Portland loses Ben Zemanski, first preseason game to Vancouver Whitecaps.


We got 23 minutes of peace, at least.

Then, the Portland Timbers midfielder Ben Zemanski crumpled to the Providence Park turf—the kind of non-contact collapse that can only mean one thing. Caleb Porter confirmed Zemanski's torn ACL within the first five words of his post-game press conference. From there, the Timbers picked up two red cards, gave up a game-winning goal to part-time cult hero, part-time leg-breaker Pa Modou Kah, and played soccer with an increasing ineptitude reminiscent of the first two months of the 2014 season in a 1-0 loss to the rival Vancouver Whitecaps.

It was bad. On Oscar night, a fitting horror show.

This was just a friendly, of course, but the preseason tournament results didn't lie last year when the Timbers played listlessly, and the damage from Zemanski's injury will be felt for months to come. He's out for the season before the season could begin, and considering that captain and key starter Will Johnson is also out recovering from his own harrowing ACL injury, the Timbers' central midfield is resting on the shoulders of an old, slow Jack Jewsbury.

The injury comes just as Zemanski was playing the best soccer of his career. The Timbers only really took off last year once he replaced Johnson in the starting lineup, and Zemanski's defensive work-rate and positioning as a true #6 gave the Timbers a solid shape, protected the back-line, and freed the attackers in front of him to go forward with aplomb. He was so good that the Timbers' didn't think twice about the decision to protect him in the expansion draft in December, and no one was losing any sleep over missing Johnson for the first month of the season.

That all changes now.

Porter, who looked nothing short of gaunt after the game, is left toying with whether to throw Jewsbury back into the fire two and half years after he last started as a central midfielder in MLS, or changing formation, which could leave the Timbers awfully thin in the center of the park. The noose strung up by Johnson's and Diego Valeri's injuries at the end of last year has tightened considerably around Portland's neck with the loss of Zemanski. And Porter has more work to do than figuring how to reshuffle his lineup: He needs his lineup to play better.

On offense, the Timbers looked on Sunday like they hadn't progressed an inch from the pre-season tournament of last year. They seemed perplexed about how to find the goal, and pretty buildup play in the midfield fizzled into tame flicks and crosses in the final third. Without Valeri pulling the strings, the Timbers' offense isn't scaring anyone. One goal—scored by Omar Cummings, who isn't even on the team—in four complete preseason games is a damning stat.

Diego Valeri will be sorely missed. His replacement on Sunday, Gaston Fernandez, is nowhere near powerful enough to be a truly menacing #10. He's a lightweight. A luxury player. His best work comes in tight spaces, and, not coincidentally, off the bench when he doesn't have to be the main creative option. Dairon Asprilla is going to have every chance to make the starting lineup for opening day against Real Salt Lake on March 7th.

Porter has never had a good first month of a season. People may not remember, but it took a while for the Timbers to consistently put together winning performances in 2013, too, and it continues to be a frustrating, confusing problem.

There was, however, nothing confusing about an uglier side of this match, featuring an incompetent referee who aided and abetted a Vancouver team that played about as angry as its city is nice. The pairing of Pa Kah and Kendall Waston as Vancouver's center-backs sounded crazy in theory, and was even crazier in practice. Both center-backs set the tone with crunching challenges in the first 20 minutes, Fernandez especially looking like a shy little man who accidentally wandered into a WWE ring. Kah scored the goal—funny, since he only ever scored one for the Timbers—and was substituted off in the second half, smug as a Cheshire cat.

The central midfield pairing of Russell Tiebert and Matias Laba also contributed to the ascetic quality of the game by persistently fouling everyone, and by the time Zemanski went down, the Timbers had had enough. Rodney Wallace was begging for a red card by the time he was given his marching orders 10 minutes into the second half, having whiffed on multiple red-card worthy tackles in the run-up to the challenge that finally did the trick. Liam Ridgewell—and here's where we give the referee the spotlight he so richly deserves—was himself dismissed with two yellow cards for dissent, unheard of at every level of the game.

The referee probably wouldn't have given Ridgewell his second yellow for arguing if he had remembered that he had given Ridgewell a first yellow for arguing, but he didn't, and had to be reminded that Ridgewell was in fact due a red card, lest a Graham Poll situation - the ref once gave three yellow cards in a World Cup game - unfold.

But if we're being honest, the Timbers also simply handled themselves increasingly poorly as they played increasingly poor soccer. This is a team that hasn't won a game in its own preseason tournament since 2012. Frustrated, upset, and cold is not a good combination. That's what it looked like last spring in Portland, and that's what it looked like on Sunday night.

All of the sudden, the pressure is on for the remaining two preseason games against the Chicago Fire and Bob Bradley's Stabaek; and all of the sudden, an MLS lockout isn't looking like the worst thing in the world. Needless to say, "Let's hope for a lockout!" isn't exactly the rallying cry anyone wants headed into a new season.

What this team has now is immediate adversity. The Timbers went down this road and emerged last year, but there is a lot less patience for a relapse than a first offense. Porter won't panic. Neither will his players. And it is important to remember that this was just a friendly. In fact, the Whitecaps are probably smarting that it didn't count for real, considering the effort they put in. Still, history shows us that this tournament doesn't lie. If this game against Vancouver is a sign of things to come, we aren't headed for the kind of season anyone in Portland wants.