The Portland Timbers had a rough night against the LA Galaxy on Wednesday night
By Ivan Yeo
This is not the way the Portland Timbers had envisioned their night with the LA Galaxy going.
The Timbers had entered Wednesday night’s game with the Galaxy on a four-match winning streak, they were in third place in the Western Conference behind its two other Cascadia rivals, Seattle and Vancouver, and Wednesday night’s match with the surging Galaxy was viewed as a conference heavyweight bout.
Unfortunately for the Timbers, they along with the rest of the league got a harsh reminder that the Galaxy are starting to catch fire. Portland could never get going against LA, as they allowed three first half goals on Wednesday night and Portland were left to lick its wounds in a 5-0 loss that snapped its win streak.
“It seemed like everything that could go wrong did,” Timbers head coach Caleb Porter said.
Wednesday’s game was a sharp contrast to Portland’s play throughout the entire season let alone its prior four-match winning streak. Prior to Wednesday’s match, the Timbers had lost by more than one goal only three times, and those three losses were just two-goal losses.
Wednesday night however was a far cry from the way the Timbers had played over the course of the season. Portland conceded a goal in the 15th minute, but it was the way they conceded LA’s next two goals that symbolized how bad it was for Portland on the night. LA’s Sebastian Lletget who had scored LA’s first goal, made his way into the penalty area in the 17th minute, Maximiliano Urruti tracked back to defend Lletget, but pushed him down from behind and referee Ted Unkel awarded the penalty to LA’ which they converted a mintue later.
Bad defending came back to bite the Timbers in the 33rd minute. Robbie Keane played a through ball into the penalty area, Alvas Powell tried to cut off the pass, but he slipped, and the end result was Robbie Rogers scoring his first goal in a Galaxy shirt to widen the Timbers deficit. Two more Galaxy goals came in the second half and Portland’s bad night was compounded in the 78th minute when captain Liam Ridgewell was red-carded for kicking Alan Gordon.
“A loss is a loss, just like a win is a win, its zero points,” Porter said of the result. “If we had lost 1-0, it would still be zero points and we’d be very disappointed. Losing by five psychologically can get you thinking that its worse, but it’s zero points.”
All that’s over now, the Timbers took a big one on the chin and all that’s left to do now is move onto the next match. Portland knows they have to be ready for this one, as they are hosting arch rival Seattle on Sunday evening, and given what happened the last time the two teams faced each other, the Timbers know that anything short of a full effort on Sunday evening could end in another bad lopsided result.
“It is a little more hard to take, but it happened already,” Timbers defender Jorge Villafana said. “We have to learn from the mistakes, make sure they don’t happen again and move onto the next game.”
