Didn't catch every minute of MLS Week 8's action? Here's a few of its top notables and quotables.
Leaders taste first defeat
Fifty days after the 2018 MLS season kicked off, the number of undefeated sides dwindled to just one on Sunday. The Portland Timbers knocked off league leaders New York City FC – who are now 5-1-2 – 3-0 at Providence Park, and it was a noteworthy result for both sides.
Giovanni Savarese set up his Timbers to frustrate NYCFC's flowing attack and achieved exactly that, conceding the ball but allowing relatively few clear scoring chances, while unleashing menacingly efficient counterattacks. His opposite number Patrick Vieira will learn plenty from this occasion, though he wasn’t sharing much in his postgame remarks.
Hitting stride in Frisco
So FC Dallas (3-0-3) are now MLS’s last unbeatens (we’re talking league play only, not Concacaf Champions League, mind you.) While still something of an enigma, Oscar Pareja’s side have won two in a row after Saturday’s 2-0 defeat of Philadelphia. That rainy occasion at Toyota Stadium featured far less scoring than it should’ve, thanks to eight Andre Blake saves and this excellent double denial from Jimmy Maurer, who’s very quietly become MLS’s statistically stingiest goalkeeper ...
Stand on your head
FCD-Union was only one among many sterling outings for goalkeepers around the league in Week 8. Though you wouldn’t know it by the some of the outlandish final scores, the guys in the gloves were pulling off acrobatics and heroics everywhere, including four penalty-kick saves:
Unwelcome guests
A tip of the cap is due to the Los Angeles Football Club, who exit a season-opening slate of six straight road games with a 4-2-0 record that has nudged them up to second place in the Western Conference ahead of the debut of their glitzy new Banc of California Stadium home next week. If it provides anything close to a typical MLS home-field advantage, the expansion side could well be trophy contenders.
Bob Bradley in Montreal | USA Today Sports Images
Bob Bradley’s bunch won another wild one on Saturday, beating the 10-man Montreal Impact 5-3after trailing 3-1 at halftime. That one easily qualifies as my condensed match plug of the week: I urge you to dive into the MLS app (if you haven’t already) and watch the extended clips from this flowing, hectic shootout.
Striking contrast in SoCal
Meanwhile, LAFC’s crosstown rivals the LA Galaxy are facing some troubling questions after a 2-0 home loss to surging Atlanta United. The scoreline probably didn’t do justice to the Five Stripes’ superiority, with the Galaxy looking like much less than the sum of their parts and pivotal midfielder Jona dos Santos aggravating an injury during warmups. Afterwards Zlatan Ibrahimovic offered up some choice scatological comparisons while lamenting his new team’s shortcomings.
Big win for the Men in RedParley carbon
One squad that will exit Week 8 feeling far better than when they entered it: the Chicago Fire, who knocked off the New York Red Bulls in Jersey via enthusiastic performances from Aleksandar Katai(a goal and a penalty kick drawn) and goalkeeper Richard Sanchez, who made nine saves. On Thursday your correspondent pondered in great detail how the Fire would handle this potentially pivotal moment – and they provided an emphatic answer, even if they had to ride their luck a bit to do so.
Note to self: Avoid red cards
Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious. Pep Guardiola once said that soccer “is a game of mistakes,” and few errors were punished as viciously as the first-half red cards brandished in the direction of the Impact, Vancouver Whitecaps and Colorado Rapids. Not coincidentally, all three lost in painful fashion this weekend.
Sounders look (somewhat) like themselves
The team that’s reached the past two MLS Cup finals finally won their first league match of 2018 on Sunday. With several familiar faces giving hopes of a return to normalcy, the Seattle Sounders held off Minnesota United 3-1, providing us with a sumptuous long-distance drive from Gustav Svensson, as well as another reminder of veteran No. 6 Ozzie Alonso’s subtly transformative effect on the Rave Green 11 – and Clint Dempsey’s value even when he’s not in it.
Seattle center back Chad Marshall doesn’t speak out too much in public, so when he does, people tend to take note:
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