Toronto FC 2-1 FC Cincinnati: My Ongoing Allan Cruz Obsession

This is on the ceiling above my bed, and in 3 other rooms. No, 4.

To start with the good news, FC Cincinnati gave fans a couple things to chew on last night. And, for those who know how this schtick works, the bad news is that the game ended in (yet) another loss for FC Cincy, 2-1 at Toronto FC this time. Moving on now to ambiguous news, what does pushing this current iteration of Toronto FC to within one header of coughing up a point actually mean at this point?

First and foremost, this game recalled the home loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy as much as any recent game. It took Cincinnati too long to come into the game - during which dry spell they gave up a goal they can ill afford – but, once they did, they generally passed the eye test, looked the part of team in North American soccer’s top flight, and so on. In something that may or may not come as a surprise, Cincinnati wound up creating more/better shots by the end of the game – and that’s without some (“alleged”) stars missing. I’ll get to that, but the sad, blunt truth is that Jozy Altidore’s goal for Toronto put the game beyond realistic reach for the Ohioans.

Before focusing on Cincinnati, I want to say, this win should scare the crap out of Toronto and their fans. I think as highly as the next guy of Altidore, but that’s not a goal he scores every week; what’s more, he benefitted (a little) from the pass coming in slightly behind him, in that his touch backwards widened the space for that shot between him and the nearest defender (Hoyte, whose momentum carried him deeper toward Cincinnati’s goal). You can quibble with that – I mean, Wonderwheel (that’s Mikael van der Werff) had the angle to step harder to close down the shot – but, as the broadcast booth kept repeating down the stretch, all it takes is a moment, and Jozy fired that shot pretty goddamn fast.

TFC had a moment or two after that, but nothing remarkable – and certainly not anything like the unrelenting frequency of what Nick DeLeon and Richie Laryea did to Mathieu Deplagne’s flank during the first half. Had you watched only the first half of that game – or even if you shut it off after Jozy’s goal – you probably would have expected the gradual withering of FC Cincy’s resistance until TFC knocked in another goal or two to labor the point about which was the better team. That didn’t happen, and that’s how Cincinnati replicated and, as I see it, improved on that earlier performance against LA. And, Toronto, one of the most expensive teams in MLS, almost let that happen, at home and against the worst team in the league. These are not TFC's finest days...

Portland Timbers 4-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: This Summer's Coming of Age Movie

Another coming of age movie that's very worth seeing...that cast...

Swear to God, that game, despite the lopsided final score, should be what a soccer fan shows the heretics to convert them to the cause. Until the Portland Timbers scored their second pair of goals late in their ultimate, and profoundlysatisfying 4-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy, this game could have gone anywhere from Poulsbo, Washington to Mars. Until the Timbers scored its third goal, this game could have gone, literally, anywhere. As I might have said more than once this season, there but for the grace of Steve Clark…

Despite the lopsided score, this is game was a fucking blast, an example to teams across the league as to how soccer should be played – i.e., both teams looking to both win it and play, and leaving the vertical space open to allow that to happen. (Every time I hear people complain about that, the same thought runs through my head on repeat: “But that’s how you make the game fun, but that’s how you make the game fun, but that’s how you make the game fun,” etc.) That allowed the Galaxy to give as good as they got with disturbing frequency, and that made the whole thing such a grand time. At least half the six saves Steve Clark made were desperate and tricky AF, and the entire experience had the feel of navigating that weird board game/puzzle where you had to steer a ball through a maze with holes all over it, but only by tilting the plane of the board (it was tres analog, obviously). But fun!

The Timbers survived it, though, and a shit-ton of the pressure landed on the shoulders of Cristhian Paredes. And, holy shit, did that kid take it all on and then some. After two seasons of contributing (more or less) nothing to the attack, Paredes delivered, nodding home a freebie and then followed that up by scoring a gem that refracted the light according to scientific parameters. In between those, he chewed up midfield real estate (just in a different way than Timbers fans are used to seeing); I lost track of all the times Paredes played a short lateral pass from the top of Portland’s defense, or rode a crap challenge and kept charging forward, but he starred last night as much as any Timber and, for a 21-year-old who struggled for daylight (or just for me to notice) in 2018, that’s a great fucking sign for the future. It’s quite possible that Portland Timbers fans previewed a coming of age movie last night. (And if you haven’t seen Booksmart, see it. It’s amazing, and it feels a little like this…but probably without the ayahuasca scene. But, to get back to non-claymation/stop-motion references…)

The Timbers as a whole brought the now-familiar aggression, and that kept the game poised on the ragged edge of chaos. Frayed tempers continue as a feature of Timbers games and…it’s complicated. On the one hand, I don’t think they win without playing at a certain heightened pitch, but, on another, it’s entirely possible that MLS referees will start comparing notes on the games they struggle to manage and, if/when Portland’s name keeps coming up? There’s the gamesmanship too – and Paredes gives an example, as when he stayed on the ground after a(n alleged) hard foul only to get up right when LA played the ball out of bounds, or when he took a dive in the area. He got a screaming from Diego Polenta on the former (while Polenta got a card), and ate a yellow for his first dive. Some might call that maturity or savvy, but I call both a risk barely worth taking it. Zlatan lost his shit throughout the game and people will (probably) argue to the end of time over the extent to which Efrain Alvarez's late red followed from Portland driving LA mad. (Again, aggression good, fouls bad. I just see this coming home to roost if it continues…ah, what am I doing, but ruining the moment.

FC Cincinnati 0-2 New England Revolution: I Blame Cruz for Everything and Nothing

I only wrote this, because I think he can handle it...

[Ed. - I understand that my chosen situation is unique, and I don’t expect MLS’s schedulers to anticipate that some random guy from Portland, Oregon will choose FC Cincinnati as his second default club…but I will still blame them every time their scheduling forces me to post late]

It sucks to lose at home – twice as much when you’ve done it so often – but FC Cincinnati put up a…fight Sunday night and, as I see it, that's all a reasonable fan can ask for at this point. And, to be clear, that statement assumes that FC Cincinnati doesn’t have the roster - or, to stretch in a rather desperate direction, the correct alignment of that roster - to make the playoffs, never mind win the league. And, until further notice, that’s the operational assumption of this site.

Before I get into the weeds, the New England Revolution wouldn’t have broken into a sweat beating FC Cincinnati 2-0 at home if it wasn’t so goddamn hot and humid on Sunday (hi, from Portland!). Cincinnati played well enough to end roughly even on numbers – which surprises me more than it should, given my belief that Cincy ended all right – but they didn’t create more than a couple convincing openings and, much as happened against DC United, they never looked like winning the game. It was possible to keep one’s hopes up until the Revs’ second goal at the 55th minute (and, golly what a howler); the odds on getting a draw spiked in that moment and the whole thing played out under a cloud.

It’s a fairly straightforward dynamic, sadly: like any inexperienced group of people, FC Cincinnati lacks the reps to transform mechanics into rhythm. More reps certainly won’t hurt them, but, that will always careen headlong into the buzz-saw of lacking the personnel for as long as that pertains. And, as a thought exercise, I’m going to channel all of that into the body of one player – and I do this no animus toward the player in question - and call this “The Allan Cruz Problem.” First, and to be clear, Allan Cruz is not the problem. The problem is that he’s being asked to do things he’s not up for doing: Cruz doesn’t have the instincts and/or skill-set for the attacking third, or he doesn’t have enough of them: he doesn’t risk passes that force the defense to make decisions and he doesn’t make his own decisions quickly enough.

Seattle Sounders 1-2 Portland Timbers: Good, Slightly Dirty, Feelings

The same coiled buttocks, I tell you....

If there’s a soccer equivalent of telling someone they won a good-sized raffle only to tell them you read the name wrong one minute and fifteen seconds later, this was it. After applying too little pressure to notice for…more or less the entire game, the Seattle Sounders poached a goal off a Julio Cascante bungle to even the score at 1-1. In that tiny amount of time later, Sebastian Blanco earned his paycheck by feeding Brian Fernandez the inch-perfect pass that Fernandez would slip under Stefan Frei’s elbow and win the game for the Portland Timbers. 2-1 to Portland in Seattle, and all is forgiven for at least one of those home draws. Fuck it, both. Tonight has me in a giving mood.

Fernandez got the Timbers’ other goal tonight, a put-back on the kind of Jorge Moreira overlap ‘n’ drive that he’ll surely be patenting before too long (along with that brick of hair he sports atop his head). As much as the last 15-20 minutes made me want to crawl out of my own skin and read a book in a quiet corner, Seattle got the same kinds of chances when the Timbers laid back as they did all game, and that’s more or less the tale of the tape: Portland handled everything Seattle threw at them, and mostly without panicking. Moreover, when Portland actually played – as in tried to dictate what happened on the field and where – they were the better team tonight.

I ended my preview thread for this game with one thought – e.g., the question of whether Seattle is (or was) 10 points better than Portland, as they were in the standings at the start of the day. The current answer is seven points, which is the number of points that separate the teams right now; the question is if/when Portland will overtake the Sounders in the standings. To pick up something noted in the same thread, Seattle has built their vaunted home record by stealing lunch money (big fan of that phrase suddenly) – i.e., winning games against weaker opposition in favorable circumstances. I still rate the Sounders a good bet for the playoffs, but I don’t see the current team roaring into the post-season as they have over the past three years. This isn’t the same team, not without Osvaldo Alonso and Chad Marshall. Losing a spine tends to have consequences…

Portland, on the other hand, looks like they’ve got another year with its main components intact and firing right: Diego Chara showed what he’s all about when he ran down Joevin Jones with his first touch of the ball; Brian Fernandez did the same by trading jabs with Roman Torres…pretty much all game; and, for as long as they pressed the game, the usual suspects, Blanco and Diego Valeri, found a succession of pockets from which to prod Seattle’s defenses. For as long as all that holds up – and for as long Portland can recruit and maintain a sound defense behind it – the Timbers will be competitive in MLS. And, with Larrys Mabiala anchoring that line and Steve Clark playing like his own number one fan behind him, I’m not worried about that part. Portland will always be at its best when it can get its animal spirits running free, and they pulled it off tonight and at the best possible time and place.

FC Cincinnati 1-4 DC United: A Problem with Casting

The importance of the casting call can't be stressed enough. Look at these schlubs.

The only positive you can take out of the….sincerely fucking awful penalty call Bartolomeo Toledo called on behalf of FC Cincinnati is the fact that Emmanuel Ledesma had the poise to put it away. With a stutter-step, which I thought wasn’t legal. And, again, on a total bullshit call.

That that it mattered. Lucas Rodriguez scored the last go-ahead goal of the night just five minutes later. The game ended 1-4 against FC Cincinnati, but the game started getting away from them as early as 10 minutes in. Sure, Kendall Waston pinged a free header off the crossbar – think that was somewhere in or around the 20s – but, for the first time in a while, the game looked very much like a USL team (that’d be Cincy) playing against an MLS team. The same DC United handing out points at home and conjuring malaise in soccer form over its past 10 games (and they’re still 2-2-6 over their past 10 with last night’s win) looked like the better team on both sides of the ball: they played out of trouble more effectively, won their defensive battles (box score be damned), moved the ball more effectively and to better places.

I caught the final 10 minutes of the game in real-time - aka, after hope got lost and fell into a car-compactor then in use – and it seemed to play out under a gentleman’s truce. It was worth circling back to see how they arrived at that moment, because it gave an answer to the question of how much stock Cincinnati fans should place in their last two wins. The short answer is, not a lot. Last night made those look still more like bad days for the Houston Dynamo and the Chicago Fire than good days for Cincinnati.

What really stood out last night – particularly in the second half, especially – was how thoroughly the wheels came off. Right before DC scored its second and final go-ahead goal, I wrote the word “GAPPY” in my notes, and just like that – as in, all caps. Cincinnati wasn’t getting any pressure on the ball, and for a while at that point, while leaving space all over the field. Nearly every player on the field, but especially in midfield, Cincinnati players assumed the proverbial position (not a proverb) and appeared, for lack of a better word, confused as to what would happen next. Call it a fresh twist on ball-watching; it wasn’t the usual case of losing marks, but…I don’t know, sincere curiosity as to what would happen next? Once DC got hold of the game, they only let go of it when sporting decency called them off.

Portland Timbers 1-1 Orlando City SC: Birds in the Bush

They are in the bush. They are not yours.

I’ve got another game to watch/write about (or, rather, I feel compelled to watch another game and write about), so I will try (and arguably fail) to keep this short. (Eh, I've done worse.)

Given the relative promise of each team, and the fact Dom Dwyer was suspended, Nani was home barfing (or something), and Ruan was God knows where (and whatever the hell else happened with Orlando’s regular starting set-up, e.g., Sane), and the fact that Orlando rarely defended beyond its own attacking third, yeah, I’m willing to call the Portland Timbers’ 1-1 draw at home against Orlando City SC the worst-case scenario. The result doesn’t mean anything and/or everything, there are other games (there will always be other games, won't there, James?), but there’s also a time and place for picking up points, and Orlando and Colorado at home is (are?) that time and that place. Goddammit.

As I hinted in the preview thread, all Orlando needs is one goal. Part of me guessed it would take just one mistake, and that gets to what I didn’t say in the thread, and what I could never have foreseen: Zarek Valentin switching way the hell off on a single play. It took impeccable timing meeting a soft clearance for that that shot (one of two for Orlando) to come off, but sometimes soccer’s a sadistic mistress (and, if I’m being honest, that’s probably why I like it) and a team operationally undeserving of a goal gets the first one and comes perilously close to making it count for three points.

Thankfully, Jeremy Ebobisse came on, (arguably) loosened up Orlando’s defensive brick, and scored the second-bite equalizer that salvaged what would have been watching a gymnast fail to stick the landing 26 damn times (and only really coming close on four of them). I’ve got a question that follows from that, and it breaks in (at least) two directions: is Portland better off with Ebobisse out there instead of Andy Polo? Whoops, I just found the third direction on that question. (hmu if you wanna know the three directions, just don’t expect me to remember them.)

Portland Timbers 2-2 Colorado Rapids: Hideous Bookends

I don't want the season to end like this.

I made my first visit to an embiggened Providence Park last night, returning to the same seats where I bought season tickets all those years ago (wistful for 2011, on so many levels). 210 was a standing section that season, and has been for every game I’ve been to since. People stood through the first half and took a seat at the half, per the custom, but, for whatever reason, everyone remained seated when the second half started. I attempted to reassume the (standing) position when the whistle blew to start the second half, as did (literally) two or three others, but the social pressure caught up with us, one by one. The guy who sat down the last man standing with a sweep of his hand to the rest of the fully-seated section…what can I say? He wasn’t wrong.

What caused the bad kind of funk – i.e., the old-school, deflating kind of funk, as opposed to the good funk with the dope beats and bulging bass that makes you want to shake your money-maker till you break it? Was it the deflation of the Colorado Rapids scoring its second goal of the game/the first one in its favor less than a minute after Tommy “OG” Smith put the Timbers in the lead (that was one of the finest own-goals I’ve ever seen; such power)? Surely it wasn’t Colorado’s late rally at the close in the second half, because didn’t Portland ‘keeper Steve Clark give these fans more than everything they could ask of him (certainly more than their sitting asses deserved)? I couldn’t poll them, as I’m accustomed to polling people in twitter (technology fails me, once again), so that will remain a mystery.

In the end, it took anger to make people stand. Seconds after Sebastian Blanco got chopped down while winding up for a shot (and Lalas Abubakar rather ungraciously barked at him where he laid, broken), Julio Cascante got sent off for a scissored lunge at Kei Kamara from behind and, with that, more formerly sedate section rose to its feet, raged foully, and remained standing for the rest of the game. Everyone around me spat words not safe for motherfucking print at that stupid son-of-a-bitch of a referee (Kevin Stott) for nearly as long as it took for Diego Valeri to score the penalty kick that followed from Abubakar’s hand-ball in Colorado’s area. And that started another avalanche of profanity and a full, ripened wheat field’s worth of middle fingers in Stott’s general (stupid, useless) direction.

All the above was a nice reminder of what makes live games worth going to. Oh, and the game ended 2-2 after Sam Nicholson beat (first) Renzo Zambrano, then Clark to equalize for the Rapids. It was a good goal, honestly, not much worse than the one Jonathan Lewis curled past Cascante to equalize for Colorado the first time. Truth is, Colorado played a solid game, certainly a better one than I expected, and I’ll absorb the totality of it all with due humility.

Chicago Fire 1-2 FC Cincinnati: What Schweinsteiger Said

He knows...

Anyone unable to appreciate the full narrative satisfaction of Fanendo Adi giving FC Cincinnati the moment both he and the team needed very, very badly does not deserve spectator sports. I mean, you could write a movie about Adi’s season and end it on the moment where he sat cross-legged on the ground in clearly grateful prayer. Even I, who's agnostic on my more pious days, felt all of that. Something else to note here: that's Adi’s best attacking play; running onto a pass and hitting the ball first time toward (or, god forbid, on) goal. That’s how he scored his best goals with the Portland Timbers. Use it.

Happily, that rare positive act was enough to carry Cincinnati to a 2-1 road win over a disconnected and aimless Chicago Fire team. It took an unlikely, lucky goal to gain an early advantage (Fabian Herbers…dude) and Nico Gaitan struggling from the penalty spot to allow the game to play out as it did to let the result hold up, but it did. As noted by the guys in Chicago’s broadcast booth, the Fire did the balance of whatever “doing” happened in the second half – i.e., they dominated possession and “piled on the shots” – but it’s not often that the gap between shots (20) and shots on goal (7) tells the story of a game so well. For every opening Chicago created, they somehow squandered two of them (absurdity deliberate; I know math), whether by Aleksandar Katai wandering the world over to tee up a shot (when he might have done better to lift his head and look around) or by attacking runs that took the runner out of the play. (C. J. Sapong deserves exemption from that statement; he was one of the few Fire attackers to use his runs to create space for the players around him.)

As sometimes happens when I watch FC Cincy games, I found myself watching Chicago more than I watched them – especially in the second half. Not to take anything away from Cincinnati, because they succeeded in their primary task of staying organized and forcing Chicago to break them down. More often than not, this took the form of watching Chicago under-achieve.

At some point during the game, the suspended Bastian Schweinsteiger stepped into the broadcast both where Chicago’s commenters talked to him about the first half of Chicago’s season. When the conversation turned to the things that might have held them back this year, Schweinsteiger named some demons that plagued Chicago in this loss: not all eleven players showing up (only Francisco Calvo, Dax McCarty and Gaitan stood out as clear positives, kind of the point); issues with communication/coordination (the serial mistiming of passes to runs; by the end of the game, both McCarty and Gaitan resorted to angrily gesturing at teammates to fulfill their most basic functions) and a lack of intention and purpose among the attacking players (which most often manifested in “wings-‘n’ prayers” flails from range from far too many Chicago players). One could make a decent case that Cincinnati didn’t win this game, so much as Chicago lost it. Chicago’s 5-2-4 home record shows they do this (literally) more often than not - again, math: 6 not-fully successful home results > 5 fully-successful results – and, when you’re not winning on the road ever, you need three points at home to get anywhere.

Form Guide ULTRA, Week 18: ....Slippage Theory

Since when does a trapdoor open upward? What the hell is up with Google.

Given the metric shit-ton of data below, and it’s late, so I’ll keep this brief. First, here is the scale I use to “rank” each team in MLS. It’s meant to be vague, and don’t pay too much attention to the order in which I list them. It’s all very much contingent.

C – Contender: a team you can plausibly see winning every time it takes the field.

M+ - Mid-Table-Plus: a team you expect to get results that make sense, plus some strays.

M- - Mid-Table-Minus: they have a little something to them, just not enough of it.

R – Road-Kill: can and will lose anytime and anywhere.

Those letters show up in the last row of the set of tables down below, which I call the Info-Boxes (plus addenda). That’s meant to provide strength of schedule for all the games each team has played, or least a shifting opinion of it. I update (or try to) the letter rankings for every team each week, but without touching the past weeks’ rankings; that’s meant to capture how I felt at the time/fallibility. That feels sufficiently caveated so, moving on…

I went a little nuts with knocking teams off a pedestals in Week 18. Most of the damage happened amongst the Contender class: there I knocked the New York Red Bulls down to M+, despite their record (5-3-2, over their last 10 games), and on the grounds that they no longer look like a team that can beat anyone anywhere. I kicked Atlanta United FC’s ass all the way down to M- because their away record, along with the goal differential that kept them among the top, fell apart. Again, the defining trait of MLS's upper classes turns on beating anyone, anywhere. Down among the dreges, the Houston Dynamo slipped from M+ to M- for a similar reason: they're terrible on the road, and patterns matter once they become entrenched.

There’s trapdoors all over MLS as it turns out, because I also put a bunch of teams on something not far off from an avalanche watch (i.e., the conditions are right for something to fall downhill and fuck up all kinds of things). That group includes: the Seattle Sounders, who have their credibility on the line in real time over their next five games; meanwhile, between their easy recent schedules and tougher times ahead, DC United and the Colorado Rapids round the Avalanche Watch category. (Related, I’d file two teams under “precarious” – as in, they’re fine so long as they can stay on top of the higher branches: FC Dallas and the Chicago Fire).

New York City FC 0-1 Portland Timbers: The Ballad of Andres Flores

There was this guy named Andres Flores, WHOA-oh-oh!

I mean, I get the thought process behind the way that New York City FC lined up on this game’s decisive set-piece – i.e., set the offside line as far away from your goal as possible, because why wouldn’t you? – but that doesn’t mean I understand how that madness made it from the training ground to a game with points on the line. With all that space between that flat, high line and the goal (again, that was by design), it would take nothing more than a good ball over the top, one player slipping, and that’s an attacking player in clear en route to your goal. By my count, a coaching staff should only have to line that up one time before saying, “Oh, shit. Right. What was I thinking?”

That stupidly soft goal provided the separation, but the Portland Timbers owe their 1-0 road win in the Rumble at the Rhombus (ht: @iamseanspencer) to everything that happened around it. Certain players deserve a little more credit/love for delivering a, frankly, contextually massive win: Sebastian Blanco tops the list, and for reasons both obvious and less than, but the players who deserve the most credit are the people who filled in for the players that even most fans agree Portland can’t do without. If I had to choose between them, I’d give Andres Flores the more vigorous nod, but Renzo Zambrano keeps erasing whatever doubts I have about him one start at a time. Those guys, along with Claude Dielna, got thrown into the deep end, with “show us you can win a tough game” ringing in their ears. The stakes were lower for Dairon Asprilla, and on the grounds that he had less responsibility for proving that Portland can win without Diego Chara on the field. And, unless I misheard, winning without Chara is something that hadn’t happened since July 5,…2015 (wha?).

I’ll be damned if Flores, especially, didn’t do his best Chara impression out there tonight. To carry over a thought from last weekend, just about every player channeled their inner Chara tonight, few more so than Dielna and Larrys Mabiala. Stressful as it was to see both of those players as high and wide as I saw them tonight, the Timbers have found real success pushing against the other team’s attack lately.

At the same time, I think the box score gives a truer read on this game than what you’ll see in the super-condensed highlights. Portland had a pair of great chances – and, holy shit, does Diego Valeri still have it (which he proved on multiple occasions tonight) – but NYCFC had more chances and better ones too. The best ones fell to Valentin Castellanos (here’s one), but Portland by and large succeeded in keeping them away from danger zones. And that’s where the box score goes wrong: the Timbers rarely broke a sweat in this game; whatever the numbers say (ungood things), the Timbers never looked uncomfortable tonight.

FC Cincinnati 3-2 Houston Dynamo: Tortoise and Hare Metaphors, Strained

Knew I wasn't the only one who mixed that metaphor....

To start with the big question, what the hell just happened out there? If I’m allowed a follow-up (yes, go ahead), did I like it?

The answer to that hinges on what I really think about the Houston Dynamo’s apparent decision to sit out the first 50 minutes of the game. Could head coach Wilmer Cabrera really have sent them out under instructions to cool their heels through 50 minutes, even if hell and high-water washed over it all, and that they’d start playing then and only then? I don’t want to take anything away from FC Cincinnati, who won every header and clogged even more passing lanes over the same period, and they absolutely deserve credit, both for that and finishing their chances (Rashawn!) on their way to a 3-0 lead (not that one, this one). All the same, Houston struggled to build out of the back, and with lack of trying front and center. Midfielders played the ball backwards over and over again throughout the first half, and without any visible pressure around them; both of their d-mids, Juan Cabezas and Matias Vera, dropped centrally to act as an outlet, but Houston’s defenders bypassed that option again and again, in favoring of shoving the ball up the wings. And Cincinnati’s midfield players – led by Emmanuel Ledesma – chewed that shit up every time.

The Dynamo applied its first (remotely useful) spell of pressure around the middle-50s, when they finally pinned Cincinnati into its defensive end and set up a siege that, ultimately, came very, very (very, very) uncomfortably close to forcing a draw, or…let’s just call it God forbid. The thing that undid Houston was ‘keeper Joe Willis letting a weak shot to roll between his legs just as Houston got its momentum going (see "this one," above). There was no reason to assume that would prove the difference when it happened – honestly, I expected Cincinnati to score one more until about the 80th minute – but Houston flipped a pretty big switch once they found it. When the Mark (probably) Gantor (probably; no offense; I love referees) blew the final whistle, the game ended in a desperately-needed 3-2 win for FC Cincinnati. I call this a great result, and without reservation. After the worst loss in franchise history any win is an unqualified good thing, don’t look gift horses in the mouth, and mind where the Pope has a shit, and so on. (Wait…I always get the thing with popes and bears turned around.)

MLS Form Guide ULTRA, Week 17: Further Adjustments & Telling Futures

Better a filthy hermit than Peter the Hermit. 

“With a dismal start to the 2019 season, that latter statement was unthinkable about two months ago. An opposite story has emerged for the Dynamo, who are now 0-4-1 across their last five MLS games. Houston started the year by hardly putting any foot wrong, but has since come back down to Earth.”

Fucking terrible copy like that is exactly why I recommend people skip The Mothership’s (aka, mlssoccer.com) recaps. Nuance aside (and there is some), Houston came back “down to Earth” when they stopped playing at home. That talking point’s got whiskers, and a dead man’s face is wearing them. I skip most of The Mothership’s content because it combines two things I hate: a dog-pile of hot-takes and treating everything like it’s a mystery. Those problems feed one another, and that’s why I become a filthy hermit once every week to compile the monument to context that I’ve called the Form Guide ULTRA, aka, Why I Started Wearing a Catheter.

In…the post before the Gold Cup break (right?), I introduced a loose scale for ranking teams. In a post some weeks later (last week, in fact), I moved around some of those original rankings and, golly, did I misread some of those. It only looks like I took bribes, honestly, but I’m going to revisit those rankings tonight, and also entertain another delegation from The Department of Corrections. Before getting into that, here are the four categories in my loose scale:

C – Contender: a team you can plausibly see winning every time it takes the field.

M+ - Mid-Table-Plus: a team you expect to get results that make sense, plus some strays.

M- - Mid-Table-Minus: they have a little something to them, just not enough of it.

R – Road-Kill: can and will lose anytime and anywhere.

I’ll start by making one general thought clear: teams will slip between those categories going forward, and how I rate each team week-to-week indicates where I think they fit into the scale above at time of writing. In other words, I can (and will) call a team an M- one week, then bump them down to, say, an R the next week (or vice versa). Next, I will not go back and retroactively update past ratings to reflect current ones, even when in the case of bad calls. If I screwed up and rated a team higher or lower than I should have, I’ll note it and apologize for the same way too many times. Like right now…

Portland Timbers 1-0 FC Dallas: The First Thing, You See, Is to Get Your Foot Planted

Like this, but with just one yellow card.

Dear God, if that wasn’t a cage match. Referee Allen Chapman blessed the whole thing with professional indifference but, in the end, no limbs were lost and no real crimes committed. The Portland Timbers came out of the rough and tumble with one goal more than visiting FC Dallas. And that felt fair, at least where I live (Portland, OR, so…), but a 0-0 wouldn’t have exactly insulted justice. Dallas gave as good as they got. That’s as much for me as it is for you, because I don’t know what the hell to make out of that goddamn team…

To dust off some clutter, Portland beat Dallas 1-0 last night at Providence Park and not one damn thing about that came easily. At the same time, I thought I saw the unveiling of the Timbers’ broad attacking approach to the game in the stretch between the 5th and the 10th minute: believe that every pass will connect, so try everything, and ruthlessly hunt down anything that tells you differently like the damned lie it is. At the precise time I sketched that note onto my pad, Portland was merrily marching up the field by flailing the ball from one side of the field to the other. It looked a little desperate and more than a little low-percentage, but it generally came off, while definitely confusing Dallas and throwing them off. The (highly relative) success of the whole “swinging for the fences” strategy didn’t last for long, and Dallas came back into the game and, generally put up a real fight…

…but, in one blessed/curs’d moment, every cog in the Timbers game-plan, and broad theory of roster construction, meshed together to steal a goal out of a game seemingly sworn to give up no goals. And I think that’s the real story of last night’s game.

Both of these teams took similar approaches to the game. When I tried to phrase it last night, I started with “defending aggressively” – by which I meant chasing down the ball and/or passer at some point on the field, as opposed to keeping your shape and making him break you down. Both Portland and Dallas assumed that general position, but they started at different parts of the field. In their better moments, Dallas rasied a bristling line of confrontation at the center stripe – i.e., anything that crossed it got swarmed like piranhas on whatever the hell is dumb enough to walk into the Amazon. During one truly fascinating phase, the kept both of Portland’s centerbacks and Sebastian Blanco trying to force their way inside that line; Blanco, specifically, could drop out of it, but he couldn’t go back in. Given that Blanco is, or has been, a major piece for Portland getting the ball moving forward, maybe Dallas studied some video and adopted that strategy to nip his usefulness in the bud.