Tom Krasovic: SDFC bucks city’s sports tradition with elimination-game win

Win-or-go home playoff game. Portland weather in Mission Valley, foggy and damp.

A full stadium of San Diegans, begging not to see another San Diego Sports Flop.

Those ingredients greeted first-seeded San Diego FC on Sunday when it faced the eighth-seeded Portland Timbers in a Major League Soccer first-round decider.

What followed was a refreshing break from the sad tradition set by San Diego’s major sports teams when cast in the favorite’s role in a big game.

San Diego’s soccer newbies rewarded their fans, instead of deflating them.

They outplayed the other team from the start, rather than playing around.

They acted like a first seed ought to act, parlaying their opponent’s leaky defense into two quick goals, scoring a third crisp goal soon after halftime and going on to a 4-0 win.

Is this a new era?

Check back on Nov. 24, when San Diego, following MLS’ international break, will play its Western Conference semifinals match at home against Minnesota United.

Attention to young fans who Sunday were in the announced crowd of 32,500:

You had a lot more fun than several much bigger crowds in east Mission Valley had in support of San Diego Chargers teams long ago in similar circumstances.

The Chargers were 2-6 as large favorites (more than a field goal) in homefield playoff games during the Super Bowl Era.

Those fan vibes: Dazed and confused.

Apparently the 2025 San Diego solution is to import several hardened Northern European footballers, and turn them loose.

Denmark’s Anders Dreyer and Norway’s Amahl Pellegrino each had two goals apiece, and Finland’s Onni Valakari assisted the first goal and made several other sharp plays.

Altogether, the trio exploited subpar defense early on to create goals in the fifth and 17 minutes.

Regathering after halftime, the Nordic wave put away the faltering Timbers.

Pellegrino, a 6-foot-3 forward who’s nearly devoid of body fat and brims with energy, clouted the ball out the air for the third goal and ran toward the supporters section, raising the crowd’s volume.

Dreyer, the do-it-all left wing who was the league’s top player this year not named Lionel Messi, put home another left-footer. He has 22 goals in 37 matches, plus a shootout goal.

This series ran the full three games, and as it turned out, coach Mikey Varas and players got more out of it, despite the scare, than they would’ve by winning it sooner.

They took the series opener, 2-1, without star wing Hirving “Chucky” Lozano, who was benched by Varas for a late-season tantrum after the coach sat him in the second half.

Call Game 1 a double-bonus outcome: a playoff victory that also reinforced a team-first principles.

The second match, even in defeat, brought a large dividend: SDFC experienced its first penalty kick shootout of the year, as MLS reserves such events for the postseason.

The Timbers won that shootout when, after Dreyer and Lozano made their penalty kicks, the trio of Valakari, Marcus Ingvartsen and Jeppe Tvarskov all missed high.

Better to err in a non-elimination game, though, than in a win-or-lose contest such as Sunday’s Game 3 or the semifinals match that comes next.

Providing another harsh teaching moment that didn’t boot SDFC from the postseason in Game 2 at Portland was this: a stunning defensive lapse that enabled the Timbers to tie the score late in regulation.

The loss set up Sunday’s elimination contest.

San Diego FC responded with opportunistic soccer.

It defeated Portland’s man-to-man press. It got players to the back post unguarded and found them. Dreyer and Pelligrino didn’t misfire on those chances, although the latter’s first goal came after the goalkeeper stopped his first try.

So now it will come down to winning three more games. The Western Conference finale would be in Mission Valley, too – against the winner of the LACF-Vancouver semifinals match. The MLS Cup matches come Dec. 6, at the venue of the team that had the most points in the regular season.

The San Diego newbies earned the homefield matches in Games 1 and 3. And doing what many San Diego teams did not do in decades gone by, they took advantage of it.