for greater concern. Even less so considering that the team’s new DP striker hasn’t played a single minute.

However, a head coach of a team that literally did not take a single shot for 60+ minutes of a home game saying that attacking isn’t something they need to work on is far from confidence-inspiring.