FC Cincinnati, 2019 in Review: A Puzzle and a Carousel

The problem, in WPA format.

For starters, I’ve never followed a team that suffered so much in one season. The world around me turned clockwise or counter-clockwise, but I’ve lead a charmed life when it comes to spectator sports.

And yet is was worse than that for FC Cincinnati in a lot of ways. In the big picture, they had their brightest moments early in the season; but for their March 30 loss to the Philadelphia Union, FC Cincy could have had the strongest start for an expansion team in Major League Soccer history. It probably wouldn't have mattered, but that game marked the turning point in Cincinnati’s 2019 season: after one more promising result – a 1-1 home draw versus Sporting Kansas City (that later provided both irrelevant and predictive for both teams, aka, more time for golf!) - they wouldn’t just lose, they’d lose in bunches: first five straight games, then six straight games, then four straight games, then four more. The end of the season looked a bit brighter, or at least fulfilled the theoretical promise of the team’s original roster construction – the defensive team they designed finally showed up, and that let them ruin a couple seasons (e.g., the Chicago Fire’s and Orlando City SC’s) – but it was too little and too late, on top of being basically unwatchable.

I’m going to (finally) close the chapter on FC Cincinnati’s inaugural 2019 season today. Rather than make anyone but the emotionally sturdiest people stick around till the end in the hope that I’ll have something bright, never mind helpful or insightful to say about 2020, I don’t. I expect hella turnover (as indicated by all the “Thank You __________” posts I see on the FC Cincinnati news page), and, between all the expected personnel turnover and a new coach (Ron Jans, whose current lease on (coaching life) expires December 2020), predictions can’t be anything but a mug’s game. Moving on…

I’ll close out with big-picture talking points, I'll name my personal team MVP…and, yeah, I think that’s about it, but I want to start by drafting a narrative for the 2019 season based on the notes I banged out through the season. And, golly, did production drop off at the end. And, frankly, so did my interest. As they say in France, allons y!

Columbus Crew SC 2-2 FC Cincinnati: Hell Is Full of Mistakes

The caption reads, "epic butt goal." On par.

Since I'm a day late at least, and since everyone who cares to knows that the first “Hell Is Real” match ended with FC Cincinnati drawing Columbus Crew SC 2-2 in Columbus (wee victory!), I’ll rein in the usual narrative excess and just spit out some bullet points. Here goes:

- This was a bad result for Columbus. Leaving the closest thing you get to free points in MLS on the table puts them where Cincinnati has been since the middle of the summer – i.e., thinking about 2020. Moreover, they throttled their own modest momentum.

- One last note on Columbus: they’re surprisingly wasteful. An uncomfortable quantity of their forward passes end as unfinished thoughts and they resort to the pointless cross too willingly. And yet, even when they do getapileofchances to put away the game (see the link under "a" for the most egregious and heave out another sigh of relief) and stay in the conversation for seventh in the East*…let’s just say I could hear the choking sound all the way over here on the West coast and a day and a half later.

(* aka, the only open conversation left to the teams below the playoff line in the Eastern Conference, as I see it.)

- Every goal in the game followed from a clear defensive lapse. For starters, I’d argue Pedro Santos’ goal was nothing more or less than a beautiful ending to a bad play – i.e., Cincinnati’s failure to manage a quick restart (and I’d put real money on Santos missing that shot 8 times out of 10). As for the rest: Maikel van der Werff had no reason to nudge Gyasi Zardes off the play; Columbus gambled so hard on covering Kendall Waston that they left Darren Mattocks free for Cincy's first; and Roland Lamah’s cross had no business finding Emmanuel Ledesma through that crowd (but nice run by Mattocks on that play, even if he didn’t finish it). These are the things that happen to bad teams.