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| Ignore your eyes. This glass is fucking empty. |
I’ve been struggling with what to think about FC Cincinnati’s 2020 season since it ended, never mind what to write about it. I had a fair sense of its high point - I’d call it the playoff-round loss to the Portland Timbers during the MLS Is Back Tournament in Orlando (covered in my patented over-written style here) - but the rest of the season felt like passing a gall stone (literally) bound and determined to not exit. Hope died both early and reasonably.
For as long as that was all I had to say about Cincy’s 2020, I couldn’t see the point in writing anything, because piling on. As most people know, it was a (briefly-) former FC Cincinnati player - Derrick Etienne, Jr. - who scored a tidy second goal in MLS Cup 2020. That one (unlikely) moment put something that had been visible all night in eye-catching italics: Etienne looked active and useful up to that point; he played defense, his passes connected, his runs had purpose, and he made at least a couple solid attacking decisions/actions and against Seattle’s demonstrably sturdy defense (as backed up by the numbers). He looked connected to the team and the game-plan, in other words. The same player looked lost or useless more often than not when he wore Orange and Blue, but one player having a good game could be anything - a fluke, for one- but that started the ball rolling. Slowly, obviously…
Someone asked me the other day, both out of the blue and when I had time to spare it some thought (toilet), whether I still follow the U.S. Men’s National Team. The answer started with “some” (for the record, I caught all of one game, parts of another, and I tracked the other two (the late blowouts) but that’s it) and ended on a jaded take on the next generation. Moreover, the odd highlight aside, I almost never see the up-‘n’-comers in Europe. A longer version: I see the individual talent and the teams they’re starting for, but how much do those clearly better teams raise those players’ games and vice versa? In other words, when all the weight of making the game-plan work falls on all those same individual talents, will they be World Cup-competitive, never mind World-Cup worthy? The rest of the thought ends with, I’ve seen the results for 2020, and this is nothing like the first time I’ve seen a bright future projected for the U.S. Men’s National Team based on objectively non-representative results - i.e., I’m giving more weight to the draw against Wales than I’ll ever give to a U.S. team kicking the shit out of El Salvador or a post-Golden Panama, c’mon, people, the 90s were fucking ages ago.
The idea that started with Etienne playing a big role in a final ended with a question: how much do FC Cincinnati’s seemingly defining struggles follow more from problems with the people/circumstances guiding the team than they come from the playing personnel? The players aren’t blameless by any means, but there’s something unusually dazed and confused about FC Cincy every time they take the field. I’ve followed a number of teams in a number of leagues since the 1990s, from the shittiest leagues they’d put on TV (the A-League!) to Europe’s finest leagues to the World Cup, and I’ve never followed a team that looks so…uncomfortable in every side of the game - and I watched the late-90s New England Revolution as if God was watching and cared as much.
For as long as that was all I had to say about Cincy’s 2020, I couldn’t see the point in writing anything, because piling on. As most people know, it was a (briefly-) former FC Cincinnati player - Derrick Etienne, Jr. - who scored a tidy second goal in MLS Cup 2020. That one (unlikely) moment put something that had been visible all night in eye-catching italics: Etienne looked active and useful up to that point; he played defense, his passes connected, his runs had purpose, and he made at least a couple solid attacking decisions/actions and against Seattle’s demonstrably sturdy defense (as backed up by the numbers). He looked connected to the team and the game-plan, in other words. The same player looked lost or useless more often than not when he wore Orange and Blue, but one player having a good game could be anything - a fluke, for one- but that started the ball rolling. Slowly, obviously…
Someone asked me the other day, both out of the blue and when I had time to spare it some thought (toilet), whether I still follow the U.S. Men’s National Team. The answer started with “some” (for the record, I caught all of one game, parts of another, and I tracked the other two (the late blowouts) but that’s it) and ended on a jaded take on the next generation. Moreover, the odd highlight aside, I almost never see the up-‘n’-comers in Europe. A longer version: I see the individual talent and the teams they’re starting for, but how much do those clearly better teams raise those players’ games and vice versa? In other words, when all the weight of making the game-plan work falls on all those same individual talents, will they be World Cup-competitive, never mind World-Cup worthy? The rest of the thought ends with, I’ve seen the results for 2020, and this is nothing like the first time I’ve seen a bright future projected for the U.S. Men’s National Team based on objectively non-representative results - i.e., I’m giving more weight to the draw against Wales than I’ll ever give to a U.S. team kicking the shit out of El Salvador or a post-Golden Panama, c’mon, people, the 90s were fucking ages ago.
The idea that started with Etienne playing a big role in a final ended with a question: how much do FC Cincinnati’s seemingly defining struggles follow more from problems with the people/circumstances guiding the team than they come from the playing personnel? The players aren’t blameless by any means, but there’s something unusually dazed and confused about FC Cincy every time they take the field. I’ve followed a number of teams in a number of leagues since the 1990s, from the shittiest leagues they’d put on TV (the A-League!) to Europe’s finest leagues to the World Cup, and I’ve never followed a team that looks so…uncomfortable in every side of the game - and I watched the late-90s New England Revolution as if God was watching and cared as much.
