Timbers’ Dario Zuparic doesn’t want to score. He wants to bleed, defend and avoid Vegas

BEAVERTON —

Portland

center back Dario Zuparic will be the first one to tell you that he’s a little bit off.

“When I was like 12 or 13, I tried to [head] the ball into the net and some guy kicked me [in the face] with a volley,” Zuparic said of a moment growing up in Croatia. “So I think that’s changed my life. I was crazy from that moment.”

Where does that show? Maybe it’s in the offseason.

“Balkans are crazy, so if you party with them you need like a month to rest. When I go home, for like two months I go crazy there and then here I don’t want to see them.”

Maybe it shows on the pitch, where Zuparic is not one to spend too much time milking an injury.

“I like bleeding,” he said.

Or maybe it’s even the fact that he has the confidence to come out and say, no, he does not need to score any goals, moments after manager

Phil Neville

spoke to the media about needing his center backs to find the back of the net. The Timbers have scored 25 goals this season, with just three coming from designated players. And while Neville said he expected that in a year where the team parted with

Evander

and has seen

Jonathan Rodriguez

spend most of the season on the bench, he said the good fortune needs to continue to spread around if it’ll be sustainable.

“We’ve not had any goals from our center backs,” Neville said. “That’s a real challenge for us to get our center backs two or three goals, because that will mean that we’re spreading them throughout the team.”

And sure, that would be great, Zuparic said. He wouldn’t be upset if he happened to score his first goal with Portland since 2023. Just don’t tell him it’s his job.

“I don’t think I’m going to score. I don’t even try to score,” Zuparic said. “If I score, it’s something extra. I’m not thinking about that. I know some people here think like,

central defender, score five goals, he’s a good player.

But for me, I’m a defender, so my job is to defend. If I can score, of course, I’m going to be happy. For me, clean sheets are the most important thing.”

And to be fair to Zuparic, the Timbers aren’t really in a position to be picky heading into Sunday’s match against St. Louis. It’ll be Portland’s first match in 10 days, which is good in the sense that this club was exhausted after an eight-match May. But the Timbers are also dealing with another international window, with keeper

Maxime Crepeau

(Canada), center back

Finn Surman

(New Zealand) and winger

Ariel Lassiter

(Costa Rica) will be away on national team duty.

Lassiter doesn’t play much for Portland, but Crepeau has started the last six matches in net and Surman has been one of the Timbers’ best players this season in stabilizing the backline. And while the Timbers aren’t sure who is going to start in net for them on Sunday — No. 1 keeper

James Pantemis

returned to training this week, but Trey Muse is on hand in case Pantemis isn’t ready to go — it’s Zuparic who could benefit the most with Surman’s departure.

While Zuparic didn’t play a minute in the season’s first two months as he fell behind Surman and

Kamal Miller

on the depth chart while dealing with an injury, he saw a steady dose of playing time in May. Zuparic played 435 minutes in the month, including starts against Orlando City and Real Salt Lake in league play and against Tacoma and San Jose in the Open Cup. The Timbers have allowed just three goals in the 225 minutes Zuparic has been on the pitch in MLS games.

And, while he’ll continue to say scoring goals is not his job, he was one of the few Timbers to try something different a few weeks ago in

Portland’s 1-0 loss at Orlando

. With the Timbers struggling to generate any offense, it was Zuparic in the 64th minute who suddenly took the ball from his own defensive zone and cut right up the middle of the field in trying to get something going.

“I saw the space and I was a little bit nervous and trying to do some crazy things,” he said. “I just saw the space. I took the ball and I go forward. We play wide and back, but it was missing something.”

The Timbers (7-4-5, 26 points) will come into Sunday well-rested, having not played since

their 2-1 win over Salt Lake City

on Wednesday of last week. The club is tied with Seattle for fourth in the Western Conference and still well ahead of the pace of last year, when Portland didn’t notch its seventh win of the season until June 22. As a reprieve from May’s challenging slate, many of the Timbers left town over the weekend.

Zuparic did not.

“Half the team went to Vegas. That’s why I didn’t go,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t want to see them again.”

Extra time

Rodriguez out for a few weeks

Portland designated player Jonathan Rodriguez hasn’t played since

Portland’s Open Cup loss to San Jose

on May 20, a game where Rodriguez played 60 minutes in the second half and extra time despite Neville saying the forward needed to be limited to around 30.

The consequences are lasting: On Tuesday, Neville said Rodriguez would “be out a couple of weeks” as he continues to rehabilitate a knee injury that’s limited him to just 154 minutes this season.

Rodriguez, Portland’s leading scorer in 2024 with 16 goals, has one goal this year on a penalty kick.

The Sticky Wicket

Here in St. Johns, a new bar called

The Sticky Wicket

opened up in late May. It’s a place that calls itself Portland’s first cricket bar, and a recent trip to the spot located across the street from the St. Johns’ Safeway confirms just that: there are a lot of TVs showing matches of cricket.

I had no idea how to follow, or what to pay attention to, so a couple of days later I asked Neville. See, Neville’s father, Neville Neville, was a cricketer for Greenmount in the Bolton League. Phil, along with his younger brother Gary, were both promising cricketers themselves before they ultimately decided on going all in with soccer.

Certainly, he’d have some advice for anyone heading to the Sticky Wicket to watch a match.

“Americans don’t like cricket, but what I always say to them is, if you like baseball and you can sit at a baseball game for nine innings and not see anyone hit it out of the park, then you can definitely watch cricket for five days,” Neville said. “There’s two forms of cricket. There’s the one that lasts five days and the one that goes really quickly. I love the one that lasts five days. It was what I grew up on. I can see why people might not like it. It’s a bit slow. But for me, it was one of my favorite sports, something that when — hopefully I can work for as long as I can — but when I’m not working, it’s one that I’ve got a couple of bucket lists that I want to do. I want to go to Australia to watch cricket. It’s one of my favorite things to do, is to watch England play Australia.

“So, how do you get into it? I would say drink lots of beer. Have a beer and just keep drinking beer.”

This article originally appeared on


The I-5 Corridor


.

— Tyson Alger

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