No one around Portland is torn up by last night’s scoreless draw with New England. The Timbers certainly aren’t thrilled with split points at Jeld-Wen Field – but they created a bunch of chances, and that’s something.
More to the point, though, was the way Portland addressed New England’s defensively dug-in tactics. Rather than moaning and groaning about it, as we see the attack-minded occasionally do when visitors “park the bus,” they acknowledged not doing enough finishing to beat it.
That is the right attitude. No, I don’t want to see every MLS club playing this way on the road, all spit and grit and resolute defense, with a lone striker to hope for something on offense. And I do enjoy it when teams travel with intent to attack, the very way Portland did in last weekend’s victory at Kansas City.
But the reality is that teams will sometimes need to sit in and absorb. New England, short on defenders Thursday and woefully short on playoff appearances lately, can hardly be blamed for a bit of bus parking.
Problem solving is part of soccer, after all. The favorites need to score, which forces the defense-minded from the shell.
Here’s what veteran midfielder Will Johnson said about it, while noting what we told you in the previous post relating to last night’s scoreless draw, that New England is good on team defense.
No one has really taken into account that they’re a pretty good road team. They come in and park the bus. They sit everybody back and try to hit you with some of their more athletic guys on the counter. It’s pretty effective. It’s not the first place that it has worked and it’s not the last. It doesn’t have as much to do with us as what they did. The way you get them out of their shape is to punish them and we let them off the hook and it makes it easy for them.”
