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| A lie, I tell you. A damned, dirty lie. Either way. |
It’s rare that you have to wait that long for at least one
person to fuck up during a penalty kick shoot-out, but that was in keeping with
the game: tighter than a duck’s ass and, don’t worry, I won’t use that for the
image. FC Cincinnati slammed the first decisive kick over the line, and they left tonight with their first playoff win in team history (seriously?). (Also, here's the Match Center for all of the details you want and more!)
Nothing should be taken away from Nashville SC, because they
played a hell of a game. They even came damn near to fluking to victory by way
of a looping oddball of a goal by Anthony Bourgeois. That erased Corben Bone’s
far more attractive (can I call it sexy?) extra-time goal, the one that let me
think - no, dream - that this game would end within the time allotted by The
Founders (aka, 90 minutes). When the game reached the penalty kick shoot-out
and Nashville couldn’t stop scoring…I don’t know. I’d prepared various parts of
my body for some kind of inevitable, even if I can’t remember what parts
guarded against which event. As one ball followed another into the back of the
net and the inevitable drifted into the unimaginable…look, I’m glass half-empty
as a motherfucker. I wasn’t expecting the best.
Curiously - or not, honestly - the glass filled over that
invisible halfway mark when Kenney Walker stepped to the spot after Nashville’s
Justin Davis skied his missed penalty kick into history. I trust Walker to piss
ice water, and he did. Moreover, Cincinnati had just survived Forrest Lasso stepping to the
spot just one kick before and - won’t lie - that worried me. I can’t explain
why, especially when I rate Lasso’s foot-work higher than your average defender’s.
Maybe it’s simple as a life-long bias against central defenders in attacking
roles that don’t involve their heads. Whatever, I held my breath all the way
through his wind-up, hands and arms wrapped around my head to keep…I dunno,
something in. The doubts from spreading, maybe?
Seeing a man of technique like Walker stride forward, and a
team leader to boot? I’d prepped for him missing but mostly out of respect for
The Fates. Of course Kenney Walker buried it, and FC Cincy won the shoot-out,
its first playoff win in team history, and the chance to keep dreaming of
arriving in Major League Soccer with a trophy in the trunk.
From the latter stages of the second half through the end of
the game, fans tuned into the broadcast would hear the letters “O” and “G”
repeated together over and over again. This was a victory for the “OGs” they
said, all the way through the post-game interviews. It’s cool to remember the
guys that upped your value, and yet I’m already sick of the thought. I’m as
thrilled as the next FC Cincy fan to see Bone sit the other team’s captain on
his (proverbial) ass (Liam Doyle never sat down; he just got over-eager) and
belt a goal past both him and Nashville’s Matt Pickens, but it’s not like Bone
has been some forgotten part of FC Cincy’s attack, something a desperate Alan
Koch rescued from a broom closet at Nippert Stadium to resurrect the season.
He’s contributed reliably and often for as long as I’ve been watching FC Cincy;
hell, Bone played an out-sized role as recently as last week. (and with the
same kind of shot, which makes you wonder about USL defenses…or Bone’s ceiling.
Nah, it’s USL defenses).
The “OG” narrative made some sense with Walker, though,
because, while he’s played, he’s been more of a…wait, never mind. Walker played
28 games in 2018, starting 21 of them. Stakes as high as they were, it’s
another week, another win for FC Cincinnati in the end. More to the point, this
team is only three years old and, while I get that players like Bone, Walker
and McLaughlin had less talent around them in previous seasons than they do
today, those are all good players who will only get better by having better
players around them - e.g, your Emanuel Ledesmas, your Nazmi Albadawis, your
Fatai Alashes. Overall, though, there is no “OG” in a three-year-old squad. FC
Cincinnati is a team forged in the fires of near-success, which means they don’t
know excruciating failure and, being a mainline Protestant (even if a very
former one), I believe in suffering as a curative to…I’ve never considered it,
but maybe they’re all masochists?
Back to the game, where the hell were the “value-added” guys
tonight - i.e., players brought on to build the bridge to the future - apart
from largely bottled up? Fanendo Adi had a great first half’s worth of hold-up
play, but he closed out the same by tripping over the ball (no, in the drugs
sense, as if contemplating meaning) and with tons of space for him to shoot at
goal (he’s scored from there as a Timber, too). As for Alashe, he scouted the
most damaging places for ideal outlet passes out of the defense over the first
30 minutes of the game (srsly, one pass was sublime), but he faded out of the
game from there to the point of his substitution (at a surprisingly early 68th
minute; Walker came on). In all those players’ defense, Nashville game-planned
them well: hard as Adi fought, he could never keep all of Nashville’s winged
monkeys off his back, and I can’t remember either Ledesma or Albadawi having a
look at goal without at least two Nashville players obscuring the view.
Nashville played a very solid game this afternoon.
Worse, and as with last week, Nashville could have stolen
this game, and not just on penalty kicks. At the half I tweeted that FC Cincy
was “in control, but not in charge,” a framing made bolder by the start of the
second half. Nashville dominated minutes 45-55; Alan Winn came damned close to
turning a Ropapa Mensah heel-flick into a goal somewhere in there and that came
somewhere in the middle of a stretch of sustained pressure from Nashville. 18
minutes after Cincinnati recovered from that onslaught, Mensah sliced through a
seam in Cincy’s right to fire a shot off the post and/or crossbar (does it
matter, really?). If soccer was a game of “clean” chance creation, Nashville
would have won this. Bottom-line, this was every bit as close as the score
(and the box score) makes it look.
On the other hand, I still haven’t seen this team lose.
Crazy. Sang-froid in motion.
What does all this mean for the future - by which I mean the
immediate future, the rest of the playoffs? With the caveat that FC Cincy has
what it has (i.e., the best team in the USL, or thereabouts), it depends on
which team they wind up facing. And…I’ve just watched the last 10 minutes of
New York Red Bulls II’s road playoff game to the Charleston Battery and…well,
looks like New York II is coming to town (and, my god, was that 10 minutes of hideous soccer). That’s a blessing as I see it,
because, by the numbers, Charleston is a team a lot like Nashville - low
scoring all ‘round (i.e., they don’t give up many, they don’t score many), and
I think FC Cincy struggles more against teams that give up less. RBNY II feels
like the better fit: true, they’ve scored a lot (71 goals), but they’ve also
gave up a lot too (59). And, while I’d never dismiss anything near or around
The Red Bulls System, I have faith that Cincinnati will run up the score, and
keep the shit out of its own kitchen. In so many words, I expect a win in
the conference semifinals., no disrespect intended.
I also expect that shit will get real in the next round,
perhaps violently. I didn’t like the look of anything in the Eastern Conference bracket that will ultimately provide Cincinnati’s semifinal opponent. And I
like the way Louisville smacked Indy Eleven out of the playoffs even less; 4-1 win games breed confidence, etc. Both the Pittsburgh Riverhounds and Bethlehem
Steel FC strike me as teams cast from the mold most likely to make FC Cincy
fans do other things with their weekends, and sooner than they’d like.
In closing, it’s odd to talk about a team that holds its
fate entirely in its own hands, only with - what is it? Five or six guys to
change the odds? - but FC Cincinnati is that team. As one of the guys in the
broadcast said about Jimmy McLaughlin, “I think he wakes up ready every day.” This
is a team as stacked as any that I’ve seen since I’ve followed Europe’s most
uncompetitive leagues. Until the USL Final, i.e., the time when they will face a
team I know nothing about (aka, a team from the USL’s Western Conference), FC
Cincy has faced every troll it must slay on its way to the final - and I say that knowing that the
semifinal and the USL final will both be a hill - but this team is insane, and
it has options.
At the same time, they really should have broken the 2018-season-long
dead-lock against Nashville FC with Bone’s goal, and they didn’t. There are
still woods ahead. Here’s to hoping they have a big enough axe.
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