FC Cincinnati 0-0 DC United: Progress and Measuring Height Against a Moving Wall

Now picture it non-linear.

Because I know FC Cincinnati fans have picked apart this game since Friday night, let’s call this a preview for tomorrow night…if without any real nnotes on Chicago Fire FC, who I haven’t watched at all since they shat out that shocker against the Seattle Sounders back during MLS Got Back. And it will be brief. Promise.

All in all, the game lacked in goals, intensity…shots on goal…just lacked really, and ended appropriately goal-less. Worse, this current DC United team is already a bugger to handicap against - and then Cincy played to type on both sides of the equation. Cincinnati didn’t score, but Frederic Brillant, Steve Birnbaum and Bill Hamid put up one hell of a wall for DC week in and out, so that doesn’t give you much. Cincinnati looked easy-breezy in defense and didn’t give DC more than a couple scraps (often with a well-arranged wall between the shooter and the goal to boot), but DC hasn’t generated either reliable or voluminous offense for a couple seasons, and now you have less with which to work. What we had here was a game that played out to expectations and moved no needles.

I think that’ll be a familiar sensation for both these teams for as long as this wonky bastard of a 2020 season limps along to…shit, where will it go? Simple sons-o’-bitches that they are, at least zombies know where they’re going - e.g., toward brains - but the Major League Soccer’s 2020 doesn’t have even that kind of direction. If anything, and for what it’s worth, I’d rather be a Cincinnati fan right now than a DC fan. While both teams labor under a work-in-progress incoherence, Cincinnati continues to integrate and arrange new, upgraded players - they even have someone shiny, new, and, ideally, specifically useful coming into the team - while, from a barely-interested distance, it looks like DC’s still waiting for Edson Flores to come good…or even start regularly.

On that, I worried a little that Flores or Federico Higuian would come in and take over the game, but, odd quality passes here or there (see below), I didn’t see any takers for that whole business of taking over the game.

That’s all I have for general commentary - it’ll specifics from here on out - but, to answer the big question, was this a good result for either team? Was it awful, though, from Cincy’s end (I can’t answer for DC)? Can the answer be no, while also acknowledging vital improvement. So long as one accepts the premise that Cincinnati’s defense left a gasping offense for dead in 2019, any and all clean sheets necessarily count as an upgrade…even if there is a finite, if-as-yet-undefined period after which goal-less draws stop counting as necessary progress and slouch to just plain old stagnation. And that’s the point of the departure for the detail work. In no particular order…

FC Cincinnati 1-4 New York City FC: Stanko-Curiosity & Role-Playing

Um, OK. Can we look at the other 19?

As I sat down to write this, I’d got it in my head that FC Cincinnati had a long history of scoring the first goal then gradually losing control of the game. As it happens, it’s a recent phenomenon, applicable only to their last three games. So, that’s one discarded frame (and title; I was thinking of going with, “I Got It, I Got It; I Don’t Got It”), but it does accurately describe a game (and a late phenomenon) slipping away one deflating increment at a time.

Related: I’ve fretted over the importance of FC Cincy scoring the first goal in the preview threads I post to twitter; the last few results punched a combined eight holes into that theory (i.e., one hole for each goal allowed), so let’s quietly set that one aside.

The best way I can think to explain yesterday’s 1-4 loss to New York City FC turns on a question: review the starting line-ups that FC Cincinnati and New York City FC fielded yesterday and ask yourself, which team’s player you’d take at each position on the field. At most, I’d take Andrew Gutman over Ronald Mataritta, Kendall Waston over Julian Sands (then Ben Sweat, but not over Maxime Chanot, maybe Mathieu Deplagne over Eric Miller, and one of Cincy’s midfielders (probably Victor Ulloa) over Keaton Parks, but he’s only 22 so that pick could invert in a year or two.

NYCFC picked up a couple lucky bounces – see, Valentin Castellanos’ accidental assist on Heber’s first goal and the way Mikael van der Werff’s heel didn’t do enough to thwart Heber’s cut-back on his second back-breaking goal – but better quality at nearly every position, particularly in the attack, feels like the proper narrative. Cincy posted as many shots as NYC in the end – at least a pair of good ones, too – but when the time came to strike the ball well and true, having Castellanos and Heber on one team versus Darren Mattocks and, say, Roland Lamah on the other decided the result.

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Louisville City FC: Holy Shit, a Win! (And the Scrabbling Path Forward!)

Suspense is contextual.

I will be brief, I will be brief, I will be brief. [Eh, you be the judge.]

I have two big, related takeaways from FC Cincinnati finally gaining a clear positive during its 2019 season with a 2-1 win (in extra time!) over Louisville City at scenic Nippert Stadium in the over-revered, yet under-valued U.S. Open Cup. First, Louisville’s press disrupted everything Cincinnati so much thought of doing for most of regulation time. Sub-first, I do wonder whether they ran themselves legless – not that I blame them either, given how close that came to being the path to success.

Second, and most crucially, how much did knowing how to manage Louisville help FC Cincy? My personal theory: an uncomfortable amount.

By pressing the way they did – and successfully - Louisville played an underdog’s hand in this game, but Cincinnati holds a clear edge in talent. Making that count took playing around Louisville’s press – something it took Cincinnati the first five minutes of the game to break even once, but it took most of regulation to finally tilt the field in its favor and, this is key, irrevocably.

Once Louisville gave up the (glorious) second goal (Team Kekuta!), and after so much exertion, I couldn’t see them coming back into the game. The underdogs had to take their foot off the gas eventually and, once they did, Cincinnati put the game in a…well, stunningly poorly executed choke-hold. Fuck me, if I didn’t feel like I was yelling “finish him” for a whole goddamn hour.

I’m happy for the win, particularly the spirit of it. Anyone watching the huddle after Fanendo Adi scored his first goal of 2019 (srsly, that can’t be right) should feel heartened by Forrest Lasso’s cross-talk with Adi over the celebrating mob. I have no idea what Lasso said, but everyone looked bought in and that’s how you build a team – aka, Step 1 to Success in team sports.

To go the other way with a thought that feels complicated: the first 70 minutes felt like Cincy bending without breaking while getting muscled all over by Louisville. That dredged up something I’ve noticed from FC Cincy during its long, dark winter-but-it’s-summer in MLS. FC Cincinnati has one hell of a time getting on the front foot in any game. Against a team capable of dominating them, the switch never flips and that's one theory on their string of regular season losses; when playing a Louisville team doing the soccer equivalent of throwing itself onto a hand-grenade to victory, it takes, as it happens, about 78 minutes. The larger point, and I’m going to emphasize this: Cicinnati does not have a reliable way to assert itself in games.

MLS Tourist Journal, Calendar Week 4: The Freighted Meaning of U.S. v. Panama and Pity Martinez

Why do they call me Pity, you ask?

Yeah, yeah, I won’t get to the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati until the end. But a little something significant takes place tomorrow evening, tomorrow night for the east coast audience, and things will just flow better if I bury that. Won’t blame anyone who spot-reads these things, ever. Moving on.

Professional soccer players (as opposed the Kombine Kids) will kick a ball around for the first time in 2019 tomorrow night. It’ll be a competitive experience, even if it isn’t a competitive event. When the U.S. Men’s National Team plays formerly lowly Panama tomorrow night – formerly, because who made the 2018 World Cup? – I can’t say how many eyes will be on them, but I expect fairly intense interest among the eyeballs they do draw. Here’s why:

“Hire the wrong coaches? Yes. Cut the wrong players? Yes. Pick the wrong teams? Yes. Fail to develop or integrate a half-decade's worth of young talent? Yes. Show gaps in the regional armor with losses to teams we should dominate like Guatemala, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago? Yes. Miss the Olympics twice? Yes. Miss the World Cup?”

That commentary, lifted from Matt Doyle’s 48-hour preview, covers just about every ingredient that led to the bad taste that’s lingered in your mouth since the U.S. Men last played. I can’t even say when the U.S. played last for the same reason you don’t go to a substitute teacher for parent-teacher conferences. Everyone understood that Dave Sarachan wouldn’t be guiding the team to 2022, so it made sense to wait until the guy who will stepped up. And, hello, Gregg Berhalter!

I read the usual handful of sources (so, so lazy) to get myself prepared for tomorrow’s game, both mentally and emotionally, but, with this being Berhalter’s first game out, no one really knows what to expect. Jurgen Klinsmann (one of my obsessions) changed my understanding of U.S. Soccer, in that he expanded the range of what is possible. In so many words, I’d grown up on steady progress, I’d internalized the idea that the team would improve, maybe without much in the way of style or excitement, and certainly with a couple set-backs, but steadily. Jurgen undermined all that in such an insidious way that one has to wonder whether he wasn’t some kind of Manchurian candidate. I remember watching Klinsmann’s first game in charge. It wasn’t pretty, but that also didn’t seem important given that Klinsmann would slowly make the U.S. his team…I don’t know that that ever happened. I’m not sure anyone knows whether that happened…