New England Revolution 2-2 FC Cincinnati: Rhymin & Stealin

Remember when they used to smoke after sex in the movies?

And...yep, FC Cincinnati’s 2-2 draw at the New England Revolution lifted them to their personal best for points in a single Major League Soccer season. 25 > 24, people. And still so much time to play.

Before digging into it, I’d like to pause here to appreciate the weirdness of Cincy’s 2022 season.

When the season started, bringing Brenner off the bench, or just leaving him there, made perfect sense. And when he did come in, he just kind of wandered around, looking some pitiful combination of sad, confused and lost. From (weighty) sunk cost to a forward scoring goals worthy of his price tag in just a handful of games. Who saw that coming?

The conversation around Brandon Vazquez talked more about the ceiling hanging over all the good things he does rather than those good things as recently as the end of last season. Today, Vazquez is in the conversation for the U.S. Men’s National Team.

Nick Hagglund has been a regular starter for most of the season. And I don’t mind it one bit.

And, yesterday, Pat Noonan trotted out the kind of defensive midfield – Allan Cruz paired with Yuya Kubo – that had spelled spinning wheels in one direction and getting run over in the other.

I type this while craving, not so much the cigarette it sold, but the branding they used to sell it: you’ve come a long way, baby, aka, FC Cincinnati.

I started with the forest because I don’t have much to say about the trees except, they’re fine. I can’t think of one Cincy player I’d accuse of having a bad game yesterday, even as I imagine Geoff Cameron is still yelling self-affirmations into his bathroom mirror after giving up the second go-ahead goal to the theretofore silent Gustavo Bou’s near-post run. The team as a whole looked a little shaky for the 10+ minutes that followed, but they regained their footing and played their way back into the match.

Portland Timbers 1-3 New England Revolution: Chance Creation

Yes, that is who you think they are. 1996.

This week’s special word is “dispirited.” (Can I keep that bit up for 35+ games? Dunno….but I’m also not saying I won’t try.)

Because I came late to the party, I turned on the game already knowing the Portland Timbers lost their last game of the preseason 1-3 to, for what it’s worth, a New England Revolution team that I expect to be good-to-great in 2020. Again, who you lose to can go some distance to explaining why your team lost – i.e., if they’re better, what else would you expect? It’s possible, in other words, that the Revs are just better than the Timbers. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but, 1) the evidence points to yes, and 2) the question is what that means for Portland’s 2020.

To flesh out No. 1 above, I’d accept that New England has a better sense of how they want to operate on the field and, in that way, they are better than Portland. Even so, the final score damned the Timbers more than it flattered the Revolution. New England never had to be great on Saturday: they just had to defend well enough and put away the chances they created. The extent to which that’s true of literally every team in soccer is all it takes to understand all the problems Portland has going into 2020.

In the Timbers’ defense, putting this game beyond their reach took a bounce lucky enough to look like a perfect pass; the ungainly laws of physics that squirted the ball wide to New England’s Gustavo Bou in that specific moment operate on the same level of probability as a hard 8 in craps, so I feel all right putting Adam Buska’s goal down to blind and/or bad luck. The trouble is, the Revs hit that hard 8 two more times. The second one, Bou’s penalty kick, somehow hurt less, and maybe because Kelyn Rowe slotted a great pass to Buska (who may or may not have been offside; I never got a good angle on the stream). The first one, though, hurt like a mother, because it repeated a disturbing pattern from the blowout loss to Minnesota United FC – e.g., the game I’d allowed myself to write-off because head coach Gio Savarese opted to start T2 over T-Prime. For those who didn’t watch (or rewind the video three-four times), Bou crossed the ball to (I think) Brandon Bye, who then crossed it back to a wide-open Bou at the back-post, leaving him nothing more to do than hitting it with enough pace to slip past Portland’s Steve Clark. It’s the “wide-open” part (hence the italics) that really distresses a fella.