FC Cincinnati 0-3 Real Salt Lake: A Night When Plan A Failed

No, FC Cincy, the voices are not friendly. Do not listen.

Well, that didn’t go well, obviously. Anyone who doubted the game was over after Real Salt Lake’s Albert Rusnak buried his 59th minute penalty (deserved; also, Jefferson Savarino is one of their guys), and his second goal of the game, should have disabused of any notions of a comeback by FC Cincinnati at the 65th minute when Alvas Powell picked up the ball and a head of steam and he carried it up the field…with somewhere between seven and eight Cincinnati players on the wrong side of the ball, i.e., behind him. Powell had to turn back inside Cincinnati’s defensive third to wait for everyone else to show up and, no, that’s not a good sign.

The rest of the game stretched out in a slow, frog-in-a-boiling-pot experience that ended the same way it started: Real Salt Lake three (3), FC Cincinnati zero (0). Then again, the whole thing projected as a depressing illusion because, even in their moments of dominance – at the start of each half, generally - Cincinnati created more corners than chances…which is factually untrue, but just barely, and also barely relevant. The one decent shot I remember FC Cincy getting – e.g., Allan Cruz’s header off Roland Lamah’s cross during the early, salad days – couldn’t have been their one (recorded, and seriously?) shot on goal, not least because it wasn’t on goal. Ah, hold on. Just remembered where the shot probably happened.

The match had a couple of turning points, but none as decisive as RSL’s second goal. Whether by accident or conscious decision (only The Shadow knows what goes on in the hearts of men), Cincinnati seemed over-eager to push for an equalizing goal after letting Salt Lake catch them off guard and against the run of play to score the game’s opening, game-winning goal. There was nothing irrational about giving it a shot, not with Cincy generally deciding what happened and where for most of the first half. It did, on the other hand, result in the home team getting caught too far upfield, with pants around ankles. The goal was all but scored when Savarino found Damir Kreilach just on RSL’s side of the midfield stripe, who would go on to complete the dissection from there. Kreilach played the ball to Baird on Cincinnati’s right and, in all the backward scrambling, Cincinnati’s three, final defenders pinched too hard to one side, leaving Rusnak free to set up the ensuing, fatal shooting gallery. It took RSL putting half their seven shots on target in a two-second span to score that second goal – a depressing spectacle, really – but that probably put three points beyond reach.

To pick up on what came back to me at the end of the penultimate paragraph, Cincinnati came as close to scoring as they managed all game (again. one. shot.) at the beginning of the second half, when one of their corners got highly interesting. That cracks open the door to what might have been, but only wide enough to where all you can see on the other side is darkness. Overall, though, Cincinnati could hold the ball and move it around, but they couldn’t take it anywhere worthwhile. RSL, meanwhile, took over the second half of each half (my work with legal descriptions comes through…), and found more ways to be lethal when they had the ball.

Was all this surprising? Hell, yeah. Anyone who saw my pregame tweet-storm might have read it as a prediction that FC Cincinnati would win Friday night, but I don’t usually think in those terms. I counted this as a game they should have won, what with all the “paper” factors in their favor – e.g., RSL is a terrible, fairly undisciplined road-team, they had an important player missing in Everton Luiz (whatever I think of him), etc. – and, as much as anything else, I believed Cincy had enough talent to get the result. More fundamentally still, winning a game like this is how a team earns the honor of being competitive. Yeah…so, what went wrong? On one level, I thought Cincinnati would play an entirely differently game – e.g., daring RSL into a low-midfield block to frustrate them, and push out from there. Based on what I saw, Cincinnati tried to push the game, only to run out of ideas and/or coordination at or around RSL’s uncharacteristically organized defense.

It was more posture than plan – loosely, the fairly reasonable idea that they could possess/press against a crap road team like RSL and dictate the game. Cincinnati did too, and for decently extended periods, but the whole effort peaked with them racking up a disproportionate four of their 13 corners over the span of 4-5 minutes early in the game. And, to push-back against the commentary of someone in the broadcast booth, corners are as low-percentage as playing the field in craps. Sure, you can score a goal off a corner (or win some chips), but it’s just as often a sign of an attack swinging wide, an idea amply supported by Cincinnati’s one shot on goal all night.

While I’m not 100% sure that this loss will send FC Cincy into the post-season competitive abyss, the path to glory looks more cluttered than before. They’ve lost three games of their last four by now, and with a 1-8 goal differential. On the other hand, hey, three of those goals just happened, and that means, until Friday night, they’ve done…all right on the defensive side of things. It’s that one thin goal (and against Sporting Kansas City’s B-Team) that should get the sweat seeping up in the palms of FC Cincinnati’s fans hands (gyuh, that’s clunky). In short, no, the trends are not good. And, to take a step back, this game provided what looked like a situationally ideal opportunity to divert the trends, as they say, toward the light. (Wait…no! It’s not your time, Cincinnati! Come back! Come back!)

The thing that really breaks the back is that this game could have – or, again, should have (dammit!) – ended in some kind of noble failure at worst, with hearty hand-shakes and maybe even one point for all involved. Instead this was a bunch of guys standing at the base of a wall that’s taller than them failing to get over said wall. If you’re looking for what really broke the compass, that’s it: Cincinnati gave every impression that they didn’t know how to win, and against one of the most historically-terrible road teams in MLS.

Thus continues FC Cincinnati’s steady reversion to the narrative assigned them at the beginning of the season, and that’s bad enough. Seeing Plan A – e.g., the stout, suffocate-‘em-all defense-first organizing principle - stumble as badly as it did on Friday bears the ominous feel of getting one’s first note from debt collectors after a couple month’s worth of scrambling for more hours – i.e., the problems are stacking up and the solutions thereto simply aren’t materializing…

…if there’s a silver lining in all this, it’s that Cincinnati has another plausible shot at rewriting its destiny next weekend, when it plays a New York Red Bulls team one could politely describe as somewhere between “in flux” and “in trouble.” If the reports are true that Thierry Henry will cross the pond to take over as the Red Bulls’ new head coach, it’ll be interesting to see how the team reacts. In the near term, Cincinnati could find themselves run over by a bunch of players falling over themselves to impress the new coach (and especially that new coach, aka, a club legend). With that in mind, I think they’d be better off catching the Red Bulls a couple weeks later, but that’s not how the cookie/schedule crumbled.

Right, I’m going to close out this over-long ramble with some random notes.

- To answer the top-line question, yes, I think Cincinnati needs to play more conservatively. It feels like a defend-and-counter world from now until the end of the season, or until they sign some new players.

- There was this moment early in the game when Powell dribbled over the center stripe on the right, and Kenny Saief dropped back to take the ball off his hands and send it forward. To Saief’s visible frustration, Powell held the ball long enough for the defense to shift, so he was fucked when he finally got it. That moment just felt emblematic of the broader confusion of how to play Saief – something that I think has something to do with his skill-set not matching the role the team needs him to play.

- Anyone feel like Christmas, aka, the 4-3-2-1? I really like the Victor Ulloa/Leonardo Bertone d-mid pairing. And, by that, I mean I rate them MLS-ready. So they stay on. I think the back four is good enough, even if the fullback situation feels unsettled, Mathieu Deplagne excepted. So that’s your back four, and your two defensive midfielders, the question is what to do with the rest of the players? Because nothing I’ve seen from Saief make me think he’s a No. 10, I wonder how he’d do playing a Wil Trapp style role, or doing all that running and connecting from a deeper position on the field, and with Bertone and Ulloa (or [other player]) providing defensive cover.

- Finally, I know Emanuel Ledesma is unfit, but, until a new signing comes on, I think getting him on to support the attack, and with enough defensive support behind him is FC Cincy’s best crack at getting practically competitive. For what it's worth, I want him as one of the players "at the 2."

Right, that’s everything for today and the weekend, with regard to FC Cincy.