SAN DIEGO (AP) \u2014 Anders Dreyer and Amahl Pellegrino scored two goals each to help San Diego FC beat the Portland Timbers 4-0 on Sunday night and win their best-of-3 first-round series in the MLS Cup playoffs. <\/p>\n
No. 1 seed San Diego plays fourth-seeded Minnesota in the single-game Western Conference semifinals. <\/p>\n
Pablo Sisniega made his second career playoff start at goalkeeper for the injured CJ dos Santos and had two saves for San Diego. Dos Santos suffered a broken cheekbone early in the team\u2019s penalty-kick shootout loss to Portland last week in Game 2 to force a decisive third game. <\/p>\n
Dreyer, on the counter-attack, skipped a volley from the center of the area \u2014 off an arcing ball-in played by Onni Valakari \u2014 into the net to give No. 1 seed San Diego the lead for good in the fifth minute. <\/p>\n
Pellegrino slammed home the rebound of his own shot to make it 2-0 in the 17th. Again on the counter-attack, Pellegrino\u2019s first-touch was parried by diving goalkeeper James Pantemis but Pellegrino was there for the putback from point-blank range. <\/p>\n
Corey Baird lofted a cross from the right side of the area to the back post where Pellegrino was there for the rising volley into the top-net in the 53rd minute and Dreyer\u2019s second goal capped the scoring in the 79th. <\/p>\n
Juan Mosquera was shown a straight red card in the 80th and the Timbers played a man down the rest of the way. <\/p>\n
Pantemis finished with five saves for No. 8 seed Portland. <\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP soccer: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/soccer<\/p>\n
The Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN DIEGO (AP) \u2014 Anders Dreyer and Amahl Pellegrino scored two goals each to help San Diego FC…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-273501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}