FC Cincinnati, 2019 in Review: A Puzzle and a Carousel

The problem, in WPA format.

For starters, I’ve never followed a team that suffered so much in one season. The world around me turned clockwise or counter-clockwise, but I’ve lead a charmed life when it comes to spectator sports.

And yet is was worse than that for FC Cincinnati in a lot of ways. In the big picture, they had their brightest moments early in the season; but for their March 30 loss to the Philadelphia Union, FC Cincy could have had the strongest start for an expansion team in Major League Soccer history. It probably wouldn't have mattered, but that game marked the turning point in Cincinnati’s 2019 season: after one more promising result – a 1-1 home draw versus Sporting Kansas City (that later provided both irrelevant and predictive for both teams, aka, more time for golf!) - they wouldn’t just lose, they’d lose in bunches: first five straight games, then six straight games, then four straight games, then four more. The end of the season looked a bit brighter, or at least fulfilled the theoretical promise of the team’s original roster construction – the defensive team they designed finally showed up, and that let them ruin a couple seasons (e.g., the Chicago Fire’s and Orlando City SC’s) – but it was too little and too late, on top of being basically unwatchable.

I’m going to (finally) close the chapter on FC Cincinnati’s inaugural 2019 season today. Rather than make anyone but the emotionally sturdiest people stick around till the end in the hope that I’ll have something bright, never mind helpful or insightful to say about 2020, I don’t. I expect hella turnover (as indicated by all the “Thank You __________” posts I see on the FC Cincinnati news page), and, between all the expected personnel turnover and a new coach (Ron Jans, whose current lease on (coaching life) expires December 2020), predictions can’t be anything but a mug’s game. Moving on…

I’ll close out with big-picture talking points, I'll name my personal team MVP…and, yeah, I think that’s about it, but I want to start by drafting a narrative for the 2019 season based on the notes I banged out through the season. And, golly, did production drop off at the end. And, frankly, so did my interest. As they say in France, allons y!

No one expected FC Cincinnati to beat 2018 MLS Cup runners-up, the Seattle Sounders, on the opening game of the season, but Leonardo Bertone at least gave Cincy fans a moment to savor when he scored the team’s first goal – and before the Sounders woke up. They would wake all the way, sadly, and do particular damage on the side of the field Alvas Powell was tasked with holding down. Then came the glory days…

Cincinnati held its banks of four together to draw the 2018 MLS Cup Champs, Atlanta United FC 1-1 in Atlanta; that gave the team its first MLS points and, better still, the newly-acquired Kenny Saief picked up the (really good) assist on Roland Lamah’s goal. After Cincy kicked the (and my) Portland Timbers’ asses three times (savor it, damn you) in their home opener and followed it up with a road win/clean-sheet over the New England Revolution, observers across the league – especially all the people who shit all over Cincinnati’s roster build (e.g., me) – perked up and took notice. And now the links start in earnest…

When Philadelphia stuffed Cincy’s shot at that expansion team record, a couple thoughts came to the fore. The way the Union made Cincy look like an expansion team all over again dragged the terrible performances of the teams they’d played since the Seattle game to the fore – Atlanta was struggling under Frank de Boer’s new system, the Timbers flat-out fucking sucked defensively, and Brad Friedel would be let go by New England several weeks later and with more than enough cause; that every one of those teams would later make the 2019 post-season, no matter how much chinny-chin-chin got shaved off on the way in, contextualizes the hell out of those losses. The home draw against a Sporting KC that most people still (mistakenly) rated followed thereafter and, even though both teams coughed up dog-shit goals, it was still possible to believe Cincinnati could right the ship after the loss to Philly.

Five straight losses followed from there, and the whole thing ended with Cincinnati’s first coach, Alan Koch, losing the locker room and getting canned. The first signs the loss to Philly wasn’t a fluke came with the home obliteration by Real Salt Lake, a game that saw Cincy cough up three goals and counter with one shot on goal. That was part of a trend, as it happens, in that Cincinnati’s scoring dried up without anyone really noticing until three games in. The goals against piled up, but not egregiously, and Koch tried to contain that by parking Caleb Stanko in front of the back four, and this was when at least I saw the rot creeping in. Philly would out-play them again (and get a bit of luck), but Cincy looked more and more incoherent in the attack with each passing game. I dubbed their loss to the Red Bulls as a “turd of a performance,” not least because the Red Bulls played so damn badly, but it was the loss to San Jose, who was terrible at the time (and who missed the playoffs) that really turned the stomach. When a team can’t even pick up a draw against a team sputtering that hard, it spells trouble.

At this point in the season, I had my guys. As noted in my post on the Red Bulls loss, I saw Bertone and Victor Ulloa as Cincy’s “guys,” the people who could perhaps drag them to a result or two when everyone else in whatever 11 Cincinnati fielded got its shit together. Lamah was the other one…and close observers should notice who is missing from the commentary at this point (Starts with F, ends in O, etc).

When Koch left, the team elevated Yoann Damet to the interim head coach position, and the team responded with a win over a Montreal Impact team that proved to be highly erratic (and also missed the playoffs). Damet instituted a possession-first system. And it worked like gang-busters for the Montreal game, but, Jesus Christ, what came after that. Defensive blunders/collapse defined the (blissfully brief) Damet era; over the six losses that followed, Cincinnati gave up 24 goals (4.0 ga/game, aka, oh, shit territory), including getting absolutely mauled by Orlando City SC (again, Orlando), New York City FC (a 5-2 loss that, as noted at the time, “flattered the visitors”), and a completely clueless blow-out at Minnesota. Some of the meltdown involved things beyond the team’s control – e.g., Fanendo Adi’s suspension (there he is!), Greg Garza going down injured, and injuries generally, but it was all bad and the overall issues clearly bigger than those injuries.

With the margin of error on the season quickly evaporating, Cincy pulled out a pair of wins – one against the Houston Dynamo in Cincinnati, the other (more notable one) against the Chicago Fire in Chicago. I called the win over Houston “a great result without reservation” – and the first attacking explosion since the win over Portland plus Mathieu Deplagne straight-jacketing Alberth Elis only added to the elation…and yet, despite controlling 80 minutes of the game, Cincinnati almost coughed up a draw by the end. As for the win over Chicago, I argued the game “took the form of watching Chicago under-achieve.” And, again, look where both teams ended up when the 2019 season ended.

When DC United kicked the holy shit out of Cincy in the next game, I panned Cincinnati for looking “very much like a USL team.” I think Adi was back by then, but it didn’t mean one damn thing because every Cincinnati player looked permanently surprised by everything that happened on the field – call it “hyper-reactivity” – so service wasn’t getting to Adi, everything in the attack remained incoherent, etc. etc. etc. At this point in the season Plan A (a stout defense) had failed, Plan B wasn’t coming together (see notes on Allan Cruz and Frankie Amaya after New England repaid Cincy with a home loss to match theirs), and even Darren Mattocks was getting passed over to see whether Rashawn Dally could do better. By the time Cincinnati lost at home to a, frankly, shitty Vancouver Whitecaps team (and cautionary tale for Cincy’s 2019-20 off-season), I’d basically given up on Cincy getting anything but a little dignity out of the 2019 season.

“This adds to the core of players to potentially carry over into the 2020 season, aka, the next time Cincinnati fans will enjoy reasonable hope of something more than the fleeting gratification of a win here, or a less painful loss there, which is what I’d expect for the rest of this season.”

That came from my post after Cincinnati’s 1-4 loss at NYCFC, and that’s more or less what happened. The overall thesis of that post was pretty straightforward – i.e., Cincy simply didn’t have the players to compete, player-to-player, against a league-elite team like NYC. More to the point, the positions where Cincinnati was competitive could only keep them from losing games, as opposed to winning anything beyond the odd one. And that literally happened once when Cincinnati snuck another win past L’Impact – significantly, on an early goal by Cruz.

I wound up skipping a bunch of games down the stretch – significantly, the home losses to Columbus and Toronto (see? no links), but also the rest – because I didn’t have anything left to say beyond, they’ll probably lose, but by how much? That turned out to matter down the stretch, when Cincinnati finally beat the single-season record for goals against, but dodged the all-time record for single-season losses. I’m not sure it’s possible to aim lower than that, but that's one of those "there where always be Paris" moments you cherish just because the fucking thing exists. It is what you have.

That takes care of the narrative, so let’s move on to the sharper talking points.

My Team MVP – Emmanuel Ledesma
First, how can one call any player “valuable” on a team that broke the record for goals allowed in a season, on top of scoring comically few goals? To put the latter in context, the last time any team scored 31 goals in a season happened in 2017, when DC and the Colorado Rapids tied at that lowly number. You have to go back to 2014 to find a team that scored fewer – that’d be Chivas USA, in its final(?), crushing 2014 season, when they scored just 29 goals. That said, Toronto FC, DC and Chivas all scored fewer goals in 2013, with DC taking the record with just 22 goals scored. Yes, over the same number of games and, dear God, hide the children.

While I think players like Kendall Waston and Deplagne are important to the team, Cincinnati’s defense failed pretty spectacularly, especially given the roster construction. When the strength you design collapses that completely, something clearly went violently wrong.

It gets worse on the attacking end, where the club’s two DPs – that’s Adi and Cruz – combined for a total of eight goals and one assist between them. To give Cruz his due, he accounts for seven of those goals and the lone assist. Adi…just Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess of a season he had. When the two attacking players you literally banked on flop, buckle up for a bad season. And yet that wasn’t the biggest issue (see below).

A couple guys chipped in some numbers – e.g., Kekuta Manneh had four goals and three assists, and Mattocks added 3 goals and as many assists – but Ledesma was the only remotely complete player in terms of both attacking aspects, with six goals and five assists. He’s just about the only player on the roster who showed any capacity to both threaten the opposition goal and make the players around him better. God knows why it took as long as it did to get him to start.

The Fatal Flaw
During the middle-late part of the 2019 season, I had a little freak out on Cruz. Long story short (because it went on), I couldn’t see how the get the most out of Cruz; where to play him on the field, or how he could best contribute to the team. The same goes for Frankie Amaya. Both players have useful attributes – Cruz knows how to attack the goal and a surplus of stamina, while Amaya has natural control on the dribble and he passes several steps above your average 19-year-old – so, I get why Cincy signed both players. But, based on the roster, I think the front office got fixated on collecting puzzle pieces, instead of thinking how the pieces fit together.

At this point, I’m willing to sit on Amaya’s upside, but Cruz gets to the heart of the dilemma - if only because he's a DP. For all his upsides – and, honestly, I’m fine calling him Cincy’s most dangerous (because unpredictable) attacker – I’ve never seen him unlock a defense, he’s a good passer, but not a great one, and he’s neither a ball-winner, nor a tracker. Everything I’ve said about him begs the question: where the hell do you play Cruz? Or Amaya? Also, are they one another's competition for the same role?

The fact it bled goals aside, I think Cincy has a decent back four, if for another year or two, and, sure, they have no forwards worth speaking of. If I had to stab my finger at what killed Cincinnati this weekend, it’d be the incoherence in midfield. At the same time, I can see the thinking when Cincy's front office signed them all – Fatai Alashe blocking and blasting in front of the defense, Bertone spraying the ball all over, Lamah sprinting up one side, while ________ sprinted up the other, and all them feeding the goal-scoring monster, Adi. Injuries/suspensions put a big hurt on the formula, but it never looked great and for a couple reason that track with the general ideas I was hanging on Cruz – e.g., Bertone is invisible in defense for all the wrong reasons, Cruz wound up being better centrally, but you can’t pair him with Bertone (or Ulloa, or without blocking the back four with Stanko) without bleeding goals - which is why I, by and large, let the back four off the hook - and, despite his size, Adi can score with his head, but that's not his game, so how do him and Lamah fit, and who can stop Mattocks from playing left wing and forward in the same game, etc.

The attacking roster never made sense and, to float a theory, that put the defense under a ton of pressure and it broke a record number of times as a result. Any coach would have been challenged by this team…but I still think the coaching carousel knee-capped them as well.

No Brass Ring for You!
My biggest question about the 2019 season surrounds the coaching position, and even that rests on two questions: 1) did it make sense to fire Koch when the team did? And 2) did Jans actually make the team competitively-organized, if only for (tortuously boring) draws by season’s end?

To take both points in turn:

1) I will argue that firing Koch when the team did was a tragic misread of the problems. I don’t doubt that he lost the locker room, but I’d counter that by asking how much the players scapegoated Koch for their own shortcomings - which later became manifest. I won’t pretend to know what happened in the locker room, but, had the front office backed Koch, the locker room would probably have quieted down and there would have been some stability. His replacement, Damet, clearly doesn’t have the time in/knowledge/authority to build a better team, hence the ongoing series of death-spirals that defined Cincinnati’s mid-season. As such, based on events and general theories of coaching, I would have stuck with Koch till it became more untenable (yeah, yeah, how?), while quietly scouting for his replacement.

2) It wasn’t that Cincy got three draws to end the season, but that they got them in games where the opposition – Orlando, Chicago and DC – all really could have used wins, only to see Cincinnati deny them. As noted above, those games were borderline unwatchable, but, so long as he can keep the defense stubborn, I’m certainly more willing to see what Jans can get out of a little more attacking talent, or more attacking coherence – which, surely, the team will find…I mean, they have to…right?

I don’t think there’s anything to write after all the above. 2019 was, in far fewer words, an atrocious season. Cincinnati got zero points from 22 games, against three points from six games and one point from six games, and it all added up to a whole lot of nothing, if with pleasing symmetry. At a certain point, you stopped caring about what Cincinnati was doing, because they probably wouldn't matter by the end of the season...and they didn't. That said, I’m confident the team will look get more points in 2020 and, in the event they don’t, there’s always bourbon.

In all seriousness, I do think there’s nowhere to go but up. As often as I heard him, I liked how Jans talked about the game – which, for lack of a better word, I’d call a cheerful seriousness – and they did look better organized. There’s a ton of work to do going into 2020, but there should also be more clarity about what’s really needed on an apples-to-apples level that simply didn’t exist before…

…if nothing else, just don’t do worse than fucking Nashville next season. Till then.