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| 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.
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.
But, here’s the thing: this marks the second consecutive occasion when a team playing FC Cincy “did it to themselves.” It took a different form with Houston – e.g., as argued in my last post, it took Houston 75 minutes to decide to start playing – but the broad pattern of misfires and disconnections carried through both games. That should at least tease the possibility that Cincinnati’s organization and defense plays some role in making the opposition look like clumsy, meandering shit.
To carry that thought one step further, Cincinnati played the better soccer during the first half. Their passes were often crisper and they created the better opportunities. I can pull one example from the (srsly) limited highlights, but also count Leonardo Bertone’s quick shot at Ken Kronholm’s near-post about midway through the first half, and on the grounds it looked one hell of a lot more likely to come off than Przemyslaw Frankowski’s pair of wild shanks from the top of Cincy’s defensive third. (And, if I had to guess, every blocked shot recorded for Chicago today came courtesy of Katai’s insistence on shooting before thinking.) In other words, when time came for Cincinnati to do something constructive, they possessed the purpose and intentionality that Schweinsteiger couldn’t find in the Fire’s game today, or for the first half of the season. And, yes, FC Cincinnati deserves credit for that.
I don’t have much to add. This game didn’t make for a great spectacle, and it really did turn on players making their moments. To name some stand-outs, badly as Herbers fucked up on the first goal, credit Allan Cruz for the sometimes-forgotten art of keeping after the play; Herbers’ mistake goes unpunished if Cruz doesn’t follow up. Also credit Cruz for the shot linked to in the paragraph above – i.e., the one Calvo had to clear off the line (and, surely, that Kronholm guy can’t be the best Chicago can find). Kendall Waston played a big, assertive game out there and he got screwed on that first penalty call, at least as I see it (thanks to Gaitan, for missing/upholding justice). Kekuta Manneh had a pretty solid two-way game, and he did as much as any Cincinnati player to make the Fire’s defense scramble and sweat. Bertone played a nice ball to create the opening goal and I’m still convinced Cincinnati’s a better, more fluid team when he’s on the field.
At the same time, none of these players blew my mind and that’s why I’ll be shoving any belief that this could be the beginning of a turn-around for Cincinnati’s 2019 season. Sure, this makes two straight wins for Cincinnati, but both file under at least mildly surprising. While I don’t think this will move me to lift FC Cincy out of the “road-kill” category in the next Form Guide ULTRA, I see the outlines of what will move me to do it – e.g., more games where the opposing team looks like a sharpened version of its worst self. That showed up as sloppiness in the home win over Houston; with Chicago, it translated as a lack of patience in the attacking third. If I see something similar next Thursday night against DC United back at Nippert Stadium, I’ll lift Cincinnati off the side of the road and start to expect more out of them.
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