How to Be a Good Bandwagon Timbers Fan

Or: How not to ruin the playoffs for everyone else.

The Willamette Week office is a hard place to be a Timbers fan.

Arts & Culture editor Martin Cizmar once told me that he thinks if a game of soccer ends regular time in a tie, the refs should just start pulling a player from each team off, one by one, in overtime, until somebody scores. (Editor's note: This is still a great idea!)

I told him—a lifelong Cleveland Cavaliers fan—that because basketball has so many points, it should only have a fourth quarter.

Well, now that my beloved boys in green have finally clinched their well-deserved playoff spot, he asked me to work up a list of ways for the rest of you fair-weather fans to not ruin the good thing we have going when you roll in with your Craigslist-scalped tickets tonight at Providence Park at 7 pm, for the match (not game!) against Sporting K.C.

If you don't know the chants and/or have only been to one other game this season, don't weasel your way into the Army during the playoffs.

This one seems self-explanatory, until a group of your college friends—six of them, who probably own one jersey between them—find out that there is a home game coming up and want you to save them all a spot in the lower half of section 108.

I get it—the Army is the most exciting place to sit during big games.

But that is precisely why you don't deserve to sit there.

This isn't a Blazers game; you can't just buy your way into the most exciting seats in the house with no personal investment. Just sit in the assigned seating with everyone else who didn't plan on being here six months ago.

Don't buy corporate scarves

On your quest to become a cool new Timbers fan, you might discover that most people in the stadium wear groovy scarves to celebrate goals and cymbal hits during national anthems and basically everything else important that happens during the game.

When you decide to purchase one, don't buy it in the damn stadium. Grab one before or after the match at the No Pity van across the street. They will have better scarves, and you will be supporting the Timbers Army directly.

Know that Diego Chara is allowed to get as many yellow cards as he wants after the regular season he had.

As long as he is smiling, he could get thrown out of the damn game for all most of us care. Because besides that time Clint Dempsey tore up the Ref's book during our ballin'-ass match in Seattle earlier this year, Chara—a wide-grinning little bolt of Colombian lightning (who was supporters' player of the year)—is all that many of us had to feel good about during the extraordinarily tough-to-watch mid-season.

Don't tell Alvas Powell how underpaid he is.

Thanks to what I can only assume was a less-than-stellar job negotiating his first MLS contract last December, the Timbers' 21-year-old starting defender only makes $60,000 a year for his job, which he has performed impressively all year long.

So don't tell him that the man who plays just to the left of him, Liam Ridgewell, makes $1 million a season, because A.) He already knows this and is probably upset about it, and B.) We need the man to keep happily kicking ass in the backfield without shit like that on his mind, OK!?

Darlington Nagbe will run towards his own goal with the ball as much as damn well pleases.

"Boy, he sure runs backwards a lot," said the middle-aged woman sitting behind me during the last Timbers match against Colorado, in which star player Darlington Nagbe went on to put away two of the team's four goals and was named MLS player of the week.

Every fan knows—and periodically agrees—that Nagbe enjoys moving away from the opposing team's goal almost as much as moving towards it. But here's the thing: He's got some of the best foot skills in the MLS, is routinely one of the most fouled players in the league, and, sometimes, it takes moving back for him to find that perfect opportunity to strike.

Every time anyone shoots, or the ball flies remotely near the goal, is a time to celebrate.

The Timbers have had a notoriously tough time finishing this season, so any time any player puts a shot on target, we need to praise them for their efforts. It's like having a puppy you don't want to pee in the house anymore: Sometimes punishment just makes it worse.

Don't ruin our good thing, new fans, it's all been going pretty well the past couple games.

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