Five-Star Timbers Stun Los Angeles Galaxy

In the days leading up to Sunday afternoon’s show-stopper, fans and pundits alike were throwing out their shoulders decrying the Portland Timbers’ trip to the Los Angeles Galaxy a lost cause. But in 45 minutes, Portland turned around a 1-0 deficit to beat LA 5-2.

In soccer more than in any other sport, because of its premium on aesthetics and style, the manner of the victory matters. So it must be said that in the second half, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, the Timbers blitzkrieged MLS’ glamour side. They obliterated them. It was a demolition.

You’ll pick your favorite moment. Maybe it was Diego Chara strapping on his moon boots and jumping out of the stadium to slam home the Timbers’ third goal. Maybe it was Darlington Nagbe killing LA’s comeback eighteen seconds after it was launched with Portland’s fourth. Maybe it was Fanendo Adi’s exquisitely worked first goal, or his tables-turning second, or even the euphoric, just-because-we-can fifth.

But you know what the best part is? This win, this magnum opus, just starts the fun. The Timbers are overwhelmingly likely to head to the 2015 playoffs, and if they win next Sunday against Colorado, Portland hosts a Wild Card game in ten days.

But whatever happens the rest of the way, this game will remain special. It will live on as the Timbers’ most debauched, euphoric, shocking — maybe even important — regular season MLS win to date.

It couldn’t have happened had the Timbers believed any of what was being said about their chances in this game. Between the fact that Portland had never won in LA — where the Galaxy had lost just once in almost two years — and the fact that the Timbers were on short rest, there was even a school of thought to rest Chara and Diego Valeri with both players a yellow card away from being suspended for the final day.

But Caleb Porter’s faith in his team was well-founded, and then repaid. The Timbers boss sent out his team in the inverted 4-3-3, utilizing Chara as the lone central midfielder, and prioritizing attack over defense. It was a plan of action that Porter himself called ambitious, designed to take do what few teams dare to do in LA — take the game to the Galaxy.

It worked well enough in a first half that saw the Timbers survive several early scares, including a Steven Gerrard free kick that hit the woodwork, and a Leonardo header that Adam Kwarasey saved quite brilliantly onto that same crossbar, only to go behind on a superb volley from the indomitable Robbie Keane.

With the score at 1-0 going into the break, LA eased. They’d seen this movie before. Everyone had. Needless to say, they weren’t prepared for the Timbers’ unprecedented response. Liam Ridgewell throttled the bar with a header early in the half, but once the breakthrough came, the goals started pouring in.

Adi led from the front. The earnest young Nigerian forward’s time in Portland had been colored more by frustration than sustained success when the Timbers went hunting for his replacement in the summer and came up with Lucas Melano. At the time, Adi was taking no small amount of abuse from the team’s fan-base and couldn’t lock down his job over the clearly inferior Maxi Urruti.

But Adi has grown up this year. Caleb Porter highlighted his transition from big player to strong player, and never has Adi’s embrace of playing the physical game been clearer than in his total domination of LA’s Omar Gonzalez. This is a player who doesn’t hang his head or go down easily anymore. Through plenty of adversity, it feels like Adi has come of age.

Somewhere between Adi’s goals, a team came of age too. The Timbers decided in that second half to stick their flag in the ground and make a stand. Chara has celebrated all of his previous Timbers goals with some benign combination of a smile and a shrug. Not so this time. After his giant leap, he took off for the corner flag at a full sprint — screaming, eyes bulging, fists pumping, chased by a maniacal-looking Jorge Villafaña.

This performance meant something extra. In just 25 minutes, the Timbers scored almost half as many goals as the Galaxy had conceded at home all season. A team that has believed in itself all year — believed when no one else would — finally did something no one could ignore.

Villafaña, who shut down Gyasi Zardes and bookended his performance by torching Leonardo, was terrific. There aren’t five full-backs in the league better than him. Nagbe, too, had another exceptional game. Porter’s formation switch — a so incredibly welcome return to optimism over pragmatism — is proving to be a stroke of genius in no small part because it has freed so much room in the center of the field and in deeper areas for the newly minted American to work.

Taylor Peay came in for Alvas Powell and didn’t miss a beat. If Sebastian Lleget was licking his chops to lock horns with the young University of Washington product, he left the game midway through the second half licking his wounds. Lucas Melano and Rodney Wallace, both flawed players in very different ways, played their parts too.

Just appreciate, for a moment, the absurdity of it all. This doesn’t happen. Chara turning Gerrard into a cone and scoring a massive goal with his head? Keane verging on spontaneous combustion? Norberto Paparatto making a stoppage time StubHub Center cameo in place of Valeri? This was some sort of Timbers erotica.

Or maybe it’s better summed up this way, by Chara, the heart and soul and joy of this team as always. When asked post-game about how he was able to so effectively balance his responsibilities in the attack and defense, the Columbian flashed the trademark grin that was so conspicuously absent earlier and answered simply, “This is my job.”

And what a job it was.