FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Jack Jewsbury scored in the 38th minute and the expansion Portland Timbers earned their first point in Major League Soccer with a 1-1 tie at the New England Revolution on Saturday night.
Jewsbury tied it with a left-footed drive into the far right corner after a nice touch pass from Jeremy Hall.
Forward Kenny Cooper also collected his first assist of the season on the play after feeding Hall with a well-placed pass from the right wing.
“Kenny did a great job the whole game holding it up,” Jewsbury said. “The ball came into him, he tried to play Jeremy in, Jeremy got a touch. It kind of bounced off the defender. Jeremy laid a great ball back to me, and I just struck it left footed and found the corner of the net.”
Both of Jewsbury’s last two league goals have come against New England. He last scored for the Kansas City Wizards in a 4-1 home win against the Revolution on Aug. 21, 2010.
Portland lost its first two MLS games, 3-1 at Colorado on March 19 and 2-0 at Toronto FC last Saturday.
“We could’ve just put our heads down, and died a little bit — third game in eight days,” Timbers coach John Spencer said. “(We had) to dig in, come back and get something out of a good and very physical team.
“I watched them play against D.C. last week. They caused D.C. a lot of problems. (New England is) very powerful, very physical — a lot of pace in the flanks. I thought we matched them very well, to be honest with you.”
New England (1-0-2) took the lead in the 22nd minute when rookie midfielder Stephen McCarthy scored his first career MLS goal, a drive into the lower left corner after Portland’s David Horst had headed the ball out.
New England’s Sainey Nyassi had a chance in the 21st minute, kicking the ball off the Portland crossbar.
Timbers midfielder Kalif Alhassan drilled a direct kick off the left post in the 70th minute.
“I thought in the second half we were very unlucky not to have got a second,” Spencer said. “With Kalif’s free kick off the post and (New England goalkeeper) Matt Reis drops one under the cross bar, I think with a little bit of Lady Luck there, we could’ve gone away with the three points.”
New England coach Steve Nicol said he was disappointed with the result.
“I guess if you’re not on your game and you pick up points then you should be happy,” he said. “But obviously we’re at home and we want three points. We don’t want one point. We had a couple of chances where we might have won the game, but in all honesty, we were disappointing tonight and we were pretty flat most of the time. We just never ever got rolling.”
The Timbers feel that they are rolling after picking up a win Tuesday in the U.S. Open Cup play-in game against Chivas USA.
“I think Tuesday was a good win for us, we got some confidence,” Jewsbury said. “I think this week we progressed a lot, and it gives the guys a good feeling with the two week break before we have our home opener.”
The Timbers’ next game is their home opener on Thursday, April 14 against the Chicago Fire.
Note
Midfielder Darlington Nagbe, Portland’s No. 2 overall pick in the 2011 MLS SuperDraft, made his MLS and professional debut, coming on as a 66th-minute substitute for Hall. Nagbe had missed the first two regular-season matches while recovering from sports hernia surgery.
