It became almost an annual event. The Red Bulls playoff chances would always seem to come down to the final weeks of the season. In most years they would qualify, but it would be as a low seed. Worse yet, a wild-card berth and a play-in game would sometimes be the best they could do.
Still, the fans were happy. Anything for a chance to claim that long-awaited MLS Cup championship.
This season, however, there’s a different feeling in the team and the fan base. Yes, there is still a great deal of success on the field like the past two years, but gone is the ego and tension that derailed promising seasons in the past. This year has gone as smoothly as you can hope for except for a stretch in late May and early June when the Red Bulls lost four games in a row.
Sunday night in Portland, the Red Bulls not only became the first team in Major League Soccer to clinch a playoff berth this season, but they did it earlier than they ever had in their history, two weeks earlier than in 2013 when they won the Supporters’ Shield.
The 2-0 victory over the Timbers, before a crowd of 21,144 at Providence Park in Portland, not only vaulted the Red Bulls back into first place in the Eastern Conference, but put them right back in the race for the Supporters’ Shield. With 48 points, the Red Bulls (14-8-6) are tied with the Vancouver Whitecaps, who lead the Western Conference with a 15-11-3 record, but the Red Bulls have a game in hand in the race for the Shield.
“It's significant in the sense that we're being rewarded for continuing to believe in ourselves and push really hard, but it's not really the end goal,” coach Jesse Marsch said. “It's a big step because to get to the playoffs this early in the season says a lot about our team and about the season we've had, but we're not stopping.
“We're going to make sure that we're all focused on the end goal. We have, I think, three or four at home now, so we have a good stretch of home games to really continue to push ourselves and continue to collect points. We're going to take it one game at a time.”
Playing without the suspended Dax McCarty and Connor Lade, Marsch started Sal Zizzo at right back for Lade and Sean Davis for McCarty. Gonzalo Veron and Shaun Wright-Phillips earned their first MLS starts on the wings in place of Mike Grella and Lloyd Sam, while Sacha Kljestan assumed the captain’s armband with McCarty out.
While it took some time for the Red Bulls to settle in, goalkeeper Luis Robles was in excellent form from the start, kicking out a tough shot in the 28th minute to keep the game scoreless. And when Veron shot wide of the far post from the right side instead of passing to cutting teammates in the box in the 36th minute, it seemed like the game might be scoreless at the half.
Then the Red Bulls struck for two goals late in the first half and the Timbers were never able to recover.
As the ball rolled out of play near midfield, Marsch picked it up and quickly flipped it to defender Kemar Lawrence as Marsch motioned his players to keep pushing forward. Lawrence made a short throw-in to Felipe, who found himself unmarked and with an open field in front of him.
Felipe slowly dribbled forward, and when no one came up to close the space, he lined a 35-yard shot into the upper right corner past a stunned Adam Kwarasey, the Timbers goalkeeper.
“I received the ball and I kept going. Nobody passed me,” Felipe said. “I looked at the keeper and, to be honest with you, the guys know I’ve been working on that shot for a couple of weeks now. I was happy that I got the goal. I got the keeper outside of the goal a little bit. It was a nice goal.”
The Red Bulls felt they had a goal early in first-half stoppage time. Kljestan’s corner kick from the left was headed straight up in the air by Portland’s Maximiliano Urruti. Defender Nat Borchers tried to head the ball out of danger but it fell to the Red Bulls’ Matt Miazga in the right side of the box. Miazga chopped a shot that Wright-Phillips headed past Kwarasey, but defender Alvas Powell blocked the ball with his body then cleared it out of danger while Red Bulls players screamed that the ball went over the goal line.
Powell’s clearance went out of play on the right and was immediately put back in play by Zizzo, who threw it in to Veron. Veron gave Zizzo a return pass and Zizzo lofted a long ball to the far post. Red Bulls defender Damien Perrinelle, who had remained forward following the corner kick, outleaped Powell and looped a header over Kwarasey for his second goal of the season.
“I think in the first half we played so well, we overwhelmed them,” Kljestan said. “They couldn't do anything in the first half and we put two unbelievable goals in. The second half we kind of just defended for our lives because that's when the fatigue started to kick in, but overall a great performance.”
Perrinelle nearly scored again in the first minute of the second half off a Kljestan corner kick from the right, but Kwarasey went low to block his shot. Grella also had a chance to put the game away, but his hard shot from the left side of the box in the 80th minute was stopped by Kwarasey.
Portland had its chances in the second half, but was thwarted by a combination of poor luck and too much Robles, who earned his ninth shutout of the season in his 100th consecutive start with the Red Bulls. That’s the second-longest streak in league history behind Kevin Hartman’s 112 games.
“He was disappointed with his game in New England,” Marsch said of Robles. “He let in a soft goal, the first one, one that is very uncharacteristic of him. Obviously (he) makes an incredible save at the end of the game but I thought overall his presence in the goal for when to punch, when to catch, speaking with his line in front of him, when to be off his line to make sure their fast guys weren't getting on the end of everything, (it was a) pretty complete performance from him.”
Portland’s Will Johnson clipped the top of the crossbar with a shot in the 52nd minute, but Robles did the rest himself. As the Timbers pressed, Robles was at his best, pushing away headers by Fanendo Adi in the 82nd and 86th minutes.
But Robles’ best save came three minutes from time. A free kick by midfielder Diego Valeri deflected off the wall and caught Robles going the wrong way. He stopped and dove back to his left and was able to get his hands on the ball and slap it down just before it got to the goal line. Robles got a hand on the loose ball as Borchers came charging in, and the ball rolled off the base of the right post and was cleared by Grella as Borchers tumbled over Robles’ arm and into the net.
“I think the most important thing for us is we didn't do well on the first part of this trip so it was really important for us to get points,” Robles said. “Sure, maybe a tie would have been OK, but we really wanted to win because we knew if we win, we qualify for the playoffs and put us in a great position going into the end of the season. For us to accomplish that today was pretty incredible.”
Marsch had to be pleased the way the team rebounded from the midweek loss to the Revolution in a week that saw consecutive road games on artificial turf turn into three points and a playoff berth.
“It was a very good first half specifically, but a very good performance to get a shutout against a team like this in an environment like this on the road,” he said. “I think we showed a lot of things. I think we showed that when we are committed to play the way we want to play that we can really command the game. We showed that we're a deep team and that when guys step on the field that they are talented and they know their roles. We showed that this team has heart and belief in what they are and who they are.
“There have been a lot of difficult situations we've been in this year. We weren't happy with the performance in New England. For these guys to come back and lay it all out here like this and empty the tank certainly shows a lot about their character.”
