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.

I want to highlight DC’s third and fourth goals, to both damn and exonerate the central defense (and Justin Hoyte) a little. The fourth goal was equal parts easy and sad: Cincinnati got caught high up the field looking for a goal and that put Hoyte in a foot race against Paul Arriola about three strides behind; I don’t think Hoyte wins that even if they started on equal terms, so that’s one you write off. The third goal stands out more than the fourth goal, and because it was more of a team effort. Cincinnati had defenders behind the ball on that one – two, in fact, Hoyte and Waston – so fault them both for getting beat to the extent you think Wayne Rooney is a decent player. That was not, however, a case of Cincinnati getting caught too far up the field; it was one touch by Leonardo Jara more or less bypassing Cincinnati’s midfield and, probably the fullback. He followed it up with the one-helluva-cross (seriously, that fucker was sublime) that set up Rooney to put two defenders through the spin cycle.

FC Cincy did stuff around all of the above, but without ever looking like they’d actually take control of the game and win it. And things get complicated from here, because, last night still left me with the same feeling I’ve had over the last three games – i.e., the question of whether Cincinnati is/was “winning” turned on the brute fact of whether or not they’d scored more goals than the other team. They scored goals without really building them and, more than anything else, they created something like a negative space that flustered the opposing attack without it ever being entirely clear how they were doing it. I doubt they did anything different last night or played all that much worse: the difference could have turned on something simple as DC United having the talent to play through that negative space, where Houston and Chicago did not (and for whatever reason).

I’m going to close on something Alejandro Moreno said from the broadcast booth – and probably more than once. The specific comment concerned Fanendo Adi, but it applies to FC Cincinnati as a whole; hell, it could define them. To paraphrase Moreno’s comment on Adi, he said something along the lines of, Adi was great for the Portland Timbers because he had a guy like Diego Valeri feeding him the ball (also, this was total baller/MVP Valeri from 2-3 seasons ago). You can read that a couple ways, but I believe that Moreno was commenting less on Adi’s capacity to find his own goals and more on Cincinnati’s incapacity to provide them.

The bright, early days aside, questions about FC Cincinnati roster construction have hung over the team all season - and for very sound reasons. Adi kicked off a little controversy when he addressed that directly earlier in the season, but everyone dragged the commentary back into the locker room, where most people seem to agree that sort of thing belongs, but Adi was right then, and Moreno is right now. FC Cincy built a roster around a cast of supporting players. This often gets framed as “we need a No. 10,” but I hate that line, because it assumes that teams can just run to Kroger’s and lift a No. 10 out the produce section or the fucking deli or something, but that’s not the case, and never will be. Whatever his talents, Allan Cruz is not the guy to feed the ball to Adi (he strikes as better-suited to Diego Chara’s box-to-box role); Kekuta Manneh, for all his (former?) speed is not, and never has been, an assist machine. Leonardo Bertone is probably the best passer on the team, but, given where he plays, he’ll rely provide the final ball to Adi, Manneh, or even Roland Lamah, if/when he returns.

FC Cincinnati’s front office took a gamble when they built a team that would be hard to beat. That gamble didn’t pay off last night – and I mean, AT ALL (see above) - and hasn’t paid off for much of the season (remember Minnesota). I don’t know how much better or worse things would have been if they tried to find some serviceable version of a No. 10, but it gets harder and harder to bless their choice to not even attempt it with each passing game.