The Portland Timbers are back in the fight for the postseason after a 3-2 hard fought win last Saturday over the Colorado Rapids. It wasn’t supposed to be that hard, but even though Colorado is mathematically out of the play off run, they still exhibited a huge level of pride and professionalism and didn’t want to be an anecdote to the Timbers’ late season rally. The Timbers were the better team, but Colorado went down with a fight.
The run of the play showed a Portland Timbers looking a lot different than the team that was almost discounted from the playoffs. It looks and feels very different to the one that departed coach Giovanni Savarese led a few months ago.
The new coach Miles Joseph has tweaked the team like a good mechanic, listens to an engine, and returned the Timbers to the racetrack. These Timbers give the fans a new hope ahead of the last month of the 2023 season, and with wins like the one over LAFC a few weeks ago, the Timbers have the potential to spoil any Cup Champion’s hopes in a playoff situation.
Miles Joseph got the head coach job after Savarese’s departure, late in the season, and sparked a reaction that now 6 games undefeated, conceding only a tie in Seattle, and having won 5 games. Joseph wouldn’t be the first coach to take up a team as an interim manager and take a team to success, for a good example, we just have to drive up north on Interstate 5, and look up the ascendance of Brian Schmetzer as Seattle’s top man, after the departure of a US coach legend Sigi Schmid.
