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| RBNY tomorrow, RBNY forever! |
For what it’s worth, refreshing my memory by watching the MLS-in-15 cast a brighter light on FC Cincinnati’s grinding 1-0 road win over the New York Red Bulls. If nothing else, it made the whole thing come off as less of a grind - at least on Cincy’s end of things. Oh, and the goal that won it was an absolute delight: Haris Medunjanin floated an olimpico over Red Bulls’ ‘keeper David Jensen’s head, who was dead to rights even before he bumbled backward a defender who’s name doesn’t really matter. Better still, seeing all those Cincy players come up to Medunjanin during the after-game handshakes with dazed and happy looks on their faces might count as my personal highlight of their 2020 season so far. If there were other, better ones, blame it on recency bias.
My strongest overall reaction to the game is pretty simple: wow, do the Red Bulls suck. I accept that’s a strange thing to say, what with them two whole points over FC Cincy in the Eastern Conference standings, but my eyes aren’t lying to me either. New York managed just two shots on goal last Saturday, one of them a pathetic slow-roller that Cincy ‘keeper saw coming from a mile away and had to wait on its arrival. They flailed a couple shots from range - Brian White probably had the best one of those at just half a dozen feet over the crossbar - but, overall, the Red Bulls strained for openings and didn’t look like they’d ever score.
That adds up a little better when you check the standings (already one game stale) and see that New York has scored just one more goal than Cincinnati during the 2020 season - and, so long as you accept that Cincy’s attack sucks (it does, but…) certain obvious things follow from. Every time I’ve watched the Red Bulls over the past couple seasons, I see a team that doesn’t do anything particularly well. And that’s a hell of a fall off for a team that won the Supporters’ Shield three times during the 2010s. While I’m still able to place most of the players in their starting XI, New York’s overall vibe is an anonymous collection of guys role-playing their assigned positions. Again, Cincinnati hasn’t been good, but New York hasn’t been much better: just 1-4-1 over their last six games.
Just one more thing about the Red Bulls: FC Cincy seems to have their number. They hold the edge in the series between the teams for 2020, two wins to New York’s one and, now, a 5-3 advantage in goals scored. A related fun(?) fact: Cincinnati has scored just three goals against teams that aren’t the Red Bulls this fucked-up season for a frankly wretched 0.33 goals for average against all other comers (well, four goals if you add the one they bagged against the Portland Timbers in the MLS Is Back tournament). I mean…what do you do with this information except ask for more games against New York?
Credit where it’s due, Cincinnati played the better game Saturday - which, again, is something the MLS-in-15 highlights helped draw out a bit. Seeing Cincy’s chances closer together helped me appreciate the variety of chances they got - e.g., Brandon Vazquez getting three decent looks (one of them an offside goal, which kinda sucked because he was offside for the length of the play), and Jurgen Locadia had at least two (maybe three) he should have buried - and it’s always good seeing your forwards get chances, even when they don’t put them away. As for the quality of the chances, the phrase “should have put away” speaks for itself. To pick up that stray reference to variety, they got decent chances from outside the area as well - one from Frank Amaya and another from Yuya Kubo stand out there - and that kept the Red Bulls nicely off-balance.
To name my stand-out player - and this is significant, because he’s a guy I’ve talked about shipping away several times now - I’d go with Medunjanin. Yeah, yeah, the goal, but the more significant development was Medunjanin playing as advertised - e.g., the seeing-eye through-balls from the depths and the balls over the top played into a player’s stride (e.g., Locadia, and for arguably his best miss). Haris even got stuck in on a defensive play or two, which is something the team simply has to see out of Medunjanin, and often as he’s on the field. So, yeah, a good day for Medunjanin played out as a good day for FC Cincinnati.
I don’t talk about formations much - which is partly a function of not believing, against all evidence, that they are real - but, the one showing on MLS’s official recap jives with reality, I can see why that worked. I think the three-centerbacks-with-wing-backs thing is pretty well tattooed into the line-up at this point, so the question has been, and remains, how to deploy in front of it. And, in terms of creating chances, having two forwards up top with a facilitator lurking underneath feels like a good way to keep those players high, whilst keeping a brick behind them for defensive purposes. It looked Jaap Stam had Andrew Gutman playing way the hell up the left for a lot of the game, and Joe Gyau’s got the legs to cover the entire right, but the important thing is keeping players high enough for them to play to.
That set up also worked/works(?) pretty well for Medunjanin, in that it frees him up to find Cincy players all over the field, whether booming diagonals to Gutman, or slip passes through to Vazquez, or feeds into Kubo. Even as I was late to the party on him, Amaya has grown nicely into a dynamic back-stop in midfield, and having three centerbacks behind him both relieves him from any need to be perfect defensively and frees him to push forward - to some extent.
Put all that together, I’d call that a good (if drab) outing, with a heavy caveat that, again, the Red Bulls, for lack of a better word, kinda suck. Closing out now with some finer details…
- I’m still not sold on Kubo and still wonder why he’s getting the nod over Cruz (an argument that assumes Cruz is 90 minutes healthy). If it’s just the investment...but, they’re both DPs…nah, I don’t get it.
- While I’d rate this Locadia’s best game in Orange and Blue, I’ve developed a fascination with his shot, his wind-up in particular. I mean, does he time it so at least one defender can get in the way, or…
- I find the defense boring at this point, which feels like a good thing. But still boring.
I’m going to close this on a bit of a down, but it’s also the elephant in the room. For all the improvement, FC Cincinnati just…isn’t a fun team to watch. The rush of games is part of the problem, in that there’s no room to breathe from one game to the next, but there’s also the same stingy approach to every game, the natural and reasonable emphasis on loss prevention.
That said, this was a good win, FC Cincinnati looked the team most likely to throughout and, if they can build on it, that could generate some forward momentum, which would in term generate some anticipation, which would in turn generate some excitement going into these games instead of hoping they put one goal in and keep the other side's out. The $64,000 question lingers in all the above: is it just something about the Red Bulls? What happens when, say, the Philadelphia Union come calling Wednesday night
My strongest overall reaction to the game is pretty simple: wow, do the Red Bulls suck. I accept that’s a strange thing to say, what with them two whole points over FC Cincy in the Eastern Conference standings, but my eyes aren’t lying to me either. New York managed just two shots on goal last Saturday, one of them a pathetic slow-roller that Cincy ‘keeper saw coming from a mile away and had to wait on its arrival. They flailed a couple shots from range - Brian White probably had the best one of those at just half a dozen feet over the crossbar - but, overall, the Red Bulls strained for openings and didn’t look like they’d ever score.
That adds up a little better when you check the standings (already one game stale) and see that New York has scored just one more goal than Cincinnati during the 2020 season - and, so long as you accept that Cincy’s attack sucks (it does, but…) certain obvious things follow from. Every time I’ve watched the Red Bulls over the past couple seasons, I see a team that doesn’t do anything particularly well. And that’s a hell of a fall off for a team that won the Supporters’ Shield three times during the 2010s. While I’m still able to place most of the players in their starting XI, New York’s overall vibe is an anonymous collection of guys role-playing their assigned positions. Again, Cincinnati hasn’t been good, but New York hasn’t been much better: just 1-4-1 over their last six games.
Just one more thing about the Red Bulls: FC Cincy seems to have their number. They hold the edge in the series between the teams for 2020, two wins to New York’s one and, now, a 5-3 advantage in goals scored. A related fun(?) fact: Cincinnati has scored just three goals against teams that aren’t the Red Bulls this fucked-up season for a frankly wretched 0.33 goals for average against all other comers (well, four goals if you add the one they bagged against the Portland Timbers in the MLS Is Back tournament). I mean…what do you do with this information except ask for more games against New York?
Credit where it’s due, Cincinnati played the better game Saturday - which, again, is something the MLS-in-15 highlights helped draw out a bit. Seeing Cincy’s chances closer together helped me appreciate the variety of chances they got - e.g., Brandon Vazquez getting three decent looks (one of them an offside goal, which kinda sucked because he was offside for the length of the play), and Jurgen Locadia had at least two (maybe three) he should have buried - and it’s always good seeing your forwards get chances, even when they don’t put them away. As for the quality of the chances, the phrase “should have put away” speaks for itself. To pick up that stray reference to variety, they got decent chances from outside the area as well - one from Frank Amaya and another from Yuya Kubo stand out there - and that kept the Red Bulls nicely off-balance.
To name my stand-out player - and this is significant, because he’s a guy I’ve talked about shipping away several times now - I’d go with Medunjanin. Yeah, yeah, the goal, but the more significant development was Medunjanin playing as advertised - e.g., the seeing-eye through-balls from the depths and the balls over the top played into a player’s stride (e.g., Locadia, and for arguably his best miss). Haris even got stuck in on a defensive play or two, which is something the team simply has to see out of Medunjanin, and often as he’s on the field. So, yeah, a good day for Medunjanin played out as a good day for FC Cincinnati.
I don’t talk about formations much - which is partly a function of not believing, against all evidence, that they are real - but, the one showing on MLS’s official recap jives with reality, I can see why that worked. I think the three-centerbacks-with-wing-backs thing is pretty well tattooed into the line-up at this point, so the question has been, and remains, how to deploy in front of it. And, in terms of creating chances, having two forwards up top with a facilitator lurking underneath feels like a good way to keep those players high, whilst keeping a brick behind them for defensive purposes. It looked Jaap Stam had Andrew Gutman playing way the hell up the left for a lot of the game, and Joe Gyau’s got the legs to cover the entire right, but the important thing is keeping players high enough for them to play to.
That set up also worked/works(?) pretty well for Medunjanin, in that it frees him up to find Cincy players all over the field, whether booming diagonals to Gutman, or slip passes through to Vazquez, or feeds into Kubo. Even as I was late to the party on him, Amaya has grown nicely into a dynamic back-stop in midfield, and having three centerbacks behind him both relieves him from any need to be perfect defensively and frees him to push forward - to some extent.
Put all that together, I’d call that a good (if drab) outing, with a heavy caveat that, again, the Red Bulls, for lack of a better word, kinda suck. Closing out now with some finer details…
- I’m still not sold on Kubo and still wonder why he’s getting the nod over Cruz (an argument that assumes Cruz is 90 minutes healthy). If it’s just the investment...but, they’re both DPs…nah, I don’t get it.
- While I’d rate this Locadia’s best game in Orange and Blue, I’ve developed a fascination with his shot, his wind-up in particular. I mean, does he time it so at least one defender can get in the way, or…
- I find the defense boring at this point, which feels like a good thing. But still boring.
I’m going to close this on a bit of a down, but it’s also the elephant in the room. For all the improvement, FC Cincinnati just…isn’t a fun team to watch. The rush of games is part of the problem, in that there’s no room to breathe from one game to the next, but there’s also the same stingy approach to every game, the natural and reasonable emphasis on loss prevention.
That said, this was a good win, FC Cincinnati looked the team most likely to throughout and, if they can build on it, that could generate some forward momentum, which would in term generate some anticipation, which would in turn generate some excitement going into these games instead of hoping they put one goal in and keep the other side's out. The $64,000 question lingers in all the above: is it just something about the Red Bulls? What happens when, say, the Philadelphia Union come calling Wednesday night
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