Portland Timbers and Real Salt Lake ready for return to action

by Matt Hoffman (@mhoff)

The Summer of Soccer has brought a great many things. Wrong national anthems being played. Organized thugs bringing the fight from the streets into the stadium instead of the inverse. The sad–but not wholly unexpected–continued civil war inside Croatian soccer.

Major League Soccer is not a top soccer league, yet. But for all its many and varied problems, MLS doesn’t have these sorts of headaches as the league returns to play following a short break for Copa America.

This includes Real Salt Lake who welcome the Portland Timbers to Rio Tinto Stadium for an 7 pm PST match.

Sitting in third place, RSL is playing their first home game since April. The Timbers meanwhile sit four places back. Both teams are coming off of midweek wins from the US Open Cup. The Timbers dispatched the San Jose Earthquakes while RSL needed an 86th minute goal to forced extra-time before going through on penalties.

Timburrr!

Prost’s Monday Morning Centerback and appreciator of gymnastics and devotee of the Macarena, Kali Korbis admits RSL looked a step slow but Joao Plata was a game changing player in a substitutes role.

If history tells us anything about USOC qualifying and overall team quality it is, (spoilers!) not so much.

RSL remain above the red line in third place despite not having played a home match since April. How well is the team playing right now?

“I’m not sure if the break almost came at a bad time or a good time for RSL because they were up and down on their road trip, and really needed the kind of consistency you get with home matches, but as the USOC proved, not everyone was particularly match-ready after the break, either.

So it is hard to say how they are playing right now. But they have about 80 matches in 6 weeks (the effect of actually caring about the USOC plus a random Euro friendly shoved into a tight MLS schedule) so they’d better be ready to play well.”

Yura Movsisyan scored his fourth goal of the season, his second goal in the last three matches. This follows Movsisyan coming off the bench for the first time this season in the Columbus game. How do you rate Movsisyan’s return and do you think RSL might make the loan deal permanent? 

“Yura hasn’t scored shit tons of goals but looks like a much more mature player than when he left. He has actually made a huge difference in terms of his presence up top in the 4-3-3/4-3-2-1 and in creating chances for other teammates.

I think RSL will make the move permanent if it works out financially for both sides. The FO prides itself on not throwing dollars around like the twerking scene from Orphan Black, but also making their players happy about being in SLC. So it’s a balance, but one that I think they will try to make for Yura.”

“This guy here … he’s The Guy! We should totally hang out.”