FC Cincinnati 0-2 New England Revolution: I Blame Cruz for Everything and Nothing

I only wrote this, because I think he can handle it...

[Ed. - I understand that my chosen situation is unique, and I don’t expect MLS’s schedulers to anticipate that some random guy from Portland, Oregon will choose FC Cincinnati as his second default club…but I will still blame them every time their scheduling forces me to post late]

It sucks to lose at home – twice as much when you’ve done it so often – but FC Cincinnati put up a…fight Sunday night and, as I see it, that's all a reasonable fan can ask for at this point. And, to be clear, that statement assumes that FC Cincinnati doesn’t have the roster - or, to stretch in a rather desperate direction, the correct alignment of that roster - to make the playoffs, never mind win the league. And, until further notice, that’s the operational assumption of this site.

Before I get into the weeds, the New England Revolution wouldn’t have broken into a sweat beating FC Cincinnati 2-0 at home if it wasn’t so goddamn hot and humid on Sunday (hi, from Portland!). Cincinnati played well enough to end roughly even on numbers – which surprises me more than it should, given my belief that Cincy ended all right – but they didn’t create more than a couple convincing openings and, much as happened against DC United, they never looked like winning the game. It was possible to keep one’s hopes up until the Revs’ second goal at the 55th minute (and, golly what a howler); the odds on getting a draw spiked in that moment and the whole thing played out under a cloud.

It’s a fairly straightforward dynamic, sadly: like any inexperienced group of people, FC Cincinnati lacks the reps to transform mechanics into rhythm. More reps certainly won’t hurt them, but, that will always careen headlong into the buzz-saw of lacking the personnel for as long as that pertains. And, as a thought exercise, I’m going to channel all of that into the body of one player – and I do this no animus toward the player in question - and call this “The Allan Cruz Problem.” First, and to be clear, Allan Cruz is not the problem. The problem is that he’s being asked to do things he’s not up for doing: Cruz doesn’t have the instincts and/or skill-set for the attacking third, or he doesn’t have enough of them: he doesn’t risk passes that force the defense to make decisions and he doesn’t make his own decisions quickly enough.

New York City FC 5-2 FC Cincinnati: Are You Better Off Today Than You Were Five Games Ago?

He lost his first run, you know. 1976.

And here we area again at where to begin.

One easy place would be when New York City FC’s Maxi Moralez finished their collective long walk into FC Cincinnati’s goal, aka, the moment that became the fifth…sharply humiliating goal in a 5-2 curb-stomping win by the home team. The final score-line pulled off the rare trick of flattering the visitors – e.g., the team who lost by three goals after "scoring" two. Funny thing about those two goals…and that first one, that’s what I like to call “a real striker’s own-goal.” Such technique...

“One Team Can Play. The Other…”

“At Least Wake Their Asses Up”

“They Were Practicing”

Each of those came to me as potential titles for the memorial service you’re about to read. I chose to throw a call-back to The Gipper to peg this specific result to the end of the Alan Koch era. The argument I’m leading to isn’t whether Koch would have done better tonight – because, probably not, see the first discarded title above. What I’m challenging is the top-line premise/logic of Koch’s firing: the idea that he was the problem. That’s not the same as arguing that the team needed a better coach – I’m still of the opinion they did – but of whether better play, or at least morale, would follow from Koch’s firing. Did it have to happen not now, but right now, as it did between the (again) road loss to San Jose Earthquakes (that’s a leading parenthetical) and the admittedly smooth home win over the Montreal Impact?

First, and full disclosure: I cannot speak to morale. I am neither on nor around the team. Moving on…

FC Cincinnati 1-1 Nashville FC: Hell, Yes, And to Hell with False Narratives

A lie, I tell you. A damned, dirty lie. Either way.

It’s rare that you have to wait that long for at least one person to fuck up during a penalty kick shoot-out, but that was in keeping with the game: tighter than a duck’s ass and, don’t worry, I won’t use that for the image. FC Cincinnati slammed the first decisive kick over the line, and they left tonight with their first playoff win in team history (seriously?). (Also, here's the Match Center for all of the details you want and more!)

Nothing should be taken away from Nashville SC, because they played a hell of a game. They even came damn near to fluking to victory by way of a looping oddball of a goal by Anthony Bourgeois. That erased Corben Bone’s far more attractive (can I call it sexy?) extra-time goal, the one that let me think - no, dream - that this game would end within the time allotted by The Founders (aka, 90 minutes). When the game reached the penalty kick shoot-out and Nashville couldn’t stop scoring…I don’t know. I’d prepared various parts of my body for some kind of inevitable, even if I can’t remember what parts guarded against which event. As one ball followed another into the back of the net and the inevitable drifted into the unimaginable…look, I’m glass half-empty as a motherfucker. I wasn’t expecting the best.

Curiously - or not, honestly - the glass filled over that invisible halfway mark when Kenney Walker stepped to the spot after Nashville’s Justin Davis skied his missed penalty kick into history. I trust Walker to piss ice water, and he did. Moreover, Cincinnati had just survived Forrest Lasso stepping to the spot just one kick before and - won’t lie - that worried me. I can’t explain why, especially when I rate Lasso’s foot-work higher than your average defender’s. Maybe it’s simple as a life-long bias against central defenders in attacking roles that don’t involve their heads. Whatever, I held my breath all the way through his wind-up, hands and arms wrapped around my head to keep…I dunno, something in. The doubts from spreading, maybe?

Seeing a man of technique like Walker stride forward, and a team leader to boot? I’d prepped for him missing but mostly out of respect for The Fates. Of course Kenney Walker buried it, and FC Cincy won the shoot-out, its first playoff win in team history, and the chance to keep dreaming of arriving in Major League Soccer with a trophy in the trunk.

Nashville SC 3-3 FC Cincinnati: Double-Fisted Heartbreak

No actual intention to go political. The rest were about prayer?

The original title for this post was, “The Maddest I’ve Ever Seen Matt Pickens,” so called because FC Cincinnati scored one of those glass-jaw specials that soccer punditry warns you of in every single broadcast immediately after Nashville SC drew the score level at 2-2. Corben Bone got free on Nashville’s right, cut back inside and fired to Pickens’ far side. Shot fired, shit lost, etc. 3-2 to FC Cincy, and in their last road game of 2018.

Cincinnati would feel a similar let-down (and a chink in the armor?) when Bolu Akinboye returned the favor via express service just as regular time drew its last (robust) breath (good game), and this game ended 3-3, and with a world of possibility, good and wish-that-hadn’t-happened for both teams on the field. (See The Match Center for all data.)

On the universal plus-side, both teams will get the chance to do it all over again, only this time in Nippert Stadium/Ohio. With all the points counted and the playoffs set to begin, 1st seed FC Cincy will face 8th seed Nashville in the first round of the USL Eastern Conference Playoffs, the day after tomorrow, effectively, 3 p.m., after school, at the flag-pole and in front of the entire motherfucking school. Place your bets now, and juice-box and orange wedges are your currency, people.

Where to begin? Even getting back to tonight is complicated, and for both teams. On FC Cincy’s side, I was about to say, when was the last time Cincinnati allowed three goals, only to realize that it happened just one month before, and against Toronto FC II. The point is, prior to that, it hadn’t happened since June and…against TFC II. (So, I guess the formula is not playing TFC II?) Another fun fact: that June 3-3 draw against TFC II came only five games into FC Cincinnati’s now-history-making-USL-unbeaten streak and, that lands my point: you’re not used to seeing FC Cincinnati give up three goals in one game because they don’t do it a lot. But they just did it against Nashville, the same team they’ll play in the first round of the playoffs. Sure, that happened in Nashville, but I’m at DEFCON 2, minimum. I mean, dumber things than a first-round flame-out for the regular season champs have happened in the history of sports…

Pittsburgh Riverhounds 0-0 FC Cincinnati: Poop Just Got Real (and Thank God)

I've been conditioned to this FC Cincy a certain way...

I won’t call it a whole lot of nothing (or even a whole lotta nuthin’). I’ve gotten more pleasure out of scores of games, maybe even several hundreds of them (I’ve been around a bit), but Cincinnati FC’s goal-less draw at the Pittsburgh Riverhounds’ (dinky*) stadium wasn’t paint-drying/grass-growing/old-people-fucking level of torture. At the same time, check The Match Center for highlights, and good luck with it!

(* I’ve had the pleasure of watching U.S. domestic soccer live for over two decades, and I can’t remember the last time I sat in a stadium as small as Highmark Stadium. In its defense, it is only the flip-side of the farce of playing professional soccer at, say, Gillette Stadium.)

In an attempt to explain/analogize to this game through a series of moments, I offer the following:

Pittsburgh’s Neco Brett received a nearly perfect cut-back from a player whose name I don’t recall; he wound up losing track of the ball, allowing his right foot to push it past his (so they tell me) preferred left foot. Minutes later, maybe even as few as one, FC Cincy’s Emery Welshman knocked a loose back pass around Pittsburgh ‘keeper Dan Lynd, only to stumble onto his can at the end of trying to run it down. For the record, neither of these moments show up in The Match Center highlights.

The other moment happened in the second half - somewhere in the 70s, if I had to guess (which I do) - when Cincinnati’s rather large Forrest Lasso tried to shepherd a ball over the goal line with Kay Banjo hanging on his back; Banjo whipped his leg around Lasso’s largeness, nearly creating another chance. This also didn't make the highlights, and that's why I chose them.

Not every shot was terrible - Christiano Francois and Romeo Parkes tormented FC Cincy’s defense in a way I’ve never seen (even at 18 games watched, I consider myself a noob), and both Emanuel Ledesma and Fatai Alashe put solid shots on goal (and all those made the highlights) - but that this game didn’t see many good chances. The detail I flagged with Banjo is meant to draw out the idea that Pittsburgh played the better game, thereby surprising FC Cincinnati, thereby perhaps reminding them that things only get harder for the rest of the season and (are you paying attention??) into some indefinite future given the path this young team has chosen.

By way of translating reality to numbers, the best stat I can provide for Pittsburgh’s visible edge in this game would be shots, general: the Riverhounds had 18 to Cincinnati’s four. Credit Pittsburgh for being the team most likely to; credit Cincinnati for making them the team that never did - even if with moments of doubt (e.g., Lasso having to pull Brett’s jersey at 34(ish) or Hoyte flirting with an own-goal when Francois broke through (yet again) down Pittsburgh’s left in the second half). I can’t think of any way in which Pittsburgh wasn’t the better team yesterday, and that runs counter to normal for someone who, like me, still has yet to see FC Cincinnati lose.

FC Cincinnati 4-3 Toronto FC II: I'm Going to Miss Kenney Walker

No,  it's "Corben." "C-O-R-B-E-N,"

Are your favorite goals individual or team? I ask because FC Cincinnati scored one of each - the former by Fanendo Adi, the latter by Corben Bone - on their way to resuscitating a 4-3 win at home against an eternally gasping Toronto FC II. I’m Team Bone because I feel like team goals are more replicable than solo flights, they make teams feel more like, y’know, a team, and there’s just…something about pulling a defense apart by running and passing. (For me, that’s soccer at its best.) Don’t get me wrong: Adi’s goal was a whole lotta something, one of those moments where a player puts it on himself to make something happen. (You can find that, and reference for everything that comes below at The Match Center.)

The downside: FC Cincy needed both of those goals, and more, to beat a team that has lost twenty one (21) times in this 2018 season. On the plus side, FC Cincy has players capable of turning a game all on his lonesome. Birthday Boy Bone (googled that; results above) would score the winner in this one, but it really is remarkable that Cincinnati would need as many as four goals to beat a team as bad as TFC II, aka, the only team already out of the United Soccer League’s playoffs. (Actually, now that I’m looking, they’ve now been joined by the Richmond Kickers, Seattle Sounders FC 2, Tulsa Roughnecks FC, and Rio Grande Valley FC, though, mysteriously, not Las Vegas Lights FC, who are factually beneath Rio Grande in the standings, but who also have a game in hand, but doesn’t that still look like inoperable cancer for Las Vegas Lights FC? Why dick around with the whole “mathematically eliminated” charade. This is when, people, not if. That patient is dead. Moving on…because life is for the living…)

The other remarkable thing about tonight’s (narrow) win: Cincinnati hasn’t allowed three goals against any team going back to June 27 – when they allowed three goals to the same TFC II team. It was a step in an unfamiliar direction for FC Cincy’s defense, because, whether they’ve paired Forrest Lasso and Dekel Keinan or Lasso and Patrick Barrett, the team’s central defensive pairing generally gets along like steak and chianti, controlled, classy, just hugging every taste bud, etc. There is, however, sub-plot to that, an asterisk hanging at the end: TFC II’s Tsubasa Endoh scored each goal in his hat trick from several yards beyond the lands where central defenders roam; even his third, closer goal came from a place where you’d want a midfielder to shut him down, not a defender.

Louisville City FC 0-1 FC Cincinnati: The Puddle Goal of Legend

Well, it ain't gonna fill itself, dipshit...

I have to start with this, mostly because I heard the name over and over: is the Louisville City FC broadcast team contractually obligated to say, “George Davis the Fourth” every time the guy touches the ball? Does George Davis the Third own Louisville, or something?

It’s not so bad to start with George Davis the Fourth - beats the howlers I had lined up about how Louisville closed out the first half with a flurry of goals, and it ended 72 hours and 38 minutes later (and don’t check me math, I barely did) - because the man with the long, formal name wreaked havoc down Louisville’s right. Or, rather, Blake Smith’s left side of FC Cincinnati’s defense. I’ve been high on Smith for as long as I’ve watched FC Cincinnati, and I’ve never seen a player make him work and/or guess as hard as…sigh, George Davis the Fourth (treat?). Fortunately, FC Cincy’s defense held, even where Blake did not - though they did have a trouser-filler around the 51st minute that neither I, nor Louisville can’t believe they didn’t put away - and FC Cincinnati walks away from this absurdist 90 with the 1-0 win.

Who knew they’d make The Puddle Goal hold up? (On that, I can’t wait till I can easily find isolated highlights for FC Cincy games, so I can show the water-logged freakshow that won this game for them. I mean, sure, sit through the highlights (at the Match Center, along with everything else you need!)). As goals go, it’s pretty fortunate and messed up. Corben Bone is clearly among the blessed.

For all the truth of “they all count” when it comes to goals, this game, along with the one before it, should make fairly clear that FC Cincinnati has real work ahead on its way to the 2018 USL Championship. (Also, has the league named its trophy? Shit, has MLS? If not, they both need to get on that shit.) I’m looking at the top eight in the USL East right now, and I’m seeing a healthy share of teams who gave FC Cincy a run for its money this season - not just Louisville and Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC (both of whom played well enough to get all three points), but teams like Bethlehem Steel FC and Nashville SC.

Back to the game(s) at hand (is it accurate to call these two games, were they that different?), Louisville’s best chances to win it dried up around the 58th minute, when Speedy Williams (who also received full-name treatment) skied what I and the broadcast agreed was a sitter. They had at least two great shots in the Saturday’s “first half” - both ably parried by a rock-solid Spencer Richey - and Louisville squeezed FC Cincy’s defense over at least two distressingly extended periods, once in Second First Half (i.e., the rest of the first half played earlier tonight), but also during this rather fascinating time in the actual second half that wound up turning the game.

FC Cincinnati 2-0 Tampa Bay Rowdies: A Dream Date with Corben Bone

Most things improve with practice...

The entire experience of watching FC Cincinnati take down the Tampa Bay Rowdies at Nippert Stadium would have felt less like sitting through my kid’s Christmas concert had I watched it last night instead of just an hour or two after watching the World Cup final, but I digress…

After a first half filled with the soccer equivalent of kids’ attention drifting, forgotten words and flat notes, FC Cincy took charge in the second half, and almost immediately. Cincinnati’s Corben Bone made a great case for game MVP (wait for it), throughout the second, but he started early with a pin-point cross to Emanuel Ledesma’s mysteriously elusive run. He nodded home that goal in the middle of 10+ minutes of steady pressure and increasing chaos in the Rowdies' defense. While it didn’t spin totally out of control, Tampa’s defense never recovered. In more ways than one, the Tampa Bay Rowdies played the kid who just stands there for the length of the concert, silently picking his nose while he stares at his parents. That’s with respect to Junior Flemmings, who did his damnedest to make the hosts earn it.

FC Cincinnati wouldn’t get its insurance goal until very, very near the end - that came in the 84th minute, when Emery Welshman dished a smooth pass to Danni Konig one thin minute after Welshman stepped onto the field - but Bone should have bought the policy 30 minutes earlier when he made himself a sitter that he bounced off the crossbar. And, as always, anyone who’s interested can see all the above in the highlights (or see it again), as well as picking through the United Soccer League’s random-access dog-pile of statistics at the Match Center for this game. Still, the story for this game was pretty simple: Cincinnati won it 2-0, and the only real question in play was whether or not they would score. Tampa battled hard, but also clumsily - by which I mean I’m calling bullshit on their (alleged) 66.2% passing accuracy, or questioning the methodology at the very least.

After that, there’s not much to say about this game, beyond cautioning anyone with even the slightest interest of doing so against watching that first half. After writing “10 minutes of dead air” around the 13th minute, I decided against writing “see above” at 10 minute intervals; the chuckleheads in the broadcast booth backed that up around the 35th minute when they noted that neither team had managed as many as five consecutive passes. FC Cincy got rolling, thank god, while Tampa Bay…well, see the kid picking his nose above, then add periodically smacking the heads of the children around him.

Nashville SC 0-0 FC Cincinnati: "Rivalries" and (Re-) Checking the Levels

No, I said "left" at Team Stats. LEFT!

Before getting to the game, I want to repeat something I said on Twitter. I am a Ronnie Woodard stan. She offered that rare commodity to soccer color commentary - i.e., talking cause, effect, and on-field mechanics, stuff it’s easy to miss when you’re watching through a screen - and with a quiet confidence. It’s something you don’t even know you miss after 20 years of listening to, say, a clown like Alexi Lalas express his love for set-pieces. To give just one example, she praised the play of FC Cincinnati’s centerbacks, Dekel Keinan and Forrest Lasso, on the way to damning Emanuel Ledesma, Danni Konig and Nazmi Albadawi for failing to defend enough. Basically, the lack of defense from the forwards made it easier for Nashville SC to find their attacking players in front of FC Cincinnati’s defense, and that put the latter under pressure for most of the night.

She could be wrong, but I still felt smarter. With that out of the way, I want to focus on another in-game comment from the broadcast booth, one pulled from some domestic soccer publication and with regard to FC Cincinnati:

“One of the most impressive teams ever assembled for a lower division American soccer club.”

To flip the script, what does that say about Nashville SC? The home team owned the balance of play and chances in last night’s 0-0 draw between these two teams - or at least until the final 10 minutes. If you go to this game’s “Match Center” (which is pretty one-stop shopping; check there for highlights) and to the “Distribution” tab under Team Stats, you will find the buried treasure…

…sorry, kidding. To give them credit, the USL website arguably puts up more complete data than Major League Soccer’s, but it takes a road map, plus a couple secret handshakes to find it. Back to the game…