FC Cincinnati 0-2 Philadelphia Union: Alternate Timelines & Lassoing Metaphors

They do dress better over in that timeline...

To start with a notice from the Department of Corrections/Over-Reach: my preview tweets suggested that FC Cincinnati might benefit from the Philadelphia Union playing in a 4-4-2 diamond. Nope.Oh, and before getting rather existentially into the weeds below, I don't intend any of what's below to stand as "what it all means" judgments about FC Cincinnati, or their larger fate in 2019. If anything, this loss complicated all that.

If you missed the Philadelphia Union’s 3-0 win over Columbus Crew SC, you caught a fairly linear encore with their 2-0 win over FCCincinnati. It featured the same feeling of suffocation, of no way to keep the ball going where your team wants it to, and no thorough way of keeping it away from where they don’t. It seemed like Philly won every 50/50 ball, that they always had a player where they needed one to be and, even when it was one lone Union player that had to perform in order to keep bad things at pay, that player performed.

The Union had a better afternoon on the slippery turf of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium, pure and simple. That left me more curious than usual to see how that game looked according to the box score, and FC Cincy’s tiny handful of shots feels like the number to highlight – even more than Philly firing off three times as many (and, just to note it, the duels/tackles data says the Union didn’t win every 50/50, and that says something about the function of perception). To hang a frame on it, this was the performance that critics of FC Cincinnati’s roster build expected to see in 2019, present company included. And, after yesterday’s loss, I mean that globally: expansion teams are supposed to look out of their depth, lacking in polish and sophistication, and on both sides of the ball. And that brings me to the Union’s second goal.

Matthieu Deplagne has impressed me as much as any player on FC Cincinnati’s roster; I’m also a Forrest Lasso stan going back to last June, think the world of the big lug and his upside, etc. And yet, examining the anatomy of that goal reveals that both players fucked up in that moment – Deplagne with his clearance-in-two-minds that dropped the ball at David Accam’s lurking feet, Lasso for biting on Accam’s cut eagerly as the world’s dumbest trout. Mistakes happen in these decisive moments (when mommy and daddy love each other very much, this is how goals happen, etc.), but that split second in time captured the macro-trends of the larger contest: the Union forced Cincinnati to do things…sub-optimally all game long. For the just the second time in 2019, FC Cincinnati looked like the out-classed expansion team.

A thought exercise follows from that: in a different – and, frankly, shittier universe – I’d be thinking and writing about this loss in a totally different way. Had FC Cincinnati got rolled over by an Atlanta United FC team (with some semblance of its shit together), had they faced the Portland Timbers with Diego Chara (and the rest of a Timbers team not rummaging around its own asses for fresh ways to fuck up), and had they faced a post-Brad-Friedel-yelled-at-me New England Revolution on the road instead of the docile twits that gave them their first road win in MLS, what the Union did to Cincinnati would have continued that narrative – the expected narrative, really. Back in the time-line we know, the one where Cincinnati came into this game with seven points and a shot at the strongest start by an expansion team in MLS history, we’ve got a game/scenario like one of those string-and-thumbtacks outlines of a crime spree, only with too few strings to tie things together. And yet, the attempt must be made before more bodies pile up…

For what it’s worth, I’m more anxious about Philly’s first goal than I am about their second, and on the grounds that it involved an actual breakdown. The replay shows too little of the field for my liking (dammit!), but the way the players from each team come into that tight frame makes it fairly clear that Cincinnati got caught with too many players upfield. It’s not great that Philly arranged to have two attacking players isolated against as many defenders, but it was Marco Fabian running ahead of Cincinnati’s midfield that gave him room to tap the ball around the one defender (Deplagne, I think) and to his left foot for a clear shot with a lot of goal to shoot at. Cincinnati hasn’t lost its shape like that for most of the season, and that’s been a major reason for their success.

The bigger issue, though, was the balance of the game writ large. Philly controlled proceedings from whistle-to-whistle. The one time Cincinnati had a chance to kick against the narrative (and, memo to every team in MLS, that play should look familiar), Andre Blake snuffed it out. Now, what to make of that? As suggested my preview tweets, Cincinnati hadn’t faced a team that plays Philly’s press-‘n’-possession style and, on the evidence, it’s not something they like, or that they’ve figured out how to counter. And, as alluded to above (e.g., the list of games from the alternate time-line in which Cincinnati played like an expansion team), the Union could have been nothing more or less than the second team they’ve played in 2019 who brought their full set of marbles to The Ring of Honor. (What? I was really into marbles as a youth.) That’s the super-narrative I want to leave hanging for now: how far has the overall quality and form of its opposition gone toward shaping FC Cincinnati’s season so far?

On a back channel, someone suggested that the shitty weather would make it hard to get a useful read out of this game. That didn’t strike me as a factor yesterday – or, rather, that it was a factor that impacted both teams equally and the right team won. Worse, the particulars of how this loss unfolded – with Philly taking permanent ownership of the driver’s seat, and Cincinnati taking the shape of a semi-anonymous collection of overwhelmed young men – threw a fairly major twist into the super-narrative outlined above. Moreover, it put real questions to one aspect in particular – e.g., Cincinnati’s capacity for going vertical with after-burners firing. Bad games happen, obviously, and there’s nothing remarkable in that; it’s how far this played outside of prior type that leaves me wondering what to actually make of everything that came before it. For instance, did I get ahead of everything just last weekend when I talked about "trusting the roster build"? Why was FC Cincy able to “play its game” against those other teams, but not Philadelphia, basically?

Answers to all the above will come as the season goes on (whether or not I’m able to make better sense of them is a different question), but I want to close on one clammy thought. With two MLS starts to go by, I expect to be less full-throated in my praise of Lasso going forward. I don’t know how far he’s been instructed to play it safe – with his clearances, in particular – but, however all that comes together, it drops his overall level/effectiveness as a player. Every defender plays under pressure, but not all show actual grace thereunder. Even when a team can’t necessarily find players who fit that description, that’s where any team with ambition has to set the bar at that position. Every flailed, get-that-shit-outta-here clearance is a missed opportunity to start the ball toward the other team’s goal in some controlled manner; worst case, it gives the ball back to the other team and keeps your defense on the back foot. I still value Lasso as a player – he’s very solid depth, he’s got great size and, given time, he passes just fine – but that’s an aspect of his game I’ll be watching going forward.

To make a metaphor of Lasso’s Saturday afternoon, this loss gave at least one scenario for what he and the rest of the team looks like when they can’t “play their game.” More than anything else, however, I’m looking to see how Cincinnati bounces back from being wakened from what has been a dream start to their first season in MLS.

UPDATE: Crap, forgot to drop a few notes on Philly - only have a couple. I'm happy to see Accam playing well for them; he's been a complete pain-in-the-ass since his father's passing, so file that under sucky trigger, but positive outcome. The bigger things to highlight is how well their young defenders are holding up (e.g. Aaron Trusty (20), Kai Wagner (22), even Jack Elliott), and how active and thoroughly slippery 18-year-old Brenden Aaronson looked out there. All them looked like the belonged entirely. The Union's youth movement looks pretty damn impressive.