On Saturday night, the Revolution will play\u00a0their first-ever\u00a0game against the expansion Portland Timbers at Gillette Stadium. But, it won’t\u00a0mark the first time that the Portland Timbers have played in New England.<\/p>\n
Nearly a generation before the launch of Major League Soccer,\u00a0the Portland Timbers, name and all,\u00a0came to historic\u00a0New England\u00a0to\u00a0face the\u00a0Hartford Bicentennials (named for the country’s upcoming bicentennial)\u00a0in the original\u00a0North American Soccer League. On July 11, 1975, with a meager 2,582 fans on hand to witness the only contest ever played between the two NASL\u00a0expansion teams, the Timbers chopped down the Bi’s 3-1 at Dillon Stadium.<\/p>\n
The following day, in front of another\u00a0sparse\u00a0crowd, the Timbers\u00a0traveled\u00a0to\u00a0Beantown to play another patriotically-named club – the Boston\u00a0Minutemen. With Portuguese\u00a0legend\u00a0Eusebio and Shep Messing on the Minuteman roster,\u00a0the hosts\u00a0claimed a 2-1 victory\u00a0in front of 2,800 fans at Nickerson Field.<\/p>\n
In the\u00a0summer ’76, the\u00a0Minutemen\u00a0paid a visit to the Timbers\u00a0in Portland,\u00a0where they dropped a disheartening 2-0\u00a0loss on June 30, 1976 at Civic Stadium.\u00a0It would be the last time the Minutemen and Timbers would ever play. Months after that\u00a0encounter, the Minutemen retreated for good, never to play another game as the fledgeling NASL saw the demise of yet another franchise.<\/p>\n
But, it was not the last time a New England club faced the Timbers. On June 3, 1977, the newly-renamed Connecticut Bicentennials, now playing in New Haven,\u00a0hoped to find a victory this time around, but dropped a 3-1 loss to Portland in front of 8,794 fans at the Yale Bowl. With the constant flux of fledgling clubs coming and going, the Bi’s became its latest victim after they moved to California in the offseason to become the Oakland Stompers.<\/p>\n
With the Bicentennials and Minutemen out of the pitcture, the\u00a0expansion New England Tea Men took\u00a0the mantle of the region’s only NASL respresentative\u00a0in 1978. That summer, they\u00a0arrived in Oregon to face the popular Portland club right in the heart of Rose City. In a shootout thriller before 14,615 fans, the hosts\u00a0sent their fans home happy with a\u00a0 2-1 win on June 16, 1978.<\/p>\n
Two years after that shootout, the\u00a0Tea Men, with rumors swirling of an impending move down south,\u00a0welcomed the Timbers to Schaefer Stadium with revenge on their minds.\u00a0And they\u00a0succeeded in similar fashion with\u00a0a\u00a02-1\u00a0overtime win over their Northwestern counterparts on August 2, 1980. But, with only 7,214 in the stands to witness it, and crowds dipping even lower\u00a0as the 1980 season rolled to a close, it looked like it would be the last time the Timbers would travel to New England.<\/p>\n
The rumors, of course, were true. Months after the 2-1 win, the Tea Men were\u00a0jettisoned to Jacksonville, where they lasted one more season before the\u00a0orange and yellow\u00a0ship set sail on NASL permanently and the team was disbanded. But this time around, with the league struggling to stay afloat, another New England-based club did not rise from\u00a0the Tea Men’s\u00a0ashes.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Timbers\u00a0continued on\u00a0for a couple of\u00a0more seasons before they were forced put down the ax\u00a0after the 1982 season. Three years later, the league collapsed,\u00a0thus shutting out any possibility of the Timbers returing to the region anytime soon.<\/p>\n
In 1996, some fourteen years after the Timbers kicked their last star-paneled soccer ball, MLS birthed ten top-flight\u00a0teams. One of those teams – the New England Revolution – reclaimed its soccer roots at the very same stadium where the Minutemen and\u00a0Tea Men played, albeit with natural grass this go-round.<\/p>\n
On the other side of the country, the Timbers, who were briefly resurrected in 1989 as a minor league club, quickly\u00a0fell back in obscurity\u00a0for much of the ’90s. After a ten-year hiatus,\u00a0they\u00a0returned to professional soccer as a second division club in 2001. With the business of professional soccer booming in the Northwest as the first decade of the\u00a02000s came to a close, MLS announced in 2009\u00a0that Portland would return to first division soccer in 2011.<\/p>\n
Much to the credit of Portland’s passionate soccer fans, the Timbers have reclaimed their spot in the top flight. And, as it was in the heyday of disco, David Cassidy, and the Dukes of Hazzard,\u00a0they will return to the region to face another patriotically-named New England opponent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saturday’s Revs-Timbers tilt won’t be the first trip the Timbers have made to New England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[24,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nesoccertoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/minutemen.jpg?fit=490%2C225&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4154"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4178,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4154\/revisions\/4178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}