PORTLAND, Ore. – There’s no question that the Portland Timbers returned from Toronto nearly two weeks ago a different team.
Not only had their captain Will Johnson been lost for the season but they were also licking their wounds from a 3-2 loss that saw them squander a 2-0 lead. Head coach Caleb Porter said it was one of the many times in this challenging season his team has had to “look in the mirror” to find the answers.
And in the two games since, following Wednesday night’s 3-0 win at Providence Park over the San Jose Earthquakes on the heels of a 2-1 away win Saturday over the same team, the Timbers have apparently addressed some issues to vault them back into a playoff spot in the Western Conference pending upcoming games this weekend.
“It’s been a tough year in terms of things maybe not going the way we think it should, maybe it’s unfair, maybe it’s fair, but at the end of the day there have been a lot of times where we’ve had to look at ourselves in the mirror and realize and acknowledge, myself included, that it’s not been good enough,” Porter said in his postgame comments.
Porter said that following the loss in Toronto, he had a “long meeting” to go over some of the mistakes that were made. He said the main lesson learned from that loss was how to manage a lead better.
“If we want to be a team that is consistently up there at the top, a team that is always in the playoffs, we have to do better at that,” Porter said. “We can’t unravel when we’re up 2-0.”
Against a shorthanded Earthquakes team who were without four international players, a suspended Pablo Pintos and Designated Player Matias Perez Garcia, Portland definitively managed their 1-0 first-half lead after a Rodney Wallace goal. A second-half brace from Diego Valeri took care of that.
And Valeri said the team has done a “great job” of addressing the problems brought up on the meeting.
“Caleb always wants us to talk because he believes that the mental thing is the most important in soccer, and I agree with him,” Valeri said. “We made some mistakes because we were not focused. And this time of year you need to stay in every moment really focused because every team needs points, they are playing for something.”
Porter also credited his team for not letting down in the second of a back-to-back matchup with the same team that was missing many of their players and had been eliminated from the MLS Cup Playoffs. He warned that it was a “trap” game earlier in the week.
“Sometimes these are games when you let your guard down,” Porter said. “You see it happen in this league and in leagues all around the world, teams don’t get out of these games with the result they should. So I think it just says a lot about our hunger right now, our focus. We weren’t going to let that happen.”
Dan Itel covers the Timbers for MLSsoccer.com.
