FC Cincinnati 2-0 Ottawa Furr...shit, Fury: Good Ruler, Terrible Context

Another layer of meaning? Are you fucking kidding?!

Watching the replay of FC Cincinnati’s 2-0 win over the visiting Ottawa Furry…crap, Fury, begged more questions than it answered. Again, knowing as little as I do about the USL Mark 4.0 (maybe?) makes this project a little like staring at a ruler, only with no idea what it’s measuring. That said, based on the replay, and a growing body of FC Cincy games, I feel confident with the following statements:

Cincinnati clearly looked the better team, but not a dominant one; I described their first half as “a game of fitful probing.” That had everything to do with Ottawa’s defense, a compact organized bolus that tangled up just about everything anyone tried to move through it. That’s their M.O., according to the booth - playing compact and countering down Route One - but, with a losing score-line and a half-time pep-talk blowing a breeze up their backsides (maybe), Ottawa tried to play a little in the second half. That step improved the game more than Ottawa’s chances, with their best chance (from eight shots? when??) coming when team captain/avatar, Carl Haworth, nearly walked in a goal early in the second half. Ottawa is a goal-a-game kind of team - one of those pertinent details one can only find by piercing a layer of mysterious veils on the USL's official website (gateway to Ottawa/hell) - and it showed. Still, I upgraded them from “just no fucking idea what they’re doing” to…well, this, I suppose:

“Who is Cincy? When have I seen them on their game? When off? No sense that Cincy will seize the game and run away with it.”

Even if I barely remember what that meant, it feels pretty fair. That said, one thing I have noticed about Cincinnati is that they tend to find the game all at once - i.e., after 15-20 minutes of half-hopeless dicking around, they sneak in a half-chance, then, two, three minutes later, they put a better-than-hopeful shot in goal. They score more often than not too, nearly two goals a game. Hold on, need to back-track a bit for another note…

Not every player on the field plays this way, but USL Soccer feels closer to rugby, aka, soccer’s twice-removed cousin, because more of the passing looks more territorial than planned. Getting the ball nearer the opponent’s goal holds a thin, yet permanent edge over how it gets there, and that means half-blind, mostly aspirational headed passes and the balance of balls out of the back look like thinly-veiled clearances (wow, second veil reference…whatever have I been watching?) show up all over the field, and attacking means chasing forward passes into space more often than it means deliberate, defense-unlocking interplay.

Happily, both of Cincinnati’s goals worked against that generality - and the reality that Cincinnati has that in them makes as good a comment on the team as I’ve got. Both attacks came down Cincy’s left and both involved Corben Bone, an MLS journeyman who might have backed into becoming a USL journeyman courtesy of Cincinnati’s (so far) steady squad rotation. His career aside, Bone paired with Blake Smith, Cincy’s left-back, nicely as steak pairs with red wine. They combined for the first goal (with Smith providing the final ball), while Bone delivered the assist for the second, a cracking beauty fired back against the grain from just outside the area by Nazmi Albadawi. Between delivering the pin-point cross that let Albadawi kill off the game and pinging the pass that freed Blake for the cross, Bone played a decisive role in the win. And that opens up a couple discussions.

First, I don’t know enough about Ottawa's Eddie Edward, but he most stood out in the wrong part of the field for fullbacks - his own defensive third, either getting little pats of encouragement to his bottom or getting lifted off the grass after getting left in the dirt to some varying degree. If Cincinnati’s coaches scouted out that weakness, good on ‘em, but the larger point is that the Bone/Smith tandem had some soft tissue to probe on Ottawa’s right, whether on the night or always, I can’t say.

To flip to the positive side, Bone having a good night just returned as an echo to a stat I picked up late last night. Albadawi has seven goals in 2018, Danni Konig has eight (including Cincy’s opener last night), and Emanuel Ledesma has another eight besides. I don’t know Russell Cicerone goals/assist total (mentioned, because he’s been the most impressive for me), but Ledesma has nearly as many assists and goals (largely whiny/useless on Saturday), Emery Welshman has dropped a couple across all competitions, and so on: whether by design, or a collection of dudes competing to make a difference, Cincinnati has, like, four hands to hit you with, and that's coming up all kinds of good in MLS. Searching too hard for some kind of elegance might cause me to overlook the effectiveness of the design, but whatever Cincy’s doing is working for them - and has worked for as long as I’ve watched them…

…so, what’s up my ass?

Probably the thing about how this teams levels up to Major League Soccer in 2019 and, more specifically, which players might level up with the club. Take Cincinnati’s steadiest, if not best, player on the field last night, Michael Lahoud. He played the base of (what I was told was) Cincy’s four-man diamond midfield, and did it super effectively, playing simple, quick passes, and with a knack for finding a better option. This was a man who played a role well enough that, had I watched him without knowing that every team in MLS had effectively taken a pass on him, I might have started this whole thing by asking, “Have you seen this Lahoud kid, have you?” Once you know the answer to that was, “yes,” followed by a look that says, “we were done before you started talking,” you lose a little confidence in your eye for scouting. Two things follow from there, and that’s where the whole dang parlor game gets a bit more fun. (I mean, fun!)

Based on all of the above, I hold two thoughts in my head:

1) FC Cincinnati’s 218 looks more than a little like an extended, older Player Combine/team audition for their inaugural MLS season, aka, some players’ FAST PASS tickets to America’s top flight.

2) After next year’s Expansion Draft, plus the regular draft, what level of player will Cincinnati, both team and city, be able to lure to the Qveen City? Or, to get to the point, how many of these current players have to come up with the team? And what does that mean?

In some ways, I’m watching the rest of Cincinnati’s 2018 season, and this specific roster, with one eye on each of those two thoughts. Seeing things that way probably makes me more cross-eyed than clear-sighted, but doesn't the coaching staff wear the same coke-bottle glasses, almost by necessity? It gets back to the thing with the ruler up top: your most reliable measure of where you are as a team - e.g., the games your team plays - starts from a different place than what you’re measuring against. To get to the first half of Thought 2, I don’t know how Cincinnati sells in the global soccer market, but I’m also guessing it’s somewhere between “where?” and, “has anyone else called?” I say that as someone with wonderful memories of that town, too. All the same, my vague theory on this goes something like, the further you are from a city everyone can name, the more what league you’re in matters. Cincinnati, in Major League Soccer, feels like a different world from the big time, is all I’m saying.

And, now that I’ve caveated this last paragraph to insensibility, here are my best current and wildly contingent guesses as to which Cincinnati players could make the jump to MLS, crucially, as reasonably-ready MLS starters:

Evan Newton (GK)

Forrest Lasso (CB)

Blake Smith (LB)

Nazmi Albadawi (MF)

Russell Cicerone (MF/wing)

Danni Konig (F)

If that list looks skimpy, I’m only four games in on this team and this squad rotates…well, pretty much as you’d imagine a rotating audition would. As I watch more Cincinnati games, I think I’ll see more players who come into that frame, but those are the guys I keep noticing out there. For instance, Lasso had this great dribbling attack, one he capped off by tap-dancing past giving up a corner kick and sitting a defender on his ass. No goal issued from that beauty, sadly, but that tiny moment made a little more sense of why I’ve been impressed by Lasso. He often looks a little better out there.

Right. All done. Till the next one (and don’t tell me when it is).