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| 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…
Because Cincy took their best shots in those last 10 minutes
- could have been one-third, or as many as half of them - the stats and numbers
under the Distribution tab gives a much better sense of how this game unfolded.
Riding the backs of players like Alan Winn (a pushy little shit, if a talented
one), Brandon Allen (who very nearly broke the deadlock at the 68th minute),
and Lebo Moloto (MVP per Nashville’s fans, and they weren’t wrong), Nashville
attacked in waves. Most of those broke against the wall built by Keinan and
Lasso, but they also missed the net a bit often for professionals (17 shots of 20, somewhere other than on-frame), but at least
two chances (Allen’s at the 68th and…another at the 79th) came from good
openings and had every Cincinnati player beat, including goalkeeper Evan
Newton. I recall the visitors playing inside their own half a lot, as well as
most of what they did on the attacking side petering out before the attacking
third.
Until the 82nd minute, that is.
Precisely because their backline barely bent and rarely
broke, Cincy came very, very close to stealing all three points. Their roll
coincided with the introduction of their last two subs - Emery Welshman for
Danni Konig (77) and Russell Cicerone for Corben Bone (81) - and that makes it
tempting to credit those two players. Cicerone, in particular, came within Matt
Pickens considerable body of scoring after scrapping his way to a breakaway.
Like Keinan and Lasso on the other end, Pickens stood as the wall - if a little
farther back - and, apart from a header by Lasso that failed to enough “glance”
on it, Pickens’ performance was decisive as it was final and necessary.
I hesitate to credit the subs, because Bone, especially,
carried most of whatever threat Cincy managed for as long as he was on the
field. He crosses a clean ball and came as close as Cicerone to scoring, even
if he had to stab at his while Cicerone got a better shot. I feel better calling
this a case of fresh legs coming good, basically, with a side of an off-night
for both Konig and Ledesma. And Cicerone, specifically, goes some way to
supporting that idea. Between the accident of when I started following
Cincinnati and how much he’s impacted the set of games I’ve watched, I viewed
him as an anchor of the team’s attack. A stray comment from the broadcast booth
hepped me to the fact that Cicerone has played a total of 255 minutes for all
of 2018, with only three starts. That doesn’t change my impression of him as a
player - he’s impressed me every time, and definitely starred in at least one
game - but it’s also clear that Cincinnati built a lot of the success they’ve
had on the season without his services. That said, I don’t see how he’s not
pushing for minutes on this team, what with those eight minutes he put in.
Back to the original premise - the one about how Nashville
stacks up against Cincinnati, or vice versa - it started weird, but got more interesting
by game’s end. The broadcast opened with the play-by-play guy (uh…didn’t write
it down; took me long enough to find Woodard’s name) gushing about the
magnitude of this game, about how only a venue massive as Nissan Stadium could
contain it as the camera panned over mostly empty seats. The “rivalry” between
the teams got mentioned now and then, a fascinating angle given that this was the
first time these two teams have met, and Cincinnati played its first season in
2016, while Nashville SC played its USL debut…uh, just this year. Then again, what
is more MLS than a manufactured rivalry?
Hype aside, everything does look a little more interesting
after seeing how close Nashville played Cincy - and more from Cincinnati’s
perspective than Nashville’s, because they’re the team joining MLS next freakin' season. Rather than parse this question through every player on Cincy’s roster,
I’m going to focus on one, Michael Lahoud. He’s a tidy player, or has been in
every game I’ve so far seen him play for the team. He defends well, holds down
the spot in front of the defenders pretty well, and his distribution is quick
(as in, he rarely takes more than two touches), but also safe. He plays his
role a little like Kyle Beckerman, but (ah, the crucial “but”) a couple steps
down from Beckerman and in all aspects of his game. On Real Salt Lake’s best
teams, Beckerman owned the center of the field and, while he mostly worked at a
hub in their system, he had the talent and touch to play balls forward, to
support the attack, or even join it. Lahoud just doesn’t do that, and that’s
basically the line I’m drawing, and not just between Lahoud and Beckerman, but
between FC Cincinnati and a team that actually competes in MLS. I mean, between the "United FC's," it's Atlanta you want to emulate, not Minnesota.
Rather than list all the reasons I wonder how comfortably
Cincinnati will step to the bigger stage next season, I’ll just say that
Nashville SC added one or two more. In terms of the game alone - both what
happened during and the opposition - Cincinnati got a good result yesterday
and, as noted above, they had their fingers wrapped around all three points now
and again. At the same time, I’ve watched this team find their feet in every
game they’ve played so far and, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, they’d find a way
to take it over. That didn’t happen this time.
So, let’s see what happens next time, yeah? Till then…
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