Sunday, September 30, 2018

FC Cincinnati 3-0 Indy Eleven: Fat and Happy in the Lap of Luxury

Loving cradling our collective asses...is it good for you?
FC Cincinnati rotated its squad - more than a little, too - and they still comfortably outplayed visiting Indy Eleven, 3-1. Hey…I lead with the score. (And here’s The Match Center for all the numbers and videos you’re going to get on this game.)

The machinery didn’t run without friction, some portions of it more manifest than others - e.g., Indy made Cincy ‘keeper Evan Newton stretch for a couple shots, and, when Pa Konate came off the field at 53’, nothing about that substitution made me scratch my head - but it never felt like Indy’s game to win. And that makes the numbers from the match curious reading - especially the figures for attack and distribution. A couple testaments to the gap between the game I thought I saw and those numbers lurk on my twitter feed (@JeffBull5), but, who is to say what is real in paranoid times? Who’s to say that some miscreant statistician within the secret sanctums of the USL FO didn’t replace the actual numbers from this game in an attempt to hide FC Cincinnati’s true greatness? No, I can’t prove it, but you can’t not prove it either. (CITIZENS: Keep your eye on the Orange and Blue’s record, watch for skullduggery! Eternal vigilance!!)

(Speaking of conspiracies, did that Cincinnati’s Matt Bahner get away with a goal-line handball early in the second half? And what to make of the Zapruder-esque quality on those replays? Wait...can someone make a basement disappear with the push of a button?)

Whatever the numbers say, Cincy created better openings, some of them boulevard-wide - e.g., when the wonderful work down Indy’s right by Michael Lahoud and Jimmy McLaughlin so mesmerized the defense that they gave Fanendo Adi a public-park’s worth of free acreage. McLaughlin would strike again later, and with a ball over the top to a surging Danni Konig that I didn’t credit enough when I watched it live. Then again, for all the good work by McLaughlin and Konig, the latter couldn’t have finished that chance without a blundering assist by Indy’s ‘keeper, Owain Fon Williams, and two of his defenders. Indy’s defense would cough up yet another mistake when Carlyle Mitchell pinged a (good) Russell Cicerone cross into his own team’s side netting…hell, maybe there is no need for a conspiracy to explain this result.

I guess the question raised by all the above is when Indy piled up their chances; based on what I watched, they racked up their numbers early in the 1st half - and before Adi’s goal. Fatal errors aside (which, like goals, still count), it’s not like they had a bad game, not even on the defensive side. As good a job as FC Cincinnati did pulling them around, once Indy got their defense set, they would steadily pushed Cincy out. And if you watch the highlights, you’ll see that they did have good shots…but what you won’t see is how they put only every fourth shot on goal, which means you’ll come very close to seeing all of their chances.

All’s well that ends well, and, while I only heard about the celebration FC Cincinnati threw itself for winning the regular season (I missed all of my own graduations, and with no regrets), it’s just fucking great that the team could reward the fan-base with A Complete Fan Experience before they close things out with two games on the road. For myself, I know I’ll see this team lose a game someday - something that’s starting to freak me out a little (am I lucky rabbit foot?) - but I hope it won’t come any time soon, or at least not till next season.

I’ll leave next season at next season, for now (or at least until the final paragraph), because the positives for rest of 2018 keep coming. FC Cincy was able to give a full 90 minutes’ worth of rest for some players they’ll rely on as they strive toward the USL championship - e.g., Corben Bone, Emanuel Ledesma, Nazmi Albadawi, Fatai Alashe, Forrest Lasso, Patrick Barrett, and, regardless of where he lurks in the hierarchy of Cincy’s forwards, Emery Welshman. That’s over half a full squad, obviously, and that, my friends, is luxury with rich Corinthian leather seats that keep your butt warm and everything. While I’ve seen plenty of teams with a great starting eleven, and a good, say, 12-16 behind them that gives them real depth at certain positions, I have never seen a team as spoiled for choice as this FC Cincinnati team, not in domestic soccer.

For the record, I’m sure there’s some part of me that finds that grossly unfair, but I can’t hear it because the rest of me keeps screaming, “Holy shit! They did it again!” over it.

I’m going to close out this post with some personnel notes, both of them looking toward the future, and one of them with a jaundiced eye.

To start with the happy thought - and this answers a (little-noticed) poll I posted on twitter - if someone asked me to name FC Cincinnati’s indispensable player, I would call it a two-way race between Ledesma and Lahoud. The people at home got treated with a highlight reel of Ledesma’s goals and assists, and that made tangible tribute to the Argentine’s contributions this season. With Lahoud, though…look, he just plays a style I like, enough to write his name into the team’s regular starting eleven in ink (aka, “Michael Lahoud and Guest”). To repeat myself (not sure how many times, but I apologize for the last two), it’s his speed of thought that most impresses me. Lahoud rarely holds the ball for long, and he’s got the precision to complete a good pass, as well as the talent to play a better one; better yet, he’ll see either option within, at most, just over a second. During yesterday’s game, the contrast with Tyler Gibson stood out. That’s not a clean knock on Gibson - who holds onto the ball in traffic fairly well - but he got dispossessed a couple times and, however well he kept the ball from Indy’s defenders in search of a good pass, taking that extra second or two more than Lahoud buys defenses as a whole time to get settled. Speed matters, and Lahoud plays with it.

Yeah, yeah, it probably helps Lahoud plays where I used to like playing, and in a very similar style, but that’s something I’d look for were I building a team for MLS (or any league). For what it’s worth, I’d be willing to wager on a Lahoud/Alashe midfield for Cincy’s inaugural top-flight season. That said, put an upgrade next to Lahoud - maybe like Diego Chara (who is God), maybe not - and they’d have something to say about who runs the midfield in most games.

On the darker side, and the sad side of it, I still can’t see McLaughlin come up with the team into MLS - and that strikes me as a combination of wrong and crazy after the game he had yesterday. It wasn’t just his two assists (again, that second one); after spending 30 minutes waiting for anyone on the attacking side of Cincy’s left to take on Indy’s right back, McLaughlin bolted to the end line then walked it like a tightrope past another one or two defenders. Moreover, he has stood out more and more in the past couple games, more often than not as a game-changing sub, but that hyphenated adjective completes the thought: McLaughlin has changed games - and recently - so…what am I seeing?

Don’t know. Too little size, too little speed, both maybe? There’s just something in his game that makes me think he tops out around the same level as, say, the San Jose Earthquakes’ Shea Salinas or Ned Grabavoy, mostly of Real Salt Lake fame. This isn’t an argument that McLaughlin couldn’t play in MLS - clearly, because those guys did - but whether Cincinnati, as a team, can thrive in MLS with a player at that level, at that position. I guess that’s where my uncertainty comes in. I say all that with all due respect to McLaughlin as a player (and not in the low-key shitty way far too many people use the phrase “with all due respect,” which has a long history of implying a total lack of respect). I’d be fine if I got my calls on Lahoud and McLaughlin backwards; I’m content with whatever works for the team.

Whatever happens next season, the above paragraph has me pulling a little harder for McLaughlin for the rest of this season. And I’m very much looking forward to that.

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