MLS Week 1 Weekly, The Weakliest Weekly of the Season

And it'll happen again about as often.

Major League Soccer’ 2023 season kicked off Saturday with a weather-delay and an outright cancellation – so, nothing on either LA team – but, more to the point, it came with a couple upsets, one of the worst individual performances I’ve seen in years [Ed. – after reviewing some tape, make that two], and a healthy slice of late goals. Better, one of the upsets had the other two things. Which to say, the opening week hit at least one trifecta.

This post marches through nearly all the games - some more in depth than others – with...fairly quick and general notes about MLS Week. And I’ll cap off the post with “what does it all mean” for the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati. (Anyone interested in deeper dives into either of those can dive into Portland’s C&C Match Report and/or Cincinnati’s CC& Match Report), but I really do want these posts to be about everyone else in the league Teams great, and the Chicago Fire FC. Hey...pulling for you guys.

As always, the links under each score will take you to The Motherships recap screens, which, to give them the odd “well done,” I’ve always found helpful. Wait! Are they doing the Form Guide this year?! Yep! How ‘bout that...still cuts off at 33 games. Right, let’s kick things off with..

The Conifers & Citrus Official Game of the Week
Inter Miami CF 2-0 Club de Foot Montreal
So...why this game? Put it this way: I went in with a sneaking suspicion and walked away feeling like I made the right call. Full disclosure: I watched at least three quarters of it and paid about the same amount of attention. About the game, first and foremost, Miami was better than good for that result. Neither goal was elegant – Serhii Kryvstov nudged in the first with his lap and it took substitute Shanyder Borgelin two cracks from six yards out to get the ball over the line, and even only came after Ariel Lassiter’s first shot pinged off the post straight to Borgelin’s feet – but Miami managed play in a way that somehow fails to show in the numbers. Yeah, my lying eyes call bullshit on the 78.7% passing accuracy number because Miami’s players seemed to find good open options everywhere they looked. At times, particularly in the first half, Montreal couldn’t escape their own half: Miami’s Jean Mota and Gregore hung a big ol’ “Thou Shalt Not Pass” across the middle of the field and, with help from Rodolfo Pizzaro, they directed traffic back to Montreal’s goal over and over again. Maybe all the misses came with penultimate and final passes that failed to connect because, despite the clinic in the midfield, Miami neither connected with the forwards – yes, it was Josef Martinez’s debut, and he lasted about two/thirds of the game – nor created a ton of chances...a statement that is, yes, belied by a respectable haul of 18 shots, 7 on goal. My lying fucking eyes.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Sporting Kansas City: A Win in March (or February) and Everything That Was Wrong with It

If I had to declare a star for the evening of the Portland Timbers’ season-opening 1-0 win over Sporting Kansas City, I’d go with the opening goal. I mean, that thing felt like the first kiss after love after love at first sight, something that left you dreaming of all the great things to come and believing they’d come true.

And then the rest of the game happened and, just like that, that same young couple is sitting at the back of the bus marveling at how all that frisson fizzled out.

There isn’t much to say about this game in either a short or long narrative. Once you take away a couple hiccups of excitement here and there, after Juan David Mosquera effectively willed in the game’s one and only goal – and by playing both sides of the ball in the same move, mind you – the game settled into an unwelcome pattern.

In a phrase, every good thing Portland managed to get going wilted over time. While that mostly took form of one Timbers player or another doing good things and leading a charge to somewhere promising, the malaise had a kind of global feel about it – say like someone running up a hill, heart bursting with courage screaming, “who's with me?!" only to realize he's leading, at most, a two-man charge. Or, to reach for another metaphor, the whole game felt like a metaphor for autumn, only some place shitty instead of, like, New England where leaves on the trees pop like fireworks in October (and with less of a fire risk; good stuff).

If there’s a plus side to this whole thing...guys(!), the Timbers kept a clean sheet! And, yeah, I get the impression that he’s popular as a narc as a high school party with a lot of Timbers fans, but stand-in ‘keeper David Bingham deserves a real share of the credit for that. He came up with saves big, double and good at the 24th and 77th minute. Bingham didn’t do it all alone, happily: Zac McGraw and his rippling physique knocked out the aerial threat time and again – one second-half intervention made it look like he has license to chase the ball across the area – and he got one of those long, sturdy (deep breath) legs in the way of one of SKC’s better attempts at a final ball. Mosquera deserves a ton of credit for making Portland’s right side hell to play down or through and I count both Justin Rasmussen and Dario Zuparic as fully present and entirely serviceable...

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Houston Dynamo FC: Notes on the First Engagement

Bygone era, my friend.

First, where the hell was the beer boot? You can’t get that level of (admittedly, highly-specific) juice on the internet and then fail to feature it? Was it Cincy’s fault for failing to sell them like the hot cakes they are? Was it AppleTV for missing an opportunity to find one? (That said, the camera team kept flashing to a kid eating dipping dots as if he'd discovered love for the first time...in a Disney channel kind of way...wait.)

I’ll start with the good news: FC Cincinnati won its home opener against Houston Dynamo FC by a 2-1 scoreline. Was that line fat enough? Not for my liking, but not every trip to the park can be a stroll, at least not this early in the season.

A couple Cincinnati players looked regular-season-ready – going with Roman Celentano and Obinna Nwobodo as the big, bright stand-outs (and what a time for the latter to break his duck?) – and, outside them (and a couple others), the overall performance rated somewhere between respectable, decent, and good. I’ll flag a couple soft spots later, but I really like two players as human stand-ins for the kind of night Cincinnati had.

Alvaro Barreal is the big one for me – and you can cut his effigy any number of ways. For instance, you can say (and/or theorize) that after seeing its more famous names get blocked out of the game, Cincy made adjustments to open a wide lane for Barreal on the left. To his credit, Barreal took swashbuckling advantage of that space – here, I’m thinking of the pass he picked up in the first half that sent what was left of Houston’s defense into a fire-drill – and, despite being positioned high left to the point Cincy defaulted to a back four (as opposed to the back five shown in Pravda’s line-up) for large stretches, the man made a man-of-the-match’s share worth of defensive interventions...

...and yet, that one time, when Nelson Quinones torched him so bad up Houston’s left that Barreal took a yellow, if just to save his dignity? If that broad concept wasn’t Cincinnati’s performance in a nutshell, I ask you what was?

And do I see Yerson Mosquera standing as another candidate? I have what I feel like accurate recollections of him single-handedly cutting off Houston’s attacking lanes with turf-eating recovery runs on three separate occasions. He didn’t give up much in the air, not that I saw anyway, and most of his actions fell somewhere between “no comment” and “oh, that’s good...”

The MLS Week 1 Preview, The First & Only That Goes in Naked

So fucking hot. Like the Rockettes...

A couple things...

First, I’ve decided (tentatively; always tentatively) to return to the Review/Preview formula I’ve used off and on since...2021(?). The broad concept is to very briefly review the action from the prior weekend – and that’s mostly because I’ll be posting on Wednesdays, i.e., well after the rest of you have already read and watched a whole bunch of other shit – and then look forward to the match-ups for the week ahead. The point of the exercise is less to tell you what’s what - I mean, I barely use analytics - than to talk about why this or that match up for the upcoming [MLS Week ___] looks like the bee’s sexy knees among a crowd of bee’s knees.

The review portion will be headlined by a Game of the Week and, if all goes right, that will be one of the games I noted in the prior week’s Review/Preview. And if that doesn’t make sense, it will soon, trust me, I swear to all the gods high, low and venal, etc.

Now, the bigger change.

People who find these posts via twitter already know that I didn't take MLS HQ’s nu, improved playoff format...well, and that included a brief panic over how I’d keep the love alive through 34 more or less meaningless games.

The good news: I came up with a coping mechanism!
The bad news: It will satisfy no one and nothing besides my yen to keep the viewing fresh.

The plan (so far): I’m going to watch and write about the first five games for the Portland Timbers (schedule) and FC Cincinnati (schedule), the two teams I always follow. That’ll change with the first match in April when I (tentatively) plan on watching every other Portland and Cincinnati game. I'll keep to that schedule until...call it August 30, for now, i.e., the end-run, i.e., my best guess at the time things will actually get interesting for both of them. On the weekends I’m not watching those two teams, I’ll be tuning in and writing about two games featuring entirely different teams. I’ll choose based on trends, curiosity about a player, or maybe something truly freakish like a Chicago Fire FC winning streak. I’ve spend more time on either teams for the past five, six years, so why not take advantage of the AppleTV thing and a six to seven months’ worth of meaningless games?

Portland Timbers 2023 Preview: In the Eye of the Moshpit

One of my several sides...

The Portland Timbers...did not have the greatest 2022 season, as evidenced by last year's final standings:

1. Los Angeles FC (67 pts., 21-9-4, 68 gf, 38 ga, +28)
2. Austin FC (56 pts. (16-10-8, 65 gf, 49 ga, +16)
3. FC Dallas (53 pts., 14-9-11, 48 gf, 37 ga, +11)
4. Los Angeles Galaxy (50 pts., 14-12-8, 58 gf, 51 ga, +7)
5. Nashville SC (50 pts., 13-10-11, 52 gf, 41 ga, +11)
6. Minnesota United FC (48 pts., 14-14-6, 48 gf, 51 ga, -3)
7. Real Salt Lake (47 pts., 12-11-11, 43 gf, 45 ga, -2)
PLAYOFF LINE_________________________________
8. Portland Timbers (46 pts., 11-10-13, 53 gf, 53 ga, 0)
9. Vancouver Whitecaps (43 pts., 12-15-7, 40 gf, 57 ga, -17)
10. Colorado Rapids (43 pts., 11-13-10, 46 g, f, 57 ga, -11)
11. Seattle Sounders (41 pts., 12-17-5, 47 gf, 46 ga, +1)
12. Sporting Kansas City* (40 pts., 11-16-7, 42 gf, 54 ga, -12)
13. Houston Dynamo FC (36 pts., 10-18-6, 43 gf, 56 ga, -13)
14. San Jose Earthquakes (35 pts., 8-15-11, 52 gf, 69 ga, -17)

(* Can the people at MLSSoccer.com kindly decide where this team fits in the alphabet?)

So...how’s 2023 looking so far?

There's a whiff of a hospital ward, for one, courtesy of an injury list that reads too much like Tinkers to Evers to Chance. To recap: Dairon Asprilla will miss the first month, month and a half (knee; maybe knock it off with the backflips?); current back-up d-mid David Ayala will miss the first two months; Felipe Mora likely won’t make a starting eleven until the July and we still don’t know how much Sebastian Blanco the team will get when all's said and done. There’s probably more (there is more, isn’t there?), but, in brighter news (even if I don’t think this view counts as universal), Claudio Bravo will only miss the first couple weeks of the season. Brighter still, with the exception of Asprilla, that list and those timelines started counting from February 3, so Timbers fans could be closer to hail, hail the gang’s all here than they know...but is the gang enough?

None of that feels great, obviously, but nothing set the doubts in my head a-wailin’ as the news that Portland had traded Bill Tuiloma to Charlotte FC for a big pile of MLS Funny Money (GAM? TAM? Oompa Loompa Buckz? Does it matter?). I’ve been anxiously eyeing the Timbers backline since 2022 wrapped up early hoping, praying and wishing that the front office would do something besides cover up for abusers (sorry; too easy), and then what do they go and do besides yank another plank out of the teetering Jenga tower?

FC Cincinnati 2023 Preview: A Case for Optimism from the Outside In

I'm not enjoying me either!

After reports surfaced that AppleTV used a preseason game between Orlando City SC and the New England Revolution to test-drive the broadcast platform, I’d hoped to use that whet the salivary glands before I sat down to write this preview. I can’t find the re-broadcast, sadly, so that’s a whole goddamn preseason of which I saw neither hide nor hair. And I’m still bitter.

FC Cincinnati kicks off its...shit, fifth(!) MLS season next Saturday at home against Houston Dynamo FC – which, to me, gives them a better than even chance of a positive first step into a season that’s somewhere between flushed and drunk with optimism. Most of (the few) things I’ve read and seen over the offseason take Cincy making the playoffs as either a given, or something close enough to that it squeezes out any daylight. And, so, here's where I step in like an uptight father trying to talk his kid past the “indestructible youth” phase. In other words, what's say we start this preview with a splash of cold water?

Let’s start with a fun-fact: Cincy went into the 2022 playoffs tied with Inter Miami CF for the worst defensive record of all the teams that qualified, with 56 goals allowed over the regular season’s 34 games. No less notably, they allowed more goals over the back nine (aka, the second half of the season) at 29 than they did over the first half, when they allowed 27 goals. The latter set of numbers includes the season-opening massacre at the hands of Austin FC, as well as the two heartbreakers against Club de Foot Montreal; taken together, those three losses accounted for 13 of those 27 goals. That’s not to say the defense didn't get the vapors over the 2nd half of the season – it allowed four goals versus New York City FC and at Miami in the second half of the 2022 season – so much as to acknowledge that, outside a glorious late-summer stretch where they kept three clean sheets and kicked the shit out of all comers, Cincy allowed goals at a steady clip throughout the 2022 season.

That’s a long way of saying Cincinnati scored its way into the 2022 post-season. Just three teams scored more goals – and all of them finished in the top two spots in their respective conferences, along with those bastards, Montreal, who scored one goal less than Cincy with 63.

I don’t bring any of that up to shit on last season – particularly not after three God forsaken seasons of lying prostrate at the bottom of Hell and screaming up to an uperturbed heaven. That Cincinnati not only qualified for the playoffs but carried into the Conference Semifinals lands in the galactic/karmic spectrum between the surreal and the miraculous. But, to return to the analogy, consider the above an exercise in reminding my randy teenage son that brakes exist and that it is perhaps wise to tap them now and again...

MLS Weakly, February 5, 2023: Keeping Up with the Joneses, Hoping They Have a Limp

Isn't this what I'm doing here?

The good news: 22 men finally kicked a ball in anger yesterday morning.

The bad news: the Seattle Sounders lost to Egypt’s(?) Al-Ahly in the Club World Cup on an own-goal that pinged off a recycled shot. Basically, Al-Ahly put Seattle into the “murder box” – i.e., they pinned them in their 18 and Seattle couldn’t clear – just as Seattle has done to countless opponents over their better seasons. Will that specific manner of doom will prove to be an omen for the Sounders’ 2023? We’ll see...

It wasn’t a great game, honestly, and neither team wowed me. I thought Seatle played too conservatively, at least in the second half (the only half I saw, for the record), keeping too many dudes behind the ball in defense and committing too few in the attack and too rarely. Ah well, maybe MLS will make a stronger showing when it sends a better team...

...I kid, I kid. Between the time of year they play the Club World Cup and the opposition, I expect any MLS team that makes it to struggle, even in the play-ins.

And yet that wasn’t even the biggest news of the past week: the launch of Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass app last Tuesday kicked up a hell of a lot more chatter. People all over twitter wandered around the big, ol’ digital playground, picked up the toys and generally treated the whole thing like some communal unboxing. I’ll do the same at the tail-end of this post, if on just one feature, and thank gods the chintzy bastards gave me something to talk about between today and First Kick 2023. I’d rather they streamed preseason games too, but we only get what they serve us...and aren’t they all closed-door scrimmages, here, in 2023?

Then again, teams haven’t played that many preseason games as yet – and last week was pretty damn thin until yesterday’s games larded it up. To round up the points of interest so far:

The two most impressive results from the past week (and here's all of 'em, with recaps for each available) saw Orlando City SC beat Minnesota United FC 2-0, with new signing Martin Ojeda reportedly involved, and freshly-minted St. Louis CITY FC (never forget ALL CAPS) smack Inter Miami’s CF’s gob 4-0 – and, just to note it, Miami is winless in preseason and with a -7 goal differential (that’s zero scored and seven allowed). Colorado’s perfect preseason came undone courtesy of a 1-3 loss at Queretaro, while New York City FC finally earned “preseason points” (non-fungible) with yesterday’s 2-1 win at the Los Angeles Galaxy. Charlotte FC started the week brightly with a 3-2 win over DC United and ended it tolerably with a 1-1 draw against the Vancouver Whitecaps – and DC appears to have played Vancouver to another 1-1 draw the same day they lost to Charlotte and that’s weird, right, playing two games in one day?