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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.
All that feels like a coaching/front-office/brain-trust problem to me. The question of how to handle that (alleged) reality, is an interesting one.
To continue, sure, Etienne, Jr. is just one guy. Once you realize he’s not the only one, the argument really gets rolling. FC Dallas found a way to get numbers out of Roland Lamah, and Victor Ulloa played a key role in a good midfield for (maybe) two seasons, and both fizzled for Cincinnati; Fanendo Adi really was a good forward for Portland, only how much he requires a specific kind of service didn’t light up in neon until he got all the wrong kind of service; I’ve seen Fatai Alashe star in a scheme…but I’ve also seen him blow at least two up with indiscipline; even semi-recently discarded projects (and no offense to them, because they earned the hype) like Kekuta Manneh, Darren Mattocks, Kendall Waston (hey, Whitecaps reunion, bros), or…this one hurts, Greg Garza: all these players have performed at the top-middle level in MLS before, and it seems like there should be some way to make a workable team out of those parts…but it has never even come close. Again, that sounds like coaching…
What about last year’s imports - i.e., the did try, didn’t they? Siem de Jong had a great seven years (by the numbers) for Ajax and…well, yes, that dried up, but that’s still a strong haul in at least one league…then what’s like a good one with Newcastle United…and then…pfff. Or what about Jurgen Locadia who…again, had a grea…make that a good run with another Dutch team, then a hiccup at Brighton & Hove Albion, then…some loans. That’s two key acquisitions who translate as “semi-recently discarded projects” only with a different passport - and there’s no denying that’s a problem. And sure, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wind-up from range as slow as Locadia (fucker’s glacial), but I also think he rarely gets his best kind of service (because that; how did he score goals before; has anyone in a professional capacity done that research?) As for de Jong, holy shit, did he look he showed up to the wrong field in the wrong shirt every time he came on. Maybe he was told to “play in the middle of the field and make something happen” every time he took the field. Yeah, I doubt it too, but did it really look much different from that?
I’ll stick up for one pick, if only based on the resume: Yuya Kubo didn’t sizzle up Europe’s hot list, but he produced numbers in sturdy clubs in sturdy leagues and but he moved a couple times and kept performing to boot (this is what impresses me most), so…why not? One answer could be, tell me Kubo’s position? Someone gets paid to figure this out, and I don’t think they ever did. And, yes, I wish I could see some sign that they ever will, but…
I don’t know what year felt worse to Cincy fans between 2019 and 2020, but 2020 took at least two years off of my fandom (I kid, I’m on this wagon till the franchise moves, or I just lose interest in everything.), and I blame how they played more than the pandemic. Maybe the front office didn’t try hard enough - by which I’m looking at the gambles on de Jong and Locadia, but only suggestively - but the coaching instability has hit Cincinnati coming and going since it arrived in MLS. First, you had…what’s his name, Alan Koch, then you had Yoann “HOLY SHIT” Damet I, then you had Ron Jans, who I liked until his malignant “sense of humor” came to light, and then you had “HOLY SHIT” Damet II era. Jaap Stam took over…wow, that was just May 2020? He was around for the MLS Is Back…solidity. Think what you want, but I enjoyed it, if masochistically, all the way up to the Portland game, when my allegiances took a well-recorded tumble.
To put a button on the whole argument, I don’t think FC Cincinnati has ever established a foundation. I can’t think of any player in any position outside the defense who I could identify as someone who holds their shit together, never mind a problem-solver or a solution, and I see that as the defining problem: no one (again, besides the defense) has a regular, stabilizing role on the roster. Lacking that stable core means the changes made to improve the team lacks anything to hold it together. It really is just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - and for two seasons now. It hardly helped that any time they came close, the head coach was either shown the door (Koch), visibly not up to the job (Damet), or said something racist (Jans)…and that’s what this turns to next.
I don’t like Jaap Stam as a hire - and I like him even less now that I’m looking again at how he racked up one abruptly-aborted departure after another before arriving in the Queen City (in fact, I’m seeing some parallels to de Jong’s and Locadia’s later careers). I’ve seen people talk about Stam’s “preferred system,” but what I don’t see is where or how he established that system as successful in that resume. It feels like the front office saw a chance to sign a name fans would recognize and jumped at it…which also feels like a pattern. More to the point, I often visualize “system” coaches as guys with a bunch of square pegs and a hammer looking at a bunch of round holes. This pitch might sound low-aspiration (not to mention eight months too late), but I would have hired a coach with a strong record of getting the most out of a low-budget roster. Those guys don’t win titles, but they know how to look at a team, figure out who does what well and put that on the field with clear instructions - which is what I think Cincinnati needs right now, instead of some guy committed to playing a 3-4-3 or whatever else. Get the nuts and bolts guy to lay the foundation, get the fancy coach later.
And here’s where I admit that ship has sailed. Stam is the coach and, for the love of sweet Baby Jesus, don’t change coaches until you absolutely have to, FC Cincinnati, and may that last until at least 2022, and with good enough results to back it up. (And, Jaap, I want to see none that “I've thought about this for a long time. My final conclusion is that it's better for the club, the players and myself if I step aside” shit like you pulled after five months (five months!) with Feyenoord.) Now, as for I want to see, let’s turn to the current roster and something I wrote after the loss to Portland:
“Cincinnati needs to figure out something more ambitious than defending to the last man and feasting on scraps. On the plus side, I think some of that is, 1) personnel driven and 2) obvious enough that anyone from Jaap Stam down to the thickest fan understands that ain’t viable. While I wouldn’t call any position solved for Cincinnati, building a better midfield still strikes me as the one necessary step and, at time of writing, that area still looks like a collection of question marks, both in terms of personnel and how they line up.”
I'm still there. Some issues aside (see the second bullet point), I’m open to ideas on this, but I want to see the same set of midfield players given an extended run in clearly defined central midfield roles from the start of 2021. If you're feeling cautious, put Caleb Stanko behind Frankie Amaya and Kamohelo Mokotjo as box-to-box No. 8s; if you're feeling frisky, play Amaya as a No. 6 and Mokotjo as a No. 8: I honestly don’t know what’s best, I just want to see Stam, et. al. commit to it and build the rest of the assumptions around the core they come up with; give the rest of the team as much predictability for as long as possible by nailing down a midfield scheme and working on it against live opposition until it functions. Yanking shit around constantly hasn't exactly racked up the results either.
Anyway, that’s the big thing I have on my mind. In far fewer words, if FC Cincinnati signed that No. 10 every fanbase pines for, I’m not sure they’d know what to do with him.
- I’m fine with most of the players Cincy kept and let go, though Mathieu Deplagne’s a bit of mystery for me…I mean, why not keep a guy who can play central and right back?
- Unless they couldn’t get value for him, I don’t know why they held on to Haris Medunjanin.
- I hope the front office has clear designs on at least two centerbacks - and at least one has to be a viable, proven, healthy starter.
- OK, yes, they definitely need a playmaker of some kind, central or otherwise.
And…that’s it. Looking forward to 2021 with trepidation, as I imagine the rest of you are.
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.
All that feels like a coaching/front-office/brain-trust problem to me. The question of how to handle that (alleged) reality, is an interesting one.
To continue, sure, Etienne, Jr. is just one guy. Once you realize he’s not the only one, the argument really gets rolling. FC Dallas found a way to get numbers out of Roland Lamah, and Victor Ulloa played a key role in a good midfield for (maybe) two seasons, and both fizzled for Cincinnati; Fanendo Adi really was a good forward for Portland, only how much he requires a specific kind of service didn’t light up in neon until he got all the wrong kind of service; I’ve seen Fatai Alashe star in a scheme…but I’ve also seen him blow at least two up with indiscipline; even semi-recently discarded projects (and no offense to them, because they earned the hype) like Kekuta Manneh, Darren Mattocks, Kendall Waston (hey, Whitecaps reunion, bros), or…this one hurts, Greg Garza: all these players have performed at the top-middle level in MLS before, and it seems like there should be some way to make a workable team out of those parts…but it has never even come close. Again, that sounds like coaching…
What about last year’s imports - i.e., the did try, didn’t they? Siem de Jong had a great seven years (by the numbers) for Ajax and…well, yes, that dried up, but that’s still a strong haul in at least one league…then what’s like a good one with Newcastle United…and then…pfff. Or what about Jurgen Locadia who…again, had a grea…make that a good run with another Dutch team, then a hiccup at Brighton & Hove Albion, then…some loans. That’s two key acquisitions who translate as “semi-recently discarded projects” only with a different passport - and there’s no denying that’s a problem. And sure, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wind-up from range as slow as Locadia (fucker’s glacial), but I also think he rarely gets his best kind of service (because that; how did he score goals before; has anyone in a professional capacity done that research?) As for de Jong, holy shit, did he look he showed up to the wrong field in the wrong shirt every time he came on. Maybe he was told to “play in the middle of the field and make something happen” every time he took the field. Yeah, I doubt it too, but did it really look much different from that?
I’ll stick up for one pick, if only based on the resume: Yuya Kubo didn’t sizzle up Europe’s hot list, but he produced numbers in sturdy clubs in sturdy leagues and but he moved a couple times and kept performing to boot (this is what impresses me most), so…why not? One answer could be, tell me Kubo’s position? Someone gets paid to figure this out, and I don’t think they ever did. And, yes, I wish I could see some sign that they ever will, but…
I don’t know what year felt worse to Cincy fans between 2019 and 2020, but 2020 took at least two years off of my fandom (I kid, I’m on this wagon till the franchise moves, or I just lose interest in everything.), and I blame how they played more than the pandemic. Maybe the front office didn’t try hard enough - by which I’m looking at the gambles on de Jong and Locadia, but only suggestively - but the coaching instability has hit Cincinnati coming and going since it arrived in MLS. First, you had…what’s his name, Alan Koch, then you had Yoann “HOLY SHIT” Damet I, then you had Ron Jans, who I liked until his malignant “sense of humor” came to light, and then you had “HOLY SHIT” Damet II era. Jaap Stam took over…wow, that was just May 2020? He was around for the MLS Is Back…solidity. Think what you want, but I enjoyed it, if masochistically, all the way up to the Portland game, when my allegiances took a well-recorded tumble.
To put a button on the whole argument, I don’t think FC Cincinnati has ever established a foundation. I can’t think of any player in any position outside the defense who I could identify as someone who holds their shit together, never mind a problem-solver or a solution, and I see that as the defining problem: no one (again, besides the defense) has a regular, stabilizing role on the roster. Lacking that stable core means the changes made to improve the team lacks anything to hold it together. It really is just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - and for two seasons now. It hardly helped that any time they came close, the head coach was either shown the door (Koch), visibly not up to the job (Damet), or said something racist (Jans)…and that’s what this turns to next.
I don’t like Jaap Stam as a hire - and I like him even less now that I’m looking again at how he racked up one abruptly-aborted departure after another before arriving in the Queen City (in fact, I’m seeing some parallels to de Jong’s and Locadia’s later careers). I’ve seen people talk about Stam’s “preferred system,” but what I don’t see is where or how he established that system as successful in that resume. It feels like the front office saw a chance to sign a name fans would recognize and jumped at it…which also feels like a pattern. More to the point, I often visualize “system” coaches as guys with a bunch of square pegs and a hammer looking at a bunch of round holes. This pitch might sound low-aspiration (not to mention eight months too late), but I would have hired a coach with a strong record of getting the most out of a low-budget roster. Those guys don’t win titles, but they know how to look at a team, figure out who does what well and put that on the field with clear instructions - which is what I think Cincinnati needs right now, instead of some guy committed to playing a 3-4-3 or whatever else. Get the nuts and bolts guy to lay the foundation, get the fancy coach later.
And here’s where I admit that ship has sailed. Stam is the coach and, for the love of sweet Baby Jesus, don’t change coaches until you absolutely have to, FC Cincinnati, and may that last until at least 2022, and with good enough results to back it up. (And, Jaap, I want to see none that “I've thought about this for a long time. My final conclusion is that it's better for the club, the players and myself if I step aside” shit like you pulled after five months (five months!) with Feyenoord.) Now, as for I want to see, let’s turn to the current roster and something I wrote after the loss to Portland:
“Cincinnati needs to figure out something more ambitious than defending to the last man and feasting on scraps. On the plus side, I think some of that is, 1) personnel driven and 2) obvious enough that anyone from Jaap Stam down to the thickest fan understands that ain’t viable. While I wouldn’t call any position solved for Cincinnati, building a better midfield still strikes me as the one necessary step and, at time of writing, that area still looks like a collection of question marks, both in terms of personnel and how they line up.”
I'm still there. Some issues aside (see the second bullet point), I’m open to ideas on this, but I want to see the same set of midfield players given an extended run in clearly defined central midfield roles from the start of 2021. If you're feeling cautious, put Caleb Stanko behind Frankie Amaya and Kamohelo Mokotjo as box-to-box No. 8s; if you're feeling frisky, play Amaya as a No. 6 and Mokotjo as a No. 8: I honestly don’t know what’s best, I just want to see Stam, et. al. commit to it and build the rest of the assumptions around the core they come up with; give the rest of the team as much predictability for as long as possible by nailing down a midfield scheme and working on it against live opposition until it functions. Yanking shit around constantly hasn't exactly racked up the results either.
Anyway, that’s the big thing I have on my mind. In far fewer words, if FC Cincinnati signed that No. 10 every fanbase pines for, I’m not sure they’d know what to do with him.
- I’m fine with most of the players Cincy kept and let go, though Mathieu Deplagne’s a bit of mystery for me…I mean, why not keep a guy who can play central and right back?
- Unless they couldn’t get value for him, I don’t know why they held on to Haris Medunjanin.
- I hope the front office has clear designs on at least two centerbacks - and at least one has to be a viable, proven, healthy starter.
- OK, yes, they definitely need a playmaker of some kind, central or otherwise.
And…that’s it. Looking forward to 2021 with trepidation, as I imagine the rest of you are.
A nice set of ruminations on Cincy players and the teams they worked best on.
ReplyDeleteAs for Jaap Stam? Well he was a heck of a centerback at ManU and elsewhere. Maybe his influence will get you the Cincy centerbacks you're hoping for.
Yeah, most players (and coaches) at the pro level are suited for a few specific variations of a theoretical team. Some of the top coaches in the EPL are hard to imagine successfully coaching, say, Brighton and Hove Albion through a season-long relegation fight where 0-0 ties against the top 4 are big victories. Conversely, we've seen Roy Hodgson and Sam Allardyce, excellent small market managers, fail when they had teams of expensive thoroughbreds. Happy new year!
Happy New Year to you too! It's hard to nail down what's making FC Cincy so unrelentingly dodgy ("worse than Orlando?" "I'm afraid so." "Oh Dear. Then the effects may linger." "Yes..."). When I spoke to a low-budget roster coach, I was thinking of someone like Dominic Kinnear, aka, people who can't be trusted with expensive players, basically. They need to get their feet under them before they can start thinking fancy...
ReplyDelete