Inter Miami CF 0-0 FC Cincinnati: Patience with the Grind & Exorcised Demons(?)

I hear his screams from beyond...

Does MLS still produce the Instant Replay series, the ones where they take a longer look to decide whether a ref fucked up, or did they retire those along with Simon Borg?

Thinking about that time when DeAndre Yedlin gave himself a cramp by falling into the back of some now-forgotten Inter Miami CF attacker somewhere after the 60th minute. That one quacked like a penalty kick, but Tori Penso didn’t call it and VAR didn’t second-guess her, so what’s the point in picking through the log for that particular piece of corn…

…related, anyone else get the feeling MLS keeps controversial calls/non-calls out of the highlight packages they throw together? Just noticed they didn’t include the late winner they yanked away from Miles Robinson in the full highlights for this one either...guess you bury the bodies where folks can’t find 'em… (To their credit, they did post a whole sidebar video on Robinson's thing.)

Inter Miami CF 0-0 FC Cincinnati
About the Game, Very Briefly
Looked sweaty as balls down in Florida and even Miami’s players looked half-cooked by the 80th minute, but both teams played a lively game in the swamp air. The hosts had the better of the game, but Cincy looked to have the better of the chances – particularly after an unstoned viewing of the highlights – and that captures the way the game played out in as few words as I can manage.

Miami’s high, aggressive defending made it hard for any Cincinnati player ahead of Roman Celentano to play the ball facing forward. Balls into the midfield space went backwards or sideways eight times out of ten and seven balls of ten played forward were long and hopeful. The latter (mostly) kept Miami from turning Cincy over in or around their defensive third (mostly; there were some inevitable miscues), but the Orange and Blue did a lot of defending and passing inside their own half. Miami created more chances – Luis Suarez probably shot and teed up their better ones (e.g., the back-post cross to Fafa Picault, saved by Celentano) – and overlapped around Cincy’s left a couple times, but they had to survive more shots on goal and have decent reason to count themselves a little lucky to escape with a point.

10 Thoughts I Had While Watching the Timbers Slip One Past LAFC

First image for "schadenfreude"

Massive damn win for the Portland Timbers last night. You don’t have to love and/or celebrate every facet of the game to accept that…I said to the imaginary person I saw complaining about it. [Ed. - It’s me! He lives in my head and he’s kind of a dick!]

Let’s get to it, speed-round style…

Los Angeles FC 0-1 Portland Timbers FC SC SP Heroes
The Game, Still More Briefly
More back and forth than the final stats suggest, though the majority of the game played out in the middle space between both teams’ defensive thirds and it wasn’t always inspiring. You’ll see good chances in the full highlights – I’ll touch on a couple below – and, with admission to a two-fold bias (I’m a Timbers fan who likes seeing LAFC fail), I thought the Timbers got the better of them (e.g., David Ayala at the end of the first half, David Da Costa in the early middle of the 2nd half (best shot of the game, probs) and a better build-up/decent shot by Ian Smith late in the 2nd). I have many questions about the state of LAFC after watching – at least two appear below – and those inevitably color how much I trust this result as a step toward progress.

Related, Portland didn’t win the game on their best chances. They won on a set piece, scored by Cristhian Paredes, a four-time starter who has played just under a third of all available minutes in 2025 (aka, 595 minutes of 1980, sans stoppage). Rookie Ian Smith served the cross, a player with a mere 29 minutes more played (if with two more starts) than Paredes. Served and server aside, it’s possible the Timbers benefitted from LAFC going with zonal marking on the corner; in any event, no one came within a yard of Paredes until it was too late.

With the state of LAFC duly stipulated into the record, the Timbers played a genuinely impressive defensive game – and I’d call that worth two uncomplicated cheers. I have more on this below, but on a big picture level, whether full-field, whether pressing, whether covering the space behind, the Timbers defense did their homework, got the math right, and walked into the LA night deserved winners. Almost certainly related, this result pushes the Timbers’ defense further to the right side of average in terms of goals allowed in 2025.

10 Thoughts I Had While Watching Portland Draw Minnesota

Minnesota, in human form, at home.

I decided to try something new for match reports and for a couple reasons, but I’ll only bore you with the substantive one: going deep on any given game isn’t so different from running an experiment once with a small and hyper-specific dataset. When you get right down to it, it takes string of results to make a dataset that’s worth a damn – and even those have ups and downs to go around. As my Portland Timbers have demonstrated over the past five (1-3-1) to ten (3-4-3) match days…

Portland Timbers 1-1 Minnesota United FC
About the Game, Still More Briefly
Nothing of note happened in the first half, thus endeth that portion of the post.

Overall, though, pretty goddamn dull, in part due to Minnesota’s soul-sucking approach to the game and in part due to the Timbers looking…familiar in all the wrong ways. Against that, I’m glad I re-watched the second half (I was entertaining through the first viewing, or was I merely hosting, because was I all that entertaining?) because, even as the result felt insufficient (in the biggest picture), Portland put on a better show than I remembered.

Both teams posted better final numbers than I would have guessed after sitting through it (1.5 times). Still, Minnesota put the Timbers in the uncomfortable position of using the ball and the discomfort showed. Nodding back to expectations, the Loons scored on a set piece – a reported specialty for them, despite all the headers over the crossbar (for both teams, really) – with Anthony Markanich adding to his unexpected haul for 2025. Between there and the final whistle, Minnesota either slipped up by allowing Juan David Mosquera time and space in the right channel – either that, or they got cocky and thought they could manage it – and they got within mere minutes of getting away with it. Mosquera snapped back with, 1) one of his best attacking performances of the season, 2) a shot off the crossbar that put-near broke it (certainly somewhere in here), and 3) an assist on Omir Fernandez’s tidy equalizer. Couldn’t feel happier Fernandez, that scrappy little scamp.

Out of context, I’d call this result respectable. Minnesota’s a brick shithouse of a team, they’re a ways higher in the Western Conference standings, if not as high as they would have been if they’d held on, and seeing Portland push to the end felt good. The fact the Timbers pulled it off with a gently rotated starting XI made it feel a little better. Add context back into the mix – i.e., the run of results over the past five, ten games, the reasonable argument that good, competitive teams beat good, competitive teams at home – and things feel a little worse.

FC Cincinnati 2-4 Columbus Crew: Sizing Pat Noonan for a Hairshirt

Wait'll I get this off, you little shit...

After the Columbus Crew scored their fourth goal, the camera panned to a young woman in the stands who alternated between glaring at the field in disbelief and shooting “what the fuck just happened” glances toward her father. Cincinnati’s staff should have escorted that young woman into the locker room (after all the players were dressed and decent, of course) to have her level that same withering glare at every player who suited up for FC Cincinnati on Saturday. Or maybe send in a six-year-old boy still in tears from watching his idols lose. Time for the autopsy…

FC Cincinnati 2-4 Columbus Crew
About the Game
Before getting my hands into the viscera (don’t worry; I don’t do snuff images), I want to preface the general comments with one quick note: the highlights looked worse and more hopeless than the full 90. The final stats weren't so bad, and Columbus held a slim 3-2 lead from the 60th minute and into second half stoppage and Cincy got…kinda sorta back into it with two…vaguely promising stretches of play in the late 70s and the late 80s. It wouldn’t have erased the 60 lost minutes that saw FC Cincinnati’s original two-goal lead evaporate, but a face-saving draw would have been nice, or at least nicer…

As anyone who turned off the world and turned on this game knows, FC Cincy took a two-goal lead before the Columbus Crew got their pants on (Pavel Bucha's opener; Cincy's second fit better down below). Sadly, once they got them on (about 15 minutes in) they commenced to thrashing the home team with their belts. All without their pants falling down…

Mistakes by Cincy’s defense added the final bricks to Columbus’ comeback – first, the deflection off Tah Anunga’s arm (right?), then the own goal/general clustercuss set off by Miles Robinson’s late defensive lunge – but Columbus laid the foundation with two things: by blowing through Cincy’s midfield going forward and smothering Cincy's outlets/transition. This hardly accounts for everything that happened coming at and going out Cincy’s defensive third, but I spotted two things that details that accounted for some of it:

St. Louis CITY FC 2-1 Portland Timbers: Paging General Buck Turgidson

Didn't get the joke in this character's name till I saw it spelled.

So, St. Louis CITY FC was about two times better, by some raw numbers? I figured they had a firm grip on the edge, but there go the judges handing them the decision...

St. Louis CITY FC 2-1 Portland Timbers
About the Game
The Timbers scored the first goal for the second match day in a row and by a cleaner strike from the same player – David Da Costa - within a mere foot or three of where he scored last week’s winner. Santiago Moreno played the (surprisingly easy) ball that slipped Da Costa behind St. Louis’ midfield, thereby challenging the defenders to do anything but back up. They backed off, allowing Da Costa to squeeze his shot through a tangle of legs not much bigger than a mousehole – and good for him!

Portland’s goal came more than a little against the run of play, even with St. Louis failing to mine many chances out of their possession and general upper-handedness. That also typified what passed for the game-state of the first half – i.e., the Timbers met St. Louis’ overall attacking prowess at a 1:3 of raw, undistinguished shots, while making something dangerous out of their best moments (e.g., that slick overlap between Da Costa and Jimer Fory that squeezed some sweat out of Roman Burki; per the full highlights, Da Costa woulda done better to pull back to Kelsy instead of shooting). Portland carried a 1-0 advantage into the halftime locker room…but the numbers were against them even then and that was the last happy memory I have.

Credit for the decisive moment goes to St. Louis’ Tomas Ostrak, who climbed his way up the spine of midfield, one vertebrae at a time, shaking off Timbers defenders on two of them, before forcing the ball forward to where Marcel Hartel (still a funny name) roofed it into Maxime Crepeau’s goal. That moment pinned the tail into the competitive heart of the game: whether Portland could keep finding their slashing paths to chances on St. Louis’ goal versus the weight of St. Louis’ attacking and counter-pressing pressure.

St. Louis CITY FC Scouting Report: Despite Everything You Will Read, I'm Not Taking This Lightly

The MLS website, one month ago...

With all due respect to the opposition, I didn’t remember the last time the Portland Timbers played a tough game until I checked Ye Olde Form Guide – which, just to note it, will be rendered useless by the overbearing ads on the right side within weeks. Some days, I think Don Garber has made crushing the spirit of amateur independents his personal mission…

At any rate, I’d date Portland’s last tough games to the second half of May when they played Seattle at home followed by a road game in Orlando. Just one point from six in there. Counting forward, they have two more soft-on-paper games to go before, per the proverb, shit gets real. That starts with…

St. Louis CITY FC
3-12-6, 15 pts., 21 gf, 34 ga (-13); home 2-4-4, away 1-8-2
Last Results: LDLLWLDLLL (1-7-2)
Strength/Location of Schedule
v SD (1-2 L); v SKC (2-2 D); @ MIN (0-3 L); @ COL (0-1 L); v SJ (2-1 W); @ POR (1-2 L); @ LAG (3-3 D); v ORL (2-4 L); @ HOU (0-1 L); @ RSL (2-3 L)

Those are the (brutal) basics, but let’s unpack some further details.

There’s the (comparatively) stronger home record, I suppose, though 12 match days separate St. Louis’ two home wins. Perhaps noteworthy: they have been good for one home draw per month since April, generally in the middle of the month, so arguably they’re due.

In all seriousness, 2025 has put a lot of hurt on St. Louis and their fans and, outside a two-hour window between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. PST Sunday, they have my sympathy. I don’t know enough to offer a deep read on everything that has gone wrong, but I do see they’ve been without some expected heavy contributors – e.g., Eduard Lowen, Tomas Ostrak and, to a lesser extent, Henry Kessler – for two-thirds to half of the season. (I have vague memories of people hyping Rasmus Alm, but…) I’d check the current availability report for additional, or even new, injuries, but that looks to have been abandoned as well…

Portland Timbers 2-1 New England Revolution, The Late (Late), but Still Pretty Good Show

Treat yourself!

Just rewatched the full highlights and think I heard something about both the Portland Timbers and the New England Revolution rolling into Saturday on unbeaten streaks. Sound salesmanship, but also inaccurate.

Still, the most affirming talking point about the Timbers in 2025 is the fact that, unfortunate trips to the North side of the Great Lakes region notwithstanding (one for your therapist or for your priest, depending on one’s outward reaction), Portland has improved on winning more of the games they should win. Hosting a Revolution team running (currently) four points under the Eastern Conference play-in line definitely makes the list and – drink ‘em if you got ‘em – Portland won this one. As for how they looked doing it.

Portland Timbers 2-1 New England Revolution
About the Game, Briefly
Given the past three or four weeks, just seeing Portland start as the better team counts as a l’il victory (so treat yourself!). They crowned that period of…let’s go with subtle dominance with a go-ahead goal that, all things considered, took a couple happy accidents to come together. That’s not to dismiss (or diss) the goal – the Timbers put together a might chain of “yes, and” to create the opening – but I doubt Santiago Moreno consciously weighted his cross to fall to Ian Smith (who didn’t line up where they had him…right?) and I bet Smith only hits side netting on that same shot once in every half dozen attempts (but prove me wrong, kid; prove me wrong). Now, the worrying thing…

The Revolution equalized 15 minutes later and in a way that highlighted one of Portland’s regular weaknesses (see Stray No. 5), but I was less concerned by that than how close Portland came to stumbling into a five-minute fall apart, i.e., one of those back-to-back goal, multi-goal, bed-shitting breakdowns that sees a game slip away from a team. Just two (or three) minutes after Luca Langoni finished around a firmly-seated Kamal Miller, New England’s Peyton Miller teed up Leo Campana for a simple, short finish that would have handed them the lead. Per the final score, Campana skied it, thereby sparing Portland from chasing the game.