MLS Off-Season Weekly (01.17.2020): Dismissals, Courtships, and More

What?

Guys! They released the 2020 preseason schedule!

Yeah, yeah, 93.7% of fans think that preseason is bullshit. Personally, I think of it like Advent – i.e., a prelude to the main event, only without the Bible verses and the shitty chocolate. (I know carob when I taste it, mom; don’t you fucking insult me.) It’s when I finally get to see games (guys!), when I finally get to address (and/or wildly extrapolate) from actual player performances; I get evidence, dammit (no matter how subjective it gets once you traverse past hard numbers like goals, assists, and clean sheets). The day I can stop guessing how, say, Gadi Kinda will do in MLS versus telling you he’s either, 1) a storm-driven revelation raging through every MLS defense he encounters, or 2) that name you can’t place in this week’s traveling 18; that's my Christmas! (Which has been true since my kids grew up: so, so transactional; I’d kill that fat jolly son-of-a-bitch on sight, if I ever saw him.)

For what it’s worth, that’s a paragraph-long version of me saying, I’ll care about Chicarito coming to MLS when he makes me care, not before then. Swear to God, fucking hype-trains leave the station daily till about the 10th week of the season…

Personal shit aside, yeah, I’m just excited to see anyone connected to any MLS team kick a ball around. Bring on the shitty live feeds with Jake Zivin muttering over the silence; I’m here for every 90-minute serving of that. Truth be told, FC Cincinnati has a lot more going on this preseason – they start before January ends, in Tucson, and against…Phoenix Rising, I think (do I care? It’s January 29 regardless) – but they’re scheduled to hand in five more games before the regular season starts, and I can’t wait to see how much all the kids, new, young, old, all of ‘em, can impress me (or give me ulcers) before the season can even start. I want my barely-supported opinions and I want them now, basically.

The Portland Timbers, meanwhile, have committed to a trip to Costa Rica (which I’m fine with, even as I don’t fully understand the tradition), followed by the…hold on, Old Trapper Beef Jerky Bowl, or some shit like that. Given my rooting interests, yes, I’m more geeked up (in both senses of the word) about what the Timbers look like going into 2020, but they’re just not doing much this preseason, or much that readily translates. That happens to carry over to player movement/activity. Portland’s being really boring right now – by which I mean, there’s nothing outside the potential/expected signing of Jaroslaw Niezgoda on the Timbers’ horizon, so the roster they have is…it, right? So, yeah, let’s talk about what FC Cincy’s up to…

Dismissals and Courtship
God, where to begin? What’s the top ticket item? Allan Cruz and Mathieu Deplagne getting green cards (the heady mix of stability & flexibility)? The decision to send Fanendo Adi (and Jimmy Hague) into the world without a suitor to catch them (maybe)? Was it the team shipping Leonardo Bertone to Switzerland’s FC Thun, or the ongoing, but with a deadline, flirtation with PSV Eindhoven’s Gaston Pereiro?

To rank those in order of importance,  I’d go: Cruz/Deplagne, then Pereiro, then Adi, then Bertone. But does any of that actually move the needle. If Pereiro actually moves to Cincinnati (he could be trolling for a signing bonus/bigger contract; or maybe he doesn’t want to be there?), that would be the biggest news, at least on the level of ambition (the payoff/production side will come in when it does, but trying is important, y'all!). Until then, keeping hold of two important pieces to your (admittedly shitty, at least at present) line-up is as one-bird-in-the-hand as it gets; arranging to get them green cards amounts to an auto de fe: I believe Deplagne’s solid, and I’m confident Cruz can get better, so I’d call those wins. As for Adi, typing as a Timbers fan, I’ve got a scrap book’s worth of happy memories, so I wish him well…that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge that FC Cincy’s first DP signing was one of the biggest busts I’ve ever seen. As for Bertone, I liked him, and would have liked to have seen what he can do, but I’ve already admitted he was surplus to requirements, so letting him move on feels like a win for team and player.

Overall, though, I don’t think any of these moves recalibrated any meaningful equations – again, Pereiro’s signing, if/when it happens, notwithstanding. (Related, I loved Nijkamp’s comment on whether or not Cincinnati land him specifically; to paraphrase, “there are other players in the world.”) Even after all those moves, FC Cincinnati will continue as a team overloaded on the defensive side until more attacking talent comes along and, to put down a massive marker, if Cincinnati tries to play Haris Medunjanin as a lone defensive midfielder, they will either get fucking wrecked for goals, or they’ll need to play four central defenders. The balance issues have not gone away, basically. Also, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

It’s Funny When Other People Talk About Your Team
Am I desperate to get some Timbers material in here? Probably.

Anyhoo, MLS’s Armchair Analyst posed one question to every team that will play in the league in 2020 and, after poking around most of the pages (and asking, say, the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Seattle Sounders plan to play without defenders (then again, Shane O’Neill to Seattle)), I mostly got a kick out of seeing how much Doyle’s questions about how Portland or Cincinnati line up with either the questions I had, or the feedback I get from my modestly-trafficked polls. With that in mind, here are the questions poised by Doyle for FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers:

FC Cincinnati: Was last year’s late-season defensive solidity a bunker-based mirage?
My Answer: I think I just addressed that: based on the current roster, I’d try to line up Cincy in either a 4-2-3-1, both with a highly-mobile, very defensive player screening the defense whilst backing Medunjanin, or I’d play two d-mids – one a pure destroyer, the other a box-to-box guy (e.g., Cruz), with Medunjanin in front of them in a (hold on…) 4-2-1-2-1 (the main thing is the first 4-2-1). Bottom line: until I see another signing that can push the field forward for Cincinnati without committing defensive suicide, and barring belief that they’ve got a God-level back four, Cincinnati still looks tangled in last season’s snares.

Portland Timbers: Will they get enough production from the wings?
My Answer: WHAT? While there’s no doubt in my mind that the Timbers need width to do…anything better, “production from the wings” needs to mean something better than crossing balls into poorly-qualified men stranded in traffic. I respect Matt Doyle enough to believe that he’s not arguing for better crosses to new forwards, but, closer to the ground, that feels like a nothing statement. And to suggest that Sebastian Blanco doesn’t put up league-elite numbers? I look at a lot of numbers (more than I should) every season, and this is higher-end production.

All the same, my read on what he means matches my own read (what? no way), and that’s easy as typing “Portland needs to find more ways to score goals, because they really suck at crossing the ball, no, seriously, it’s worse than you think.” If that’s in the form of Niezgoda (or, “discord,” as pointed out here) knocking in crosses that the Timbers couldn’t before, good! If it’s Yimmi Chara combining with Jorge Moreira to tear apart the opposition’s left (even if it means Yimmi doesn’t post DP-worthy numbers), good! I think there a shit-ton of ways to skin a cat, but I also know that the Timbers died down the stretch in 2019 by failure to figure more than three or four of them. “Production from the wings” is fine, but “production, by way of God or anything else” is not just better, but more in keeping with the reality that, for as long as I’ve followed them, the Timbers have “needed a winger.”

The Rest of It
Dear God in heaven (wait, is “heaven” capitalized?), did I really fold most of what I wanted to say about both Portland and Cincinnati in the above? Good, good, good. I’m going to close this out with a series of blurbs that will last as long as it takes me to lose interest. Starting in…3, 2, 1.

Colorado. Ambition?
I don’t know even one goddamn thing about Younes Namli and, as much as I was impressed by Nicolas Benezet the few times I saw him play for Toronto, same. I also know the Rapids did some real damage to all comers down the stretch in 2019, so…yeah, I’m paying attention when they look like they’re getting ambitious.

Expanding on the ‘Caps Rebuild Rebuild
I noted the Whitecaps imbalance up above, but, with word they’ve signed Cristian Dajome, I want to dig in a little on what that could mean. First, hailing from Colombia isn’t an automatic plus – i.e., it’s the distance between Diego Chara and Dairon Asprilla(‘s admittedly seasonal brilliance; don’t kill me) – but, more to the point, who gives a shit when the rest of the roster looks like…well, what’s on the bottom of that web-page. Sure, the ‘Caps have a decent d-mid core even between Andy Rose and Russell Teibert, but they’ve got six defenders total, and I know how much (and well) Ali Adnan gets forward. Bottom line, it’s worth going through Doyle’s “one-question-for-each-team” thing, just to see how few defenders too many teams have. This feels oddly urgent. Outside Cincinnati, anyway, where they’re drunk on defenders…

Edson Flores to DC United
People keep telling me this is a big deal and, for what it’s worth, I hope it is. DC has spent enough time in purgatory, blah, blah, blah. The incoherence still reads like it’s real for that team.

BWP with LAFC
Bradley Wright-Phillips training with Los Angeles FC caught my attention, because they are both talented. That said, only one of them is old. That said, can you say super-sub on a reasonable contract? (Correct answer: Only if BWP can.)

That’s it for this week. No, I can’t wait for actual games to get started…even U.S. Men’s National Team games…oh, shit, wait! Did you hear what Alejandro Bedoya said about Gregggg Berhalter’s U.S. Men? “Naïve” is a good word. And I think I’ll elaborate on that later. I mean, after the February 1, 2020 game against...Costa Rica, right?