An 18-year-old shining light amidst another Vancouver loss
The youngest Timber to score a goal in MLS history provided the lone highlight in another Cascadia defeat.
No, Eric Izoita didn’t envision a debut like that.
The 18-year-old did his best to prepare for every situation. With Portland down six players from its lineup going into Saturday’s match, the Vancouver, Wash., native got the heads up Friday that he’d been called up from T2 to the first team. It was just hours before kickoff that Portland manager Phil Neville informed Izoita he’d be the second-youngest Timber in the MLS era to start a game.
Talk about getting thrown into the deep end: waiting for Izoita and the Timbers were the Vancouver Whitecaps, a team that hadn’t lost to Portland in its last four tries and came into Providence Park with stars in the midfield such as Thomas Müller and Sebastian Berhalter.
“I wasn’t really nervous or anything,” said Izoita, who played the entire match in midfield. “It was just, for me, like a regular game.”
Sort of.
While Portland (1-2-0, 3 points) lost 4-1 — which is starting to feel like a “regular game” in this one-sided Cascadia matchup — it was Izoita who provided the match’s most unexpected moment. In the 72nd minute, he collected the ball just outside the box and ripped a left-footed shot that curled into the top-right corner of the net.
Providence Park erupted, and the rest of the Timbers appeared stunned as Izoita repeatedly lifted his arms into the air in celebration of his first professional goal.
“I never scored,” Izoita said. “I didn’t score a single goal last year with T2. I’m not the goal-scorer.”
That didn’t stop people like teammate Sawyer Jura or Izoita’s brother from telling him before the game that that’s exactly what he was supposed to do.
Given the state of the match — and the Timbers’ otherwise nonexistent attack — Izoita said he was simply doing his job.
“It came today,” Izoita said. “I knew I had to shoot from there.”
Izoita’s manager wished some of the veterans on his squad were as good at identifying what they needed to do.
The Timbers have now been outscored by Vancouver 13-2 in their last three meetings at Providence Park and were all but done early in the second half when a 1-0 deficit turned into a 3-0 hole after goals by Tristan Blackmon in the 49th minute and Berhalter in the 64th.
Until Izoita’s strike, the Timbers had just one shot on target all match.
“We were playing against a really good team. And when you play against men, you’ve got to play like men. Not play like little boys,” Neville said. “And I thought some of our players played like little boys. I really did — and these are the experienced players, the players that have been with us. I thought they played with too much fear.”
It didn’t sit well with the manager that one of the few players playing with confidence — along with new signee Alexander Aravena — was the one who became the youngest goal scorer in club history.
That, the manager said, puts Izoita in a strong position to start Saturday again when the Timbers return to the pitch in Houston.
“There’s going to be ups and downs,” Neville said. “Tonight was a down, but he was a shining light.”
– Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor