FC Cincinnati 0-1 New England Revolution: Inching Toward Competitive?

There was ample room for improvement, and yet...

If a game can feel busy and uneventful at the same time, I think I just watched it. All kinds of things happened - not least FC Cincinnati and the New England Revolution combined for nearly 40 shots, some of them quite good - but both ‘keepers spent most of the game looking unbeatable and both teams a step or two away from that defining moment when it all comes together and the crowd goes wild. Maybe it’s apt that the only goal came off a sleeper of a set-piece that didn’t feel any more dangerous than the rest of them.

That came in the 70th minute, when Cincy’s Ken Vermeer could only paw Adam Buksa’s header into the side netting (more later). With that, the Revs won a deceptively close game 1-0, leaving the universe feeling right and better at the same time.

My biggest takeaway is pretty straightforward: FC Cincinnati played a team that most people can see winning a trophy this season without squinting too hard and looked more or less competitive throughout. They got on the wrong side of dominated more often than any Cincy fan would like to see - an impression the xG numbers back up - but they also made more and better shots than they have all season, they had a shift of dominance of their own (about the 20th to the 25th minute), and after the Revs ended the first half strong, the defense adjusted and improved: if memory serves, New England ended the first half with 21 shots or thereabouts; they ended the game with just 26. (Related: if you watch the MLS in 15 highlights, the first half takes up at least 10 minutes of the run time.)

Now, to pick through the details…

Cincinnati seems to like the 5-3-2/3-5-2 they’ve used for the last couple games, even if they still struggle with getting the former to flip to the latter (that’s to say, neither Joe Gyau nor Ronald Matarrita impacted the game that much). They set a tone of “ain’t backin’ down” - see Caleb Stanko’s heavy lunge at Arnor Traustason and the fairly visible shove Jurgen Locadia used to throw off Henry Kessler to set up his first (pretty damn solid) shot - and I think that set a bar that referee David Gantar struggled to interpret consistently toward the end (and with no small part of that hovering in Kessler’s general vicinity). I can excuse all that on the grounds that it was the right tone to set - especially when playing in a new home Cincinnati both wants and needs to make into a fortress.

All that said, it should have surprised…basically no one when the Revolution took the name by the scruff after a promising opening 10 (or so) minutes for Cincinnati. The Revs probably should have gone up 1-0 threw a scramble around the 11th minute (see full highlights, I guess, because they didn’t make the cut for a stand-alone), but they couldn’t turn the scramble into a goal. A few more chances fell their way thereafter - a pair of corners that set up Carles (fucking?!) Gil and Brandon Bye for good, if cluttered looks at goal being the low points, organizationally - so New England had their chances to put them away. To his credit, Vermeer did well with both; his overall performance tonight made me feel better, which is, for lack of a fancier word, nice.

Cincinnati, meanwhile, had a rash of their best chances in between all that. Locadia followed his long-ball-solo effort with some smart footwork on the right New England’s area and a shot off the crossbar two minutes later, while Brenner fired what I’d call his best shot so far in the run of play just a couple minutes after that. That was good to see, no question, and the Brazilian (a word I’ll never think of the same way) did well to get around his defender and Revs’ ‘keeper Matt Turner got only the tips of his fingers on the shot. Going the other way, I flagged Turner in my pregame thread for a reason: Brenner’s motion took him away from the goal and didn’t give him neither the time, space nor hope of getting power on the shot - something that’s not going to beat a ‘keeper playing at Turner’s current level at anything better than a leap year’s frequency. Not what you want from a marquee signing...

Going the other way - and, to be clear, I think this is big - Cincinnati forced saves out of Turner on all four of the shots they put on goal. Sure, Locadia could have hit his first shot away from Turner, I covered Brenner’s above and Alvaro Barreal’s roller had even less on it than the first one, but, placement notwithstanding, Turner earned his paycheck when he stopped Brandon Vazquez’s late shot. Bottom line, three different players in orange and blue (or the “ocean” equivalent thereof) found four good looks at goal in a game they lost by one lonely goal. I call that a promising signal from a team with a history of not getting a lot of looks, good or bad.

To sprinkle on that parade a little, I see the Revs’ defense as their real weakness. For all the years he’s logged as a starter, and whatever I think of him (I’m a fan, fwiw), Andrew Farrell has never made anyone’s defender of the year list and Kessler’s just a second year pro; I like both Matt Polster and Tommy MacNamara (even as I noted a combined lack of…how do you say, foot speed?), but no reasonable fan would mistake them for a lights-out, league-beating defensive midfield. They have better players in the tank, or at least players whose names I recognize - e.g., Wilfrid Kaptoum, Maciel, and even Scott freakin’ Caldwell - so it’s possible Bruce Arena either rested some guys or didn’t have them available, but, Cincinnati will face stouter spines in other teams. I suspect Turner takes them up a notch all on his own, but…fair warning, yeah?

New England didn’t have Gustavo Bou available either, but I don’t want to dwell too much on a New England team I’m not deeply knowledgeable about. What I can say is that Cincinnati’s latest iteration of its defense largely handled something like a league-elite attack and without breaking down. If there was a weakness, it came in the first half when they left Bye and Tajon Buchanan open to swing in crosses from New England’s right; seeing Geoff Cameron struggle against Buksa has been noted, even Cameron still looks like one of Cincy’s better acquisitions thus far. All of which brings this post to the defining moment…

Buksa was clearly the Revs’ biggest threat and/or their talisman for low-hanging slop. Moreover, given how much Geoff (freakin’) Cameron struggled with him in the air, I cannot for the life of me figure out how any rational marking scheme had Matarrita as his primary marker on the 70th minute free kick that ultimately won the game for New England. The play as a whole might have broken down fairly spectacularly (e.g., it was all New England around that ball), but I simply cannot fathom why you don’t get either Cameron or Gustavo Vallecilla on the opposition’s biggest, bestest body.

All in all, though, I’m as happy as I can be about a loss. After a 2019 season that looked like rust taking over a car, then a 2020 season that led with a head-fake (i.e., the run in MLS Is Back) and then fell on its face, the last three games could very well count as FC Cincinnati’s best -and, crucially - most steady performances since coming into MLS. The organization has looked better and, with my opinion on the Revs’ defense already entered into the record, ideas about creating chances finally do look like they’re getting closer to being productive. Make all that regular and, by gods, the Queen City has itself a soccer team. More to the point, and unlike after the bye week, I’m looking forward to what happens after the international break. Now, some random notes…

- While he still falls short of expectations (something I’m sure Europe’s scouts are noting), this was the most involved I’ve seen Brenner in any game he’s played. I appreciate that some chunk of that $15 million went toward potential, but I also haven’t seen anything remarkable from him so far. He achieved noteworthy today, and I’ll take it, especially because…

- It took Locadia almost a year to get settled and now (and despite what I definitely said about him in an earlier post), I hope Cincy extends his loan. There was some in-game chatter out of the broadcast booth about Locadia and Brenner working on a partnership, and I think I saw signs of that, not just today, but over the last three games. It’s to the point where Cincinnati looks semi-effective once they get past the other team’s midfield…something that's just hard to do, unfortunately. Broadly, the attack feels like it’s improving. Finally.

- I’d say the same about the defense. The midfield, on the other hand…

- I don’t know what I’d do with Yuya Kubo. He’s improving as a d-mid - e.g., game-defining foul aside, he probably had his best defensive game tonight, and I’m inching toward the idea that Jaap Stam might see the right kind of something in him - but that doesn’t soften the blunt fact that Cincinnati has…not hit it out of the park in the DP market. It's bad enough that no player they've signed as a DP has panned out on any positive kind of noticeable level, but it beggars belief that FC Cincy can’t do better in a key position than forcing a square peg into a round hole…and with very open questions about the quality of that square peg floating above it all.

All those black marks matter, certainly, but...but how much would I care about it if FC Cincinnati becomes a competitive team for the next 4/5 of the 2021 season and beyond? Till the next one...