For 125 straight days, the Portland Timbers didn't lose a single soccer game. In the last five days, they've lost two.
The first of those losses, at home against Vancouver last Saturday night, was forgivable: the Timbers dominated the game, but were doomed by a pair of individual errors from two of their most reliable players.
But Wednesday night's defeat, on a sultry evening in the nation's capitol against D.C. United, was another matter. The Timbers led after 40 minutes, but then conceded four straight goals — the last of which was came in stoppage time via a 60-yard run from their former backup forward Darren Mattocks — to fall 4-1.
The second half, in particular, was a walkover. The Timbers just didn't show up for it. It was the kind of total surrender that we hadn't seen from them since they were so thoroughly humiliated by the New York Red Bulls all the way back in March.
Giovani Savarese ended that night in Harrison by apologizing to Timbers fans for the performance they'd been subjected to, and he ended this night in similar fashion: taking full responsibility for the failure of his team's mentality.
The loss to the Red Bulls, it should be noted, was just that: a failure of mentality, encapsulated in Liam Ridgewell's fateful jogging trackback on the home team's second goal.
On Wednesday night, there was more. Almost to a man, the Timbers just looked tired. They were slow close gaps defensively, slow to get pressure on the ball, and slow to break out in transition, slow to do all of the things that they did to recover from that Red Bulls game and make their season the success that it's been.
That fatigue would be a factor for the Timbers, playing three time zones away on three days rest, made plenty of sense. But even with a crucial, intra-conference game at Sporting Kansas City looming on Saturday, Savarese opted not to rest any of his first-choice players and instead pursue a result full-blooded.
That decision, something of a head-scratcher to begin with, backfired badly. The Timbers were good enough for the majority of the first half, and took the lead with a well-worked scored by Samuel Armenteros, but then fell apart.
The first blow came at the end of the opening period, when Yamil Asad picked up the ball just inside of the midfield stripe on the Timbers' righthand side and was allowed all kinds of time and space to move forward and then pick out the darting run of Wayne Rooney — who had a simple finish to tie the score.
Savarese was livid with the nature of the concession, perhaps as openly angry as we've yet seen him this season, and he promised a stern halftime team talk in response.
But whatever he did during the interval, it didn't work. Two minutes after halftime, D.C. had the ball in the net, with Luciano Acosta driving and dancing his way past five Timbers defenders and setting up former Seattle fullback O'Neil Fisher to score his knock his career MLS goal off the inside of the far post.
It was another piece of collectively soft defending, and with the Timbers now trailing, the game's trendline was clear.
Rooney, who put on a show all evening, same as he's done in almost every outing since debuting for D.C. a month ago, came a crossbar away from chipping Jeff Attinella 20 minutes after that — and, two minutes later, scored his second goal on free kick.
With the game all but decided, and the likes of Rooney, Acosta, and Diego Valeri all withdrawn, the game's final act belonged to a highly-motivated Mattocks — a player who, offloaded by the Timbers after Caleb Porter's departure over the winter, clearly had a point to prove.
He had his first chance after replacing Rooney with five minutes to go blocked, but made up for it and then some in the first minute of stoppage time when he received an outlet pass off of a Timbers corner, sprinted at Alvas Powell, nutmegged him, churned past Zarek Valentin, and chipped Attinella to make it 4-1.
Mattocks took off his shirt in a lock-jawed celebration, and D.C. had the final piece of an altogether joyous night at Audi Field. They played as fluidly going forward, and as comfortably in possession, as just about any team the Timbers have faced this year.
Questions still abound about D.C.'s defense, but their attacking core, the likes of Rooney, Acosta, Asad, and Paul Arriola, are going to score a lot of goals down the stretch.
For the Timbers, in the grand scheme of things, this isn't such a damaging defeat. There are no games less important for Western Conference teams than those they play on the East Coast, and that applies double to games they play on the East Coast midweek.
The questions, then, are about individual players: Julio Cascante, who fell asleep on Rooney's run on the first goal, hasn't put together a single clean 90-minute performance in the last month. Attinella, whose dreadful positioning led in part to Rooney's second goal, has had a tough couple outings as well.
During their unbeaten run, the Timbers' defense played above its talent level. It's not a unit with a plethora of elite MLS players. Jorge Villafaña is about to join it, thankfully, but the number of soft goals conceded recently has to be a major concern.
Same goes for the uneven performances. Savarese made a point of emphasizing the need to start games with more intensity on Tuesday, and, though the Timbers did that here, they clearly couldn't keep it up. Perhaps they were just rundown, but they're going to be facing the same challenge against Kansas City on Saturday.
All good teams go through tough stretches, and the Timbers are in the thick of one right now. How they manage it will go a long way in shaping the rest of their season.
