FC Dallas hasn't won in Portland since the 2016 season, but on Saturday they came pretty damn close to picking up a rare win at Providence Park. Had it not been for some goalkeeper heroics and the post, Dallas might have found its first three-game winning streak since the 2020 season.
But, as we all saw, a draw was what Dallas left Portland with instead. Still, the club is still unbeaten in their last seven games and are still in contention to earn a playoff spot with three games to go on the regular season.
Let's wrap up the look at the Portland game with some stats before we move on to our back-to-back games against the LA Galaxy.
The defense shows some cracks
For the last few weeks, the Dallas defense has been fairly stout. Sure, they let in some goals here and there, mostly to long range attempts on goal that were always going to be tough to stop, but this week we saw a few cracks in the defensive group that may need to be ironed out.
Portland is a team that does very well at combination play in and around the penalty area. Their second goal of the night was a big example of that as Cristhian Paredes found some open space behind the three-man backline.
I snapped this screenshot of Paredes before he makes his open run into the penalty area. You can see four Dallas defenders around him, none track him into the penalty area. This is a moment that you hope gets sorted out in training this week as a quality attacking team (say a Vancouver) would easily eat this kind of stuff up all day if given the chance.
There were a couple of other moments like that one the night where the Dallas defense fell asleep a bit. I think you could place some blame on the turf for how it changes the game, but overall the defense showed some of their old habits in this one.