Minnesota United FC 7-1 FC Cincinnati: Knocked on Their Heels, Then Their Asses

Moving on to Ulloa, I'm not sold...

When it comes to choosing between the defining moments of FC Cincinnati’s disastrous, season-worst performance in a season presently collecting them like a wildly indiscriminate philatelist, I have a wide selection from which to choose. Was it when Justin Hoyte slammed the ground in frustration after Emmanuel Ledesma’s “defending” on Cincinnati’s right let Minnesota United FC’s Chase Gasper run into a pasture with time to write a novel about what he would do next? Was it Frankie Amaya standing six feet away from…honestly, does it matter? Anyway, Amaya stood, calling/gesturing for the ball and with no apparent sense of what he’d do with it, he just wanted the ball. Or was it that one time when, with Minnesota ceding ground and FC Cincy plainly bereft of ideas and/or willingness to move, that (probably) Ledesma dished the ball sideways for Victor Ulloa to strike hopelessly toward goal from (at least) 25 yards out?

Describing everything that went wrong in this game would take as long as picking one card from a 52-card deck that someone fanned in front of you and discussing each card at length after flipping it over. Hell, even the one clear bright spot Cincinnati can claim from the afternoon – Ledesma’s goal – probably shouldn’t have gone in. The fact that the “Amaya Moment” described above happened immediately before that goal just underlines how unlikely that goal really was.

By my personal account, Cincinnati enjoyed a decent stretch of soccer, one that lasted from around the 30th minute of their home loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy through the first 20 minutes of this game. They passed the ball fairly well over that period and several players seemed to have some idea as to how to make things happen on the field. Hell, there was even a moment tonight when Rashawn Dally looked like he had some ideas. That was his last one, sadly, and Cincinnati ceded the game onepainfulfuck up at a time until it ended in a crushing [rubbing my eyes] 1-7 loss for FC Cincinnati.

There is literally nothing to analyze about this game (and yet...). Anything Minnesota did right must necessarily be measured against Cincinnati’s sheer, gutted awfulness. Cincy simply didn’t have players with the quality of, to name some examples, Ike Opara, Osvaldo Alonso, or Darwin Quintero. They might make up the first and last with the return of Kendall Waston and (bigger maybe) Roland Lamah, but nothing I’ve seen makes a plausible case that FC Cincy is the equal of Minnesota – a middling Western Conference team at best, btw – even with all present and accounted for. Worse, the game swallowed up Amaya, the one young player on Cincinnati’s roster with any kind of upside. Without dipping too deeply into naked, “what-about-the-children” panic, how will a season or two of effective helplessness shape the kid’s self-belief?

Montreal Impact 2-1 Portland Timbers: Dead Ends & Futures

The image feature is fucked up. Here are birds of paradise getting sexy.

What good is a player who is only good every October? I’m asking for Dairon Asprilla, a player the Portland Timbers have carried on its roster since…hold on…wow, 2015. For all his lung-busting effort, he’s scored fewer goals than you think, and over more performances than you realize. God willing, he’s killing it every day with T2, but, without further excavation, I have only his numbers with the Timbers’ first team to go with, and one has to wait a while before having anything to count…something like being in prison and having one day last six months.

And, wow. Wow, wow, wow. Lucas Melano’s numbers are barely better. Even with the year off, yikes.

The Timbers gambled on its youth tonight against the Montreal Impact. The starting eleven included one regular starters (Cristhian Paredes), another guy who’s slipping out of the regular rotation (Jeff Attinella), and one patch-starter (Julio Cascante), maybe two (Marco Farfan). Every other guy Portland fielded has, at most, a start or two with the first team next to his name. They wound up losing 1-2, both to Montreal, and to a freakish, wonderful goal. Honestly, I take off both hats off to Orji Okwonwko’s winner, because that’s, at best, a 1-in-50 kind of goal, a Bird of Paradise, if you will…

…but on the level of argument, it took Montreal pulling that out of their collective asses to win this game. So, yeah, not all is lost, and that’s why I didn’t go with my original, more arresting sub-title, “I Hate this Team And I’ll Never Watch Them Again.” It was a joke, people…

The game started all right – call it 10-15 minutes – before degenerating into a conspiracy between the Timbers giving away the ball and Montreal winning nearly every duel that sent all the traffic toward Portland’s goal. The Timbers started the second half stronger and, when they equalized via the famous trio of Loria-to-Cascante-to Conechny (OK not famous locally, but do any baseball fans get the reference?). Portland looked capable of God-knows-what after that goal, and they played…relatively even with Montreal for the rest of the game, even if, after Okwonwko scored Montreal’s second goal, they never really looked like coming back into it. All the same, and generally allowing for the reality that Montreal’s B+ team narrowly out-played Portland’s B- team (in Montreal), some players looked ready for this level, while others did not.

Form Guide ULTRA, MLS Week 16: A Message from the Department of Corrections

We regret to inform you, etc.

Let the record show that I skipped two beats this weekend; I won’t be writing about FC Cincinnati’s loss at home to the Los Angeles Galaxy or the Portland Timbers wholesome thrashing of the Houston Dynamo, also at home. This content is stale enough as is, when you miss a wave, you miss a wave, etc.

Moving on to the Major League Soccer week at hand – during which, it bears noting, both the teams I follow (e.g., Cincinnati and Portland) played – the results served up more confirmation than shake-up. For example (and details notwithstanding), the Galaxy beating Cincinnati in Cincinnati is just meeting expectations. The same goes for the Colorado Rapids' 2-2 draw against Vancouver at BC Place; good for the former, bad for the latter, but…well, raise your hand if you see either of those teams as viable contenders. In a somewhat indirect way, the same thing goes for the Chicago Fire’s 1-1 draw against RSL at home: nothing about that result changes the calculus in either conference, even if, at the same time, Chicago’s players should give Mo Adams a solid week’s worth of side eye for that deeply ill-advised hand-ball. So long as you view…more or less all of those teams as strictly undercard material (measure the Zlatan Effect however you see fit), their results hardly demand careful study.

All the same, this severely truncated weekend wasn’t a total waste. For instance, Portland’s full-frontal cleating of Houston, and the sad fallout of Columbus Crew SC’s home loss to Sporting Kansas City hints at the entrenchment of some potentially meaningful trends...going in different directions. Even if you factor in the fact the Timbers bullied a pair of B-teams on the road, the fact that they bullied them remains. Portland is showing vivid signs of life, basically, and with a (crucially) fresh mix of personnel to boot. It’s harder to read SKC’s win over Columbus as a sign of their revival, or as the continuing story of Columbus’ continuing illness. Meanwhile, FC Dallas’ utterly overwhelming demolition of Toronto FC falls into a different category all together – i.e., is a short-handed TFC team a big enough mess that they can be safely ignored, and what does that mean going forward?

Before I dig into the Info-Boxes that will fill in this post’s considerable tail, a visit from the in-house Department of Corrections moved me to revisit…a number of calls I made heading into the Gold Cup break (that barely was). I’ll start with the key for the bottom-most cell in the Info-Boxes, which I use to measure strength of schedule. When you see a “C” in the box under a team, that means I rate them as a contender. “M+” means “mid-table, but with some upside; “M-“ means mid-the wrong side of mid-table. Finally, “R” stands for road kill, as in these are the teams your team should beat, and that you absolutely should panic when they fail to do so. And that’s where the rub came in.

Portland Timbers 4-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: Of Victory and Flexibility

The MVP of second assists.

In an attempt to keep this short (that failed; caveat lector, and is that name taken?), I’m going to use the counter-arguments to describe the Portland Timbers 4-0 submission hold over the Los Angeles Galaxy, here, in the fourth round of the U.S. Open Cup. Yes, at least three of the Timbers’ goals loitered in the neighborhood of lucky and, no, that was nothing like the Galaxy’s best team out there. My response to that is, so what? The fact that wasn’t LA’s best team only matters in terms of what Portland has to handle next time they play LA; the deeper story is that Portland played whatever LA threw onto the field straight off of it – and without fielding every one of its regulars, and that’s your context.

From the time Sebastian Blanco scored Portland’s third, and only fully intentional (and yet still fortunate), goal until the end of the game, the Timbers played cat-and-mouse with LA. For instance, somewhere around the 70th minute, and after a period of flinging the ball forward looking for the next goal, Portland collectively pulled back and steadily passed the ball backwards first, then all over the field, just holding it. I guesstimated the sequence at around 20 consecutive passes, but a full composed minute passed before LA got back on the ball. And then Portland chased LA off the ball again – or LA passed/pissed it away – the whole thing started all over again.

Dame Fortune might have kissed every one of Portland’s goals more or less closer to the lips (and Blanco’s was straight-up tongue), but the Timbers very deliberately wrecked the havoc that lead to each of them – whether by Blanco’s ball over the top to Jeremy “Broadside of” Ebobisse that caused the second goal or the slick combination between Tomas Conechny and Jorge Moreira that ended with the ball falling to Blanco for Portland’s third. As for the fourth goal, I only submit it for the record: after a brief pressing rally around the 2/3 mark of the game, the Galaxy slipped into a stupor for the rest of the game. Another useful deflection, another goal, game, set match, Portland.

That’s the entire narrative thrust of this game, really. Once the Timbers put the Galaxy in the soccer equivalent of a figure-four leg-lock over a 10-minute period in the first, this was 50 minutes of LA failing to find any solutions. Waiting on a tap-out that the rules of the game doesn’t allow, basically, and that means waiting for the final whistle to bless the inevitable. While you’re hear, though, I’ve got three bigger picture ideas to pass on, both about this game and the Timbers as general. In no particular order…

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Louisville City FC: Holy Shit, a Win! (And the Scrabbling Path Forward!)

Suspense is contextual.

I will be brief, I will be brief, I will be brief. [Eh, you be the judge.]

I have two big, related takeaways from FC Cincinnati finally gaining a clear positive during its 2019 season with a 2-1 win (in extra time!) over Louisville City at scenic Nippert Stadium in the over-revered, yet under-valued U.S. Open Cup. First, Louisville’s press disrupted everything Cincinnati so much thought of doing for most of regulation time. Sub-first, I do wonder whether they ran themselves legless – not that I blame them either, given how close that came to being the path to success.

Second, and most crucially, how much did knowing how to manage Louisville help FC Cincy? My personal theory: an uncomfortable amount.

By pressing the way they did – and successfully - Louisville played an underdog’s hand in this game, but Cincinnati holds a clear edge in talent. Making that count took playing around Louisville’s press – something it took Cincinnati the first five minutes of the game to break even once, but it took most of regulation to finally tilt the field in its favor and, this is key, irrevocably.

Once Louisville gave up the (glorious) second goal (Team Kekuta!), and after so much exertion, I couldn’t see them coming back into the game. The underdogs had to take their foot off the gas eventually and, once they did, Cincinnati put the game in a…well, stunningly poorly executed choke-hold. Fuck me, if I didn’t feel like I was yelling “finish him” for a whole goddamn hour.

I’m happy for the win, particularly the spirit of it. Anyone watching the huddle after Fanendo Adi scored his first goal of 2019 (srsly, that can’t be right) should feel heartened by Forrest Lasso’s cross-talk with Adi over the celebrating mob. I have no idea what Lasso said, but everyone looked bought in and that’s how you build a team – aka, Step 1 to Success in team sports.

To go the other way with a thought that feels complicated: the first 70 minutes felt like Cincy bending without breaking while getting muscled all over by Louisville. That dredged up something I’ve noticed from FC Cincy during its long, dark winter-but-it’s-summer in MLS. FC Cincinnati has one hell of a time getting on the front foot in any game. Against a team capable of dominating them, the switch never flips and that's one theory on their string of regular season losses; when playing a Louisville team doing the soccer equivalent of throwing itself onto a hand-grenade to victory, it takes, as it happens, about 78 minutes. The larger point, and I’m going to emphasize this: Cicinnati does not have a reliable way to assert itself in games.

MLS Form Guide ULTRA: Week(s) 14/15: We Have Strength of Schedule Data

One of the many wild cards in play right now.

With the league taking a break to accommodate Gold Cup 2019, the schedulers at Major League Soccer HQ decided to put the regular season on hold until June 22, i.e., when teams across CONCACAF will play...their second group stage game. I don’t know what to say, except that the schedulers seem to like the U.S. Men’s chances about as much as anybody – which is to say, not at all.

Still, with the league on ice for just short of two weeks, I wanted to post this place-holder on the state of play across MLS. Also, with 21 of the league’s 24 teams having 15 games under their belts, it finally feels like pundits have enough data to make generally applicable statements about how every team in the league stacks up in terms of form and quality. I’ve made my own judgments below by lumping them into four broad categories. And those are:

Contenders: The teams who win more often than not and who look like reasonable bets for the playoffs and beyond.

Mid-Table Plus: Teams more likely to beat your team than not, if depending on circumstances (the Houston Dynamo defines this category), but without showing clear signs they can hang with the contenders.

Mid-Table Minus: Teams who are unlikely to compete for anything real (e.g., “we're focusing on Cup play”), but who can be a real pain in the ass when you play them – again, circumstances depending.

Road-Kill: The league’s reliable patsies, the team your team should dunk on every time, and you should be sad when they don’t. A real select group, this one…

I used those four loose categories to come up with the freshly-added “strength of schedule” information now folded into the Info-Boxes down below. And, because that took no small amount of work, and because I’ve got much, much (much, much) more left to do tonight, I’m calling this preamble finished. Just one final note:

New York City FC 5-2 FC Cincinnati: Are You Better Off Today Than You Were Five Games Ago?

He lost his first run, you know. 1976.

And here we area again at where to begin.

One easy place would be when New York City FC’s Maxi Moralez finished their collective long walk into FC Cincinnati’s goal, aka, the moment that became the fifth…sharply humiliating goal in a 5-2 curb-stomping win by the home team. The final score-line pulled off the rare trick of flattering the visitors – e.g., the team who lost by three goals after "scoring" two. Funny thing about those two goals…and that first one, that’s what I like to call “a real striker’s own-goal.” Such technique...

“One Team Can Play. The Other…”

“At Least Wake Their Asses Up”

“They Were Practicing”

Each of those came to me as potential titles for the memorial service you’re about to read. I chose to throw a call-back to The Gipper to peg this specific result to the end of the Alan Koch era. The argument I’m leading to isn’t whether Koch would have done better tonight – because, probably not, see the first discarded title above. What I’m challenging is the top-line premise/logic of Koch’s firing: the idea that he was the problem. That’s not the same as arguing that the team needed a better coach – I’m still of the opinion they did – but of whether better play, or at least morale, would follow from Koch’s firing. Did it have to happen not now, but right now, as it did between the (again) road loss to San Jose Earthquakes (that’s a leading parenthetical) and the admittedly smooth home win over the Montreal Impact?

First, and full disclosure: I cannot speak to morale. I am neither on nor around the team. Moving on…

Colorado Rapids 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Putting Together a Puzzle with a Hammer

The hammer is the puzzle...whoa....

Was it nice to dream that FC Cincinnati could rescue a draw after Kekuta Manneh’s split-second equalizer, even for the minute it took for Nicolas Mezquida to slip a go-ahead goal under Spencer Richey’s arm-pit? Or was that more like someone pointing over your shoulder and yelling “Oh my God, that is the best thing I’ve ever seen!” before kicking you in the balls when you turned to look?

The Colorado Rapids would go on to score one more sloppy goal on the way to a 3-1 win over FC Cincy in the Rockies. With that, a bad streak gets one game longer and Cincinnati fans’ collective nausea at the impotency of its attack rises a little higher up the throat. It’s easy to take a walk with despair, given that fact pattern, but let me see if I can’t scrape a couple positives out of Interim Head Coach Bowl (aka, yesterday’s game…Yohan Damet and Conor Casey…right?).

Cincinnati held a solid edge in possession – damn close to 60/40 – and they impressed both me and Marcelo Balboa (who couldn’t stop talking up Cincinnati’s bravery for playing out of the back) with their composure playing between the defense and midfield…it’s just what happens when they get closer to goal. A moment early in the first half encapsulates FC Cincy’s biggest weakness. They got the ball around the Rapids’ left around the 13th minute and had the chance to play a ball into the area with the Rapids scrambling; sadly, all of Cincinnati’s players ran to more or less the same spot – at or about the penalty spot – and a lot of crowding and tripping over dicks ensued. Not surprisingly, that didn't make the highlights. In fact, the runs Colorado’s players made on their first goal late in the half provides an extremely useful contrast – e.g., see how Kei Kamara’s near-post run cleared space for Andre Shinyashiki’s shot? That’s what happens when you put players who understand that role in that role. Getting the final ball right is every bit as much about runs as it is about the quality of the passes that feed them.

To draw the obvious contrast, I see two “pure” attacking players for Cincy in yesterday’s starting XI: Fanendo Adi (who…I’ll get to it) and Roland Lamah. After that…is Allan Cruz an attacking player? Is Frankie Amaya? I’m on, I don’t think so and wait for it(?), respectively, but how does that flaccid attack play against reasonable expectations of the roster FC Cincinnati built? To (finally) go back to the positives, one of them lurks in the penumbra of the last two paragraphs: FC Cincinnati has decent pieces on the parts of the field where they have the right personnel in the right position. They looked fine knocking the ball around and out of the back, even when Colorado pressed them a little, precisely because the players they had in those roles are where they should be and know what they’re doing in those roles/ places. To flip the argument, it’s the lack of proper personnel where they need them that hurts them.

Portland Timbers 2-3 Los Angeles FC: Do It for Tiffany

I'll do anything, girl...

What was the most important part of last night’s game: Jeff Attinella’s colossal, opening-10 fuck-up, or the series of aggro-pointless skirmishes that tripped one over the next for the last five minutes of regulation? For me, that depends on one’s willingness to see each of those moments in symbolic terms.

To lean into controversy early, I don’t want Attinella to start until Steve Clark gets injured, Attinella’s nerves calm down, or Clark has a collection of episodes that evidence some equal or greater measure of nerviness than Attinella’s. I think Attinella is a damned good goalkeeper; I also think he’s set up a long-term campsite in his head and, until he packs out of that fucker, I’d rather see Clark start. Mind, this isn’t some kind of “Jeff Out” campaign; I’m just noting it as a big deal for scale.

Attinella owns just one of last night’s goals – and Los Angeles FC scored three of ‘em on the way to the 3-2 win they stole out of an…engorged Providence Park (let me have it; just this once). Other Timbers fathered LAFC’s other two goals: Jorge Moreira for dozing off and letting Diego Rossi slip past him to score their second goal, and (probably) Jorge Villafana for failing to track Latif Blessing’s second run to knock home their third. LAFC put up plenty of shots – like this one, for instance, which should’ve deepened Portland’s hole (because LAFC was on a roll; but it’s not like they’re dipping SKOL/Bandits) – and the fact they didn’t gives LAFC something of their own to think about. As well they should, the bastards…

…look, LAFC is the soccer team equivalent of the rich, new kid who shows up at your high school, and he’s better than you at sports, he just humiliated you in debate club warm-ups, and now you’re worried about a bunch of other stupid extemporaneous shit because of all the insecurity that follows from those realities, but it’s cool. You just need to get your head on, and your shit together, because that kid is soft…somewhere. It’s just…you haven’t figured out where, but you will. Or, rather, you have to, or Tiffany might dump you for him…I mean, she’s always been out of your league…