Philadelphia Union 2-0 FC Cincinnati: Line-Breaking Passes Break Teams

At last! I have whipped a metaphor to stiffness!

If you’re looking for good news, FC Cincinnati lost 0-2 to the Philadelphia Union Wednesday night, and the result didn’t really flatter anyone. Going the other way, if you’re going to call a lot of what FC Cincy put up "shots," you are the patron saint of generosity. Too many of them looked about as threatening as Darren Mattocks’ 29th minute attempt. It was fairly early in the game when “PHI really good at blocking shots” went into my notes, and that didn’t really change till late in the game. I’ll get to that later, but the big takeaway for this game is that Philly deserved the win. Now, the details…

FC Cincinnati fans had all of – what? – five minutes to ask whether it would have mattered or not had Kacper “Sh-Bilko” Przybylko was offside on the go-head goal (wha…? 7 minutes? No shit?). I don’t know how psychic recovery time works, for a variety of reasons, but I hope no one treats the question of whether “Sh-Bilko” (yes, I’ll stop; it just helps me remember the pronunciation) was offside on the Union’s opening goal as the whole damn problem tonight, because it mattered to the same rough extent that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand “caused” World War I – i.e., it was merely the first act in a particularly painful drama (only scaled to 1 versus, oh, 30,000,000 or so, not counting the Spanish Flu, as in, and the "1" is spectator sports suffering, which isn't actual suffering).

FC Cincinnati had a low-block as dense as plywood, one that alternated from suffocation (4-1-4-1) to outright strangulation (5-4-1; rare sightings on that one). The Philadelphia Union had more talent in every position, familiarity, tactical understanding, etc. etc. etc. It took them an entire half, plus a halftime of (presumably) planning and/or screaming to figure out how to breakdown that low-block, but they did it. And once the tide turned, low-tide didn’t return until late in the game, when Cincy substitute, Fatai Alashe, lined up the most unobstructed shot of the game for Cincinnati. They came too late, obviously, but I want to linger on that idea of unobstructed shots, because it’s a biggie.

From what I saw, Cincinnati’s low-block only kicked in when it’s press failed – and that press discombobulated the holy shit out of Philly for the first 45 minutes of the game. Throw the possession stats all the way out the door, because a lot of Philly’s involved pushing the ball across the backline until something actually easy opened up. The Union alternated between isolating players on farthest fringes of the low-block, or trying to play a ball over the top to Fafa Picault, or to Kacper Przybylko. None of that worked: FC Cincy kept Philly’s players too far away from one another to do any damage, and that threatened to spell a decidedly uninspiring phrasing of “success,” but I also think most FC Cincy fans would have eaten 20 crickets in exchange for a draw tonight. If that doesn’t make sense, I’m arguing that just about any draw would have worked for me tonight – and I’m guessing that applies to most fans of FC Cincinnati.

Whatever it took, Philadelphia came out with a new plan and, around the 50th minute, they tried to bury Cincinnati alive under the weight of five straight, menacing corner kicks (and then this). Though tarnished, the Orange and Blue survived all that, only to succumb to that maybe-offside goal at the 63rd minute (link above). The larger, more immediate point in there is the “new plan,” because the talent-gap defined the second half. The first adjustment was what undid FC Cincinnati’s low-block – i.e., having (again, 18-year-old) Brendan Aaronson drop from his CAM role to, first, receive the ball, and then to do whatever the hell he wanted. The (literal) kid became a deep threat every time his foot touched the ball in the second half (and he showed his share of toughness too by surviving a kick or two). This allowed Philadelphia to break lines – and that’s what pulled apart the low-block.

For the record, I’m a massive fan of line-breaking passes; in fact, I question the chances of any team that can’t pass into the teeth of the proverbial dragon, and on the grounds that most teams can defend crosses playing to largely static attacking players. Back to that opening goal, who fucking cares whether or not that goal was offside: the bigger issue is all the time Philly had in Cincinnati’s defensive third with the ball at their players’ feet. The same goes for all the times Philly players got caught offside before that: getting one marginal look after another still boils down to getting looks, and that’s how to grind down a team.

Philly's second goal tells an even darker, one-name tale. Before I get to that, full credit to Alan Koch for his attempt to bring on game-changing subs – there, I’m talking about Kekuta Manneh coming on for Roland Lamah, and Emmanuel Ledesma coming on for Darren Mattocks. Once those players came on, the team shifted from players you play into space (e.g. Mattocks and Lamah) to players who can hold the ball and combine. For all the attempts Cincy had before then, they never gave the Union’s defense so much trouble as when they backed and/or bodied against their defenders and dished to Fatai Alashe (aka, "the most unobstructed shot") – not a clear attacking player by the way, but the guy has a history of bangers, so it’s not crazy. For anyone wondering whether or not the return of Fanendo Adi could help, there’s your template. Overall, I don’t think FC Cincinnati has enough talent to fly forward on the counter – their attack gets too separated from the midfield, and strands the talent in (e.g.) 3-v-god knows how many defenders – but they also struggle to build possession with guys like Mattocks and Lamah stretching into an ever-shrinking defensive space. Maybe that “body-up” formula is the better approach for an essentially, and by serious necessity, defensive team.

If you’re feeling good, this is where it gets dark…

After Philly scored, they had the bench to bring on David Accam and, more importantly, Ilsinho. The latter made the offside question irrelevant by waltzing the meringue through Cincinnati’s left, then handing the dagger to Picault. Regardless of where either team came down on resting talent tonight, the Union had more talent to rest – lethal talent, too, the kind Cincinnati still dreams of having. And that was after starting the kind of promising talent that you can shift your game around like Aaronson, or the occasionally useful skills of Olivier Mbaizo out on Philly’s left or the loud metronome of Haris Medunjanin, or the quiet one of Alejandro Bedoya. Philadelphia is the more complete, constructed team, and it showed throughout the game, but at no time more viscerally apparently as the 81st minute when a “why not?” Union press pinned Cincinnati into its own end and throttled it (like Hercules did to the snakes whilst still in the crib…sorry, they just come to me).

By all the above I mean, yeah, sure, feel bad about the loss, feel stressed about the state of FC Cincinnati. Things aren’t good, and it doesn’t feel like they’ll get better anytime soon. Even as someone who has bizarre good fortune (or keen, if highly localized, talent for spotting a bandwagon; seriously, I started with DC United in the first couple seasons of MLS, then shifted to the New England Revolution in the later 90s (because I moved there), and then followed them through their glory seasons, before the by and large successful Portland Timbers moved up into MLS, at which point I finally had a basically natural rooting interest), I don’t really know about enduring a pure shit team one wretched season after another. I have, on the other hand, seen plenty of doubt and anger when a team is struggling. For as long as I've known FC Cincinnati, they've known nothing but success. It'll be interesting to see what happens if that falls apart.

OK, enough of that. Time to wrap up with some random notes:

- Sunk costs notwithstanding (as in, what’s Tyton’s contract?), I firmly believe that the starting ‘keeper’s job should be Spencer Richey’s to lose. He’s done well all season, and he did fucking wonderfully tonight. I’m a firm believer in showing that success will be rewarded.

- Caleb Stanko is interesting. Sure, the whole thing could have turned on game states, but he looks better as a back-stop than he does as a two-way player (and he should have picked a yellow in the first half). I like both Victor Ulloa and Leanardo Bertone, but also wonder whether they’re the answer as a double-pivot, assuming they are a double-pivot, which I’ve only just thought of now, nevermind whether or not “double pivot” should be hyphenated. All the same, I didn’t track Stanko’s capacity to cover ground as a mobile wall, and that’s a big part of the answer of how to make this midfield get enough “bounce” forward…

- …that first half was terrifying as a cross-country trip on a bus. Nice as it was to see Cincinnati prevent Philly from doing something, it was fucking exhausting to see Cincinnati fail to do anything. That slow descent into the kind of oblivion where you’re too fatigued to even read a book feels more and more like a plausible journey through the rest of Cincinnati’s season. I have horrible thoughts on that (well, spectator sports “horrible”; again, drama), but if there’s a cause for panic around Cincinnati this season, it’s that they’ll fucking bore you to death. I know this is crazy (really, I do), but I’d rather see FC Cincinnati get torn apart trying to find a way to win, than to see them play every game like a UFC submission hold. I’m just saying that one of those paths sacrifices the present to a brighter future.

- Oh, to pick up one thread on Philly, Auston Trusty fucking killed it out there tonight. Even when he fucked up (and he had two biggies), he recovered, then killed it. Philly is talented. I’m also concerned that they’re not that hard to figure out. We’ll see.

All right, that’s a lot. Tapping out for the night. Do you have any idea what time it is over here?