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.
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.”
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.