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It’s been quite the ride for one of the hottest teams in the MLS.
BEAVERTON — TV news was at Timbers training on Tuesday.
This isn’t a daily occurrence, then again, it’s not annually that the city’s soccer club places a member on the MLS’ all-star team. It had been five years, in fact, without Portland representation before Evander was named to the MLS roster earlier this week.
It was a warranted inclusion: the Portland midfielder leads the Timbers in goals (9) and assists (11), with his 20 goal contributions ranking fifth overall in the MLS.
It was also a celebrated inclusion: Evander’s performance this season has helped pull Portland from the bottom of the Western Conference table and into the race for home-field advantage in the MLS Playoffs. And as the player spoke with reporters Tuesday after training, the man who brought him to Portland couldn’t help but note the significance.
“It’s well-deserved, you know,” Timbers general manager Ned Grabavoy told The I-5 Corridor. “This season is what we thought he was capable of. That’s a player who can score goals in multiple different ways. It’s a player who can also change the game with some of the different service and final ball quality that he can provide that I think few others in this league can.
“Credit to him. Our club is proud to have some representation again.”
Grabavoy’s club has put its supporters on quite the ride through the season’s first 21 games. Only two months ago, the Timbers seemed listless, a club with a new manager that scored a lot of pretty goals and allowed even more ugly ones as they tanked to the bottom of the table during a nine-game winless streak. Today, the Timbers have won three in a row and have taken points in all seven matches since May 25. And yes, credit to Evander who has been the fulcrum behind Felipe Mora (8 goals), Jonathan Rodriguez (8 goals) and himself being the only trio of designated players in the league with eight or more goals each.
But also some credit should land on the shoulders of the executive who put them together and didn’t freak out when the wheels fell off at the start of the race.
Evander was better last season than people give him credit for, Grabavoy said.
Sure, he’s already surpassed his goals and assists totals from his debut with the club in 10 fewer games, but Grabavoy said the team was still in the process of putting the right pieces around the Brazilian.
The Timbers in 2023 were a club in transition. Portland was a year clear from the departure of former MVP Diego Valeri, while team stalwart Sebastian Blanco was finishing the last of his injury-plagued years with the team. The club missed the playoffs in 2022, Grabavoy replaced Gavin Wilkinson, who was fired that offseason after 13 seasons, and his first item of business was finding the centerpiece — not the finishing piece — of the puzzle.
See, Grabavoy said he had a couple of options when it came to addressing that team’s needs at designated player.
“We were trying to figure out if it was a player who was going to be almost a second forward [to support the now-departed Yimmi Chara] or if it was going to be a player that plays a more center/midfield-type role that can still impact the game in and around the goal.
“We opted for the latter,” Grabavoy said, in a decision that would pave the way for the key acquisition of the following offseason when the Timbers signed Rodriguez in March. With Evander set as the team’s table setter, Grabavoy said it really narrowed the focus of how to shape the 2024 roster in the vision of the offense-happy Neville.
“The thought process with Jonathan is you bring in Jonathan because you already have a player like Evander,” he said. “The team needed an established player. A player that already had a solid career in terms of places they played and the level of success that they’d reached. We needed it right away. We had signed a lot of really talented young players and sometimes the timeline for those players to help the club start winning games takes longer. And in my opinion, we need to win now. We need to be competitive. We need to be in the playoffs. We need to do that now.
“And he was a big part of that.”
The problem for the Timbers was, for the first half of this season, they weren’t winning.
At all.
Phil Neville says he never lost faith in his team, that he saw the improvements in training, a group putting the right steps together in matches and just failing to get results.
There was a loss and draw to LAFC, a pair of games decided by one goal that saw the Timbers play a man down. There was a 2-1 lead the Timbers took into the final third in Columbus that ended in a draw and that comeback in Vancouver when Portland scored two second-half goals to equalize, only to concede the point on the road in the 87th minute.
There were also some downright clunkers, such as Portland’s 2-1 loss at home to Seattle on May 12 that left Neville bickering about the referees, threatening lineup changes and telling anyone who would listen that his roster would get better.
“We cannot keep giving teams a two-nil start and expect to win games of football,” Neville said after that loss. “It’s unacceptable, it’s on me. We need to fix it and we need to fix it quick, and we will.”
Considering Neville’s lack of success in the MLS before Portland and some of the apprehension to his hiring in the first place, it didn’t feel like the fan base believed him — especially later that week when Neville and the Timbers left the pitch to boos at halftime after falling behind 2-0 to league-worst San Jose.
“I told them in situations like that, when your backs are against the wall and your neck is on the line, you have to tell them how to feel and tell them how to win a game,” Neville said. “So at halftime, it was all about what we can do to win the game. ‘We can win the game. We gotta start believing that we can win the game.’ And I never stopped believing honestly.”
Portland scored four second-half goals — two from Rodriguez, one from Mora and one from Evander — to win, a recipe that has powered the club to a 5-1-2 record in the eight games since.
“I think we all had the same feeling,” Evander said after San Jose. “We needed to change this now or we’re going to stay like this forever.”
Grabavoy, for one, believed they could. Despite the dismal first third of the season, he said the constant communication between him, Neville and the rest of the staff allowed them to see the potential beneath the rubble of one of the worst stretches in franchise history. The Timbers are a team built to play through its stars — Grabavoy and Neville have been saying it publicly and privately since before the season began — and its stars were producing.
“We stayed calm. It’s not easy to do, but we stayed calm,” Grabavoy said. “I’ve been in this league one way or another for 20 years. It can be incredibly streaky. I saw real differences in the way the team was playing in the first half of the season, even when we weren’t getting results. We were in games. We were dangerous. Of course, we were conceding too many goals and we’re still trying to improve on that. But the team’s also built to attack and to score goals and to excite. And you’ve got to be careful because you don’t want to take away too much from that just to correct the other thing. It’s a really fine balance.”
Grabavoy credits Neville for getting the rest to follow. Because in addition to the stars, it’s been James Pantemis recording a pair of clean sheets in June with No. 1 goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau away on Canadian national duty. It’s been Santiago Moreno and Antony finding the back of the net and Dario Zuparic and a Timbers defense that allowed only five goals in June after allowing 10 in March, 10 in April and nine in May.
“I’m happy we won the game. We did not concede a goal again. That’s great for me,” Zuparic said after Portland beat Vancouver 2-0 on June 22. “I wish we’d concede so I don’t have to be here.”
After training Tuesday, Zuparic walked by reporters and joked, “See you all again in four years.” Other players hung around the grounds, with some getting in extra shots on net and others, like 38-year-old Diego Chara, watching the Timbers 2 team practicing nearby under sunny skies. Zac McGraw was even there getting in work on the side despite his stitched-up face being, according to Neville, a “complete mess” after taking a head to the cheek in Saturday’s 3-2 win over Minnesota.
McGraw will miss Thursday’s match against Dallas. Neville expects his club to rally.
“I was lucky enough in my playing career that I came through with a group of guys that were my best friends and brothers. And if you’ve got a brother with you — I literally did — you’re willing to push extra for your brothers, 1000 percent,” Neville said. “In difficult moments, moments when you need help, when you’re down goals, you’re going to fight even more for those that you care about. If you don’t care about someone, you’re not going to go that extra mile. What you’re seeing at the moment is a team that really cares about each other. I think that beats any system, any tactic, anything you can throw at us.”
With 13 games left in league play, the Timbers are entering into a summer transfer window where they’d like to patch a few holes — not always the easiest thing to do with a roster as harmonious as this one.
“I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone that the roster and the club has been in a transition period. Some of those years you feel like you’re swimming upstream a bit really trying to get it back to a place where you’re getting going again and starting to fire on all cylinders,” Grabavoy said. “We still need to address a few things and make a few changes. I think we’re on track to do that. I feel good about where we’re at right now and hopefully, over the next four or five weeks, we’ll have those things in place and we can really approach those final 10 regular season games, or whatever it is, with a confidence and a belief that we’re heading in the right direction.”
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor
