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| Just makes you sad at a certain point... |
After taking a 2-0 lead that no one saw coming, FC Cincinnati spent the final 70+ minutes of tonight’s 2-2 draw at Nashville SC showing, in thorough detail, that they still don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I’ll squeeze all the bright spots out of this lipsticked pig that I can below, but, golly, was that a shit-show. And to think I came in with low expectations…
To ac…centuate the positive, Cincinnati genuinely deserved that first goal. It came during a strong period, the play was sharp and aggressive, it involved all the shiny new toys: there was a lot to love about it, not least the insidious promise of better days comin’. Luciano Acosta was where they needed him to be (just a shade off the front of the attack), Ronald Matarrita split two defenders with an excellently weighted pass. In the moment it felt like they would do it all day. And the way Cincy’s press frazzled and dislocated Nashville’s passing out of the back? You asked yourself, where is Dax McCarty? Where is Anibal Godoy?
Little by little, though, you couldn’t stop seeing McCarty and Godoy. Worse, if you weren’t seeing them, you saw the ball advance via Daniel Lovitz, Alistair Johnston and the very and lethally lively Randall Leal. Once that started, what Cincinnati fans watched tonight stopped being a game and turned into an exercise in extreme patience. Fuck it, call it indulgence.
When the very expensive and thereafter invisible Brenner got close enough to punish a dodgy touch by Nashville’s ‘keeper Joe Willis, he gave Cincinnati nine lives’ worth of cushion to take something out of the game. It was a good moment for the kid, no question, but it’s nothing a team can rely on for production; to be a dick about it, it falls within the realm of a “hustle play” that any eager mug can do and, as such, falls well short of $15 million expectations. Credit where it’s due, Brenner took responsibility for the resulting (and just) penalty kick and went on to put his shot past a (very large) ‘keeper who guessed right.
FC Cincinnati would go on to burn through eight-and-a-half of those lives, at a minimum. Honestly, if Hany Mukhtar was worth half his DP tag, Cincinnati would have lost by a goal or two; Dave Romney had a free header from six yards out for gods’ sake, which extended the borrowed time well beyond any reasonable credit. The gods did ‘em right tonight - or wrong, depending how you look at it. The very, very hard reality about the rest of the season: the gods can only help them so much, and FC Cincinnati has to sort out the rest. And, based on tonight at least, they don’t look up for it.
Nashville got back into the game with a tap-in by Jhonder Cadiz, a move that followed from something you saw for the rest of the game: either Cincinnati has a terrible tendency to collapse to one side of the field or Nashville has a knack for flairing a fullback or a winger to the weak-side, where he’ll find…just so much space. That’s how Nashville’s first goal played out anyway: Godoy and McCarty combined to get a good look at the field and, Lordy, all the space they found. And that just kept happening. If Cincy pinched inside to cut out balls up the gut, Nashville played it wide for a cross (related, if Nashville has a fault, it’s crossing too much); if Cincy played wide, the ball went straight up the gut and that’s where the real nightmares/chaos began.
Nashville scored its equalizer off one of the 14 corners they forced, and that came after a series of very loud knocks at the proverbial door. Regardless of what Leal attempted, it ended with a very pretty goal and a richly deserved draw for Nashville. Cincinnati’s Przemyslaw Tyton made…literally, gods know how many saves (because I can’t work the widget on The Mothership’s stats board), but I’d still argue Nashville did this to themselves more than Cincinnati did it to them. Long story short, if I had to put my money on one team to do better than the other, I’d bet heavily on Nashville.
Now, let’s turn to…the several things that are wrong with Cincinnati. In descending order.
Who the Fuck Came up with that Midfield? (I know, I know. Jaap Stam)
I don’t know enough about Kamohelo Mokotjo as a player or Yuya Kubo as a deep midfielder to judge what fucked up that pairing the most, but I’m going to start with the one that makes the most sense, even if superficially: neither of them defend really well, and Kubo…is not a deep midfield player. I can picture a reformation for Mokotjo - is he a No. 8? Can he play deep and dish? - but I’ve seen plenty of the Kubo experiment, and can you stop that, like, immediately, like now? He sucks at tackling, he doesn’t seem to understand the role (e.g., to pass quickly, turn defense to offense, etc.), and just generally looks like an odd duck with five wings back there. As much as I appreciate the quandary of, “what do we do with Yuya Kubo, who appears to…”, nothing I saw tonight makes the remotest sense of playing him where Stam did tonight. So…just don’t. It’s hurting the team.
Luciano Acosta’s Debut (for me)
He scored his goal, had his moment, etc., but, as the game progressed, Acosta was playing in the space where either Mokotjo or Kubo (and, later, Caleb Stanko) should have operated. He might have played the odd, good pass - I’m blearily recalling a good, grounded diagonal to Matarrita around the 70th minute - but Acosta played too deep and, from there, lacked the quality to impact the game. He didn’t look like a solution tonight, not that I blame him for that. Again, what the fuck is this team doing out there? Seriously.
Gustavo Vallecilla Better Be God Level
Between them, Tyton, Tom Pettersson and Nick Hagglund did enough tonight to make the draw stand up. I don’t know where people land on Tyton, but I sincerely and sadly doubt that anyone sees an elite center-back pairing in Hagglund and Pettersson; and I don’t think throwing Maikel van der Werff into the mix changes the overall equation. So long as Cincy’s central midfield sucks that fucking loudly, they need a towering, rock-hard/solid defense to weather all the shit that the sieve in front of them leaks. In other words, welcome to the first day of the rest of your career, Gustavo Vallecilla.
Finally, Calvin Harris Did Not Look Ready
I think the term is, the thing speaks for itself. It was like homicide against good ideas...
To close on a the highest high I can attain, I liked what I saw from Mataritta, Joseph-Claude Gyau (despite how much he flailed on the final ball on at least two occasions), and, more or less throughout, by Alvaro Barreal. As much as anything, Cincinnati’s players simply don’t seem to know what they should do in any critical moment: it’s as if none of them know what to expect from anyone else when an opportunity falls in their lap - as it did now and then tonight - which means they can’t even be dangerous on a counter. If they lose that, what’s left? The rest files under a combination of useless, misused and…who knows, maybe out of their depth players. Overall, tonight’s draw was bad and, worse, failed to promise a better future. Oxymoronic as it is, hope can only spring eternal for so long.
Look, there was never a time when I didn’t think of Nashville as a better team than Cincinnati, but ample time remains to get this - or at least more of it - right. The midfield needs some kind of animating logic, at least beyond a born-broke double-pivot (i.e., Mokotjo and Kubo), the defense needs cover and, however it happens, Cincinnati pure and simple cannot let the disconnect between the defense and attack get that complete and thorough, not if they want to don’t want to set up in the league’s fetid basement for a third straight season.
Hoping to have more positives next week, even if New York City FC on the road doesn’t seem like the right opportunity…
To ac…centuate the positive, Cincinnati genuinely deserved that first goal. It came during a strong period, the play was sharp and aggressive, it involved all the shiny new toys: there was a lot to love about it, not least the insidious promise of better days comin’. Luciano Acosta was where they needed him to be (just a shade off the front of the attack), Ronald Matarrita split two defenders with an excellently weighted pass. In the moment it felt like they would do it all day. And the way Cincy’s press frazzled and dislocated Nashville’s passing out of the back? You asked yourself, where is Dax McCarty? Where is Anibal Godoy?
Little by little, though, you couldn’t stop seeing McCarty and Godoy. Worse, if you weren’t seeing them, you saw the ball advance via Daniel Lovitz, Alistair Johnston and the very and lethally lively Randall Leal. Once that started, what Cincinnati fans watched tonight stopped being a game and turned into an exercise in extreme patience. Fuck it, call it indulgence.
When the very expensive and thereafter invisible Brenner got close enough to punish a dodgy touch by Nashville’s ‘keeper Joe Willis, he gave Cincinnati nine lives’ worth of cushion to take something out of the game. It was a good moment for the kid, no question, but it’s nothing a team can rely on for production; to be a dick about it, it falls within the realm of a “hustle play” that any eager mug can do and, as such, falls well short of $15 million expectations. Credit where it’s due, Brenner took responsibility for the resulting (and just) penalty kick and went on to put his shot past a (very large) ‘keeper who guessed right.
FC Cincinnati would go on to burn through eight-and-a-half of those lives, at a minimum. Honestly, if Hany Mukhtar was worth half his DP tag, Cincinnati would have lost by a goal or two; Dave Romney had a free header from six yards out for gods’ sake, which extended the borrowed time well beyond any reasonable credit. The gods did ‘em right tonight - or wrong, depending how you look at it. The very, very hard reality about the rest of the season: the gods can only help them so much, and FC Cincinnati has to sort out the rest. And, based on tonight at least, they don’t look up for it.
Nashville got back into the game with a tap-in by Jhonder Cadiz, a move that followed from something you saw for the rest of the game: either Cincinnati has a terrible tendency to collapse to one side of the field or Nashville has a knack for flairing a fullback or a winger to the weak-side, where he’ll find…just so much space. That’s how Nashville’s first goal played out anyway: Godoy and McCarty combined to get a good look at the field and, Lordy, all the space they found. And that just kept happening. If Cincy pinched inside to cut out balls up the gut, Nashville played it wide for a cross (related, if Nashville has a fault, it’s crossing too much); if Cincy played wide, the ball went straight up the gut and that’s where the real nightmares/chaos began.
Nashville scored its equalizer off one of the 14 corners they forced, and that came after a series of very loud knocks at the proverbial door. Regardless of what Leal attempted, it ended with a very pretty goal and a richly deserved draw for Nashville. Cincinnati’s Przemyslaw Tyton made…literally, gods know how many saves (because I can’t work the widget on The Mothership’s stats board), but I’d still argue Nashville did this to themselves more than Cincinnati did it to them. Long story short, if I had to put my money on one team to do better than the other, I’d bet heavily on Nashville.
Now, let’s turn to…the several things that are wrong with Cincinnati. In descending order.
Who the Fuck Came up with that Midfield? (I know, I know. Jaap Stam)
I don’t know enough about Kamohelo Mokotjo as a player or Yuya Kubo as a deep midfielder to judge what fucked up that pairing the most, but I’m going to start with the one that makes the most sense, even if superficially: neither of them defend really well, and Kubo…is not a deep midfield player. I can picture a reformation for Mokotjo - is he a No. 8? Can he play deep and dish? - but I’ve seen plenty of the Kubo experiment, and can you stop that, like, immediately, like now? He sucks at tackling, he doesn’t seem to understand the role (e.g., to pass quickly, turn defense to offense, etc.), and just generally looks like an odd duck with five wings back there. As much as I appreciate the quandary of, “what do we do with Yuya Kubo, who appears to…”, nothing I saw tonight makes the remotest sense of playing him where Stam did tonight. So…just don’t. It’s hurting the team.
Luciano Acosta’s Debut (for me)
He scored his goal, had his moment, etc., but, as the game progressed, Acosta was playing in the space where either Mokotjo or Kubo (and, later, Caleb Stanko) should have operated. He might have played the odd, good pass - I’m blearily recalling a good, grounded diagonal to Matarrita around the 70th minute - but Acosta played too deep and, from there, lacked the quality to impact the game. He didn’t look like a solution tonight, not that I blame him for that. Again, what the fuck is this team doing out there? Seriously.
Gustavo Vallecilla Better Be God Level
Between them, Tyton, Tom Pettersson and Nick Hagglund did enough tonight to make the draw stand up. I don’t know where people land on Tyton, but I sincerely and sadly doubt that anyone sees an elite center-back pairing in Hagglund and Pettersson; and I don’t think throwing Maikel van der Werff into the mix changes the overall equation. So long as Cincy’s central midfield sucks that fucking loudly, they need a towering, rock-hard/solid defense to weather all the shit that the sieve in front of them leaks. In other words, welcome to the first day of the rest of your career, Gustavo Vallecilla.
Finally, Calvin Harris Did Not Look Ready
I think the term is, the thing speaks for itself. It was like homicide against good ideas...
To close on a the highest high I can attain, I liked what I saw from Mataritta, Joseph-Claude Gyau (despite how much he flailed on the final ball on at least two occasions), and, more or less throughout, by Alvaro Barreal. As much as anything, Cincinnati’s players simply don’t seem to know what they should do in any critical moment: it’s as if none of them know what to expect from anyone else when an opportunity falls in their lap - as it did now and then tonight - which means they can’t even be dangerous on a counter. If they lose that, what’s left? The rest files under a combination of useless, misused and…who knows, maybe out of their depth players. Overall, tonight’s draw was bad and, worse, failed to promise a better future. Oxymoronic as it is, hope can only spring eternal for so long.
Look, there was never a time when I didn’t think of Nashville as a better team than Cincinnati, but ample time remains to get this - or at least more of it - right. The midfield needs some kind of animating logic, at least beyond a born-broke double-pivot (i.e., Mokotjo and Kubo), the defense needs cover and, however it happens, Cincinnati pure and simple cannot let the disconnect between the defense and attack get that complete and thorough, not if they want to don’t want to set up in the league’s fetid basement for a third straight season.
Hoping to have more positives next week, even if New York City FC on the road doesn’t seem like the right opportunity…
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