Portland wins MLS Cup, beating Columbus 2-1

The Portland Timbers play in their first MLS Cup Final Sunday at 1 p.m. against the Columbus Crew.

There’s only a pair of hard-working small-market teams striving for some Major League Soccer glory at MAPFRE Stadium – host Columbus Crew SC and the Portland Timbers.

SCOUTING THE CREW: Columbus is appearing in its second MLS Cup championship game. The Crew have also won their last three home matches, The last time Columbus lost at Mapfre was to Portland in late September.

The five-year-old Portland franchise, meanwhile, have been on a scorching run since late in the regular season and advanced to their first MLS Cup after a 5-3 aggregate-score win in the two-leg Western Conference Championship.

On a normal day with referees that were able to handle the pressure of the MLS Cup Final, Portland’s second goal would not have counted. If they can work it down the flanks and get it strong frame of 6-foot-4 striker Fanendo Adi – who scored 16 goals this year and has the ability to body up and bully defenders – they have a good chance of finding the scoresheet. You know into the box for and he’s you know nearly guaranteed to create a chance other than scoring more goals than Portland on Sunday what do the crew need to do to win.

“We were trying to press from the first minute and we got that goal”, Valeri said. (The fans) tried to give us the lift there in the second half.

Home Field Advantage- The Crew looked lackadaisical for the first fifteen minutes which resulted in two early goals for Portland.

However they will come up against Kei Kamara, who has hit 25 goals so far this campaign and is now the leading goalscoring in the league, and the former Middlesbrough and Norwich man will have a big part to play, according to Columbus midfielder Ethan Finlay. Despite the injury coming so close to the match, Columbus SC head coach Gregg Berhalter told ESPN that he is hopeful Kamara will play on Sunday.

Crew captain Michael Parkhurst immediately gathered his teammates at midfield to settle them down before play resumed. “I’m looking forward to it and hopefully I can add another big achievement to my career”, he said. “No one envisioned that”.

In only their fifth MLS season, the Timbers became just the third expansion club to win the crown, after the Chicago Fire in 1998 and Real Salt Lake in 2009.

After Portland took the ball clearly out of bounds down the touchline, Columbus’ Federico Higuain stopped, expecting to be given a throw-in.

Caleb Porter said if you go through the suffering, then you’ll succeed. “We were comfortable. We were tight”. “Obviously we wanted to bring a championship to this city and we wanted them to see it firsthand in our stadium, and it’s disappointing”. We shut it down.

“This is special for us”, said Valeri, who was named the match’s Most Valuable Player.

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It was hardly a classic final with plenty of errors on each side, yet that did not douse the enthusiasm of the Timbers, who ended their 40 years in the soccer desert.

Crew SC have won MLS Cup once before, in 2008, but their celebration then occurred at the StubHub Center in Carson, California. I don’t care much about either team and found it much harder to watch any MLS game this past season that didn’t involve FC Dallas.