FC Cincinnati 0-0 DC United: There Are No Highlights...

Three inches is generous, kind even.

Well, wasn’t that as pleasant as a team-building “event” at the office? It took an absolutely mind-boggling amount of men doing things in uniforms for nothing to happen. Worse, the few things that did happen - e.g., a timely, deserved red card to DC United’s Moses Nyeman, aka, the same guy who scored the sharpest, yet offside, goal all day - didn’t change a damn thing.

If you’ve ever asked the question, what would happen if FC Cincinnati had a man-advantage at home with 38 minutes to go, you got your answer tonight. Nothing, a fucking pair of useless eggs, a 0-0 home draw against half a DC United team. Lorde, gimme patience. I guessed the right final score - without knowing the many, many players DC had missing (e.g., Paul Arriola, Brendan Hines-Ike, Russell Canouse, etc.) - but that only makes it all worse (see Thought No. 1). I know what Cincinnati is/can and cannot do, and I only had a loose sense of DC as a high energy, low-accuracy team: so long as Cincinnati matched their energy, it’d be on the hosts to score. I see the xG, and, based on what I watched, that’s generous…and I don’t think I’d feel any differently had Cincinnati finally scored.

If Cincinnati had better chances than Joe Gyau’s (of whom and others, see Thought No. 2) header off Ronald Matarrita’s cross and that Nick Hagglund header early, quality yet hopeful header, they don’t register (hold that thought; forgot this one); related, Brandon Vasquez’s late (equally hopeful) lunge represented a better percentage opportunity, but it was no less desperate and unlucky. Ye gods, where to begin when you don’t even want to start?

Cincinnati wrestled both DC and themselves for chances and came up empty. Going the other way, the only chances they allowed DC came via offside plays and Julian Gressel trying to make the most of free-kicks on the cheap and direct. But, again, this was just half a DC United team, and I’d call Gressel and Kevin Paredes (who I’d kill to have on any roster I watched) the two best, most effective and interesting players on the field tonight. DC made the better chances, even if they had to push against legality to make them happen.

That’s my summary of the game and, no, that’s not good.

Los Angeles Galaxy 4-1 Portland Timbers: A Little Like Bankruptcy

There were signs...

I might have told this story before, so I appreciate your patience. When my family moved west in the early mid-1980s, I landed on my first select team - to be clear, though, this was “select” in the context of Pullman, Washington, so not so select. This put me in contact with my first soccer coach who took both himself and the role seriously (more the former, honestly). At any rate, any time he got it in his head that his charges weren’t trying hard enough, he’d throw up his hands and stop watching. I was fine with that - which is about 40% of why my career as an athlete never went anywhere (a lack of natural ability accounts for the other 60%) - but my teammates would beg “Coach” to watch again.

Phil Scudderi (the elder), wherever you are, I finally feel you. I turned away from this turd around the 80th minute.

As for the Portland Timbers, things fell apart gradually and then all at once in a, frankly, embarrassing 1-4 loss at the Los Angeles Galaxy. I think that borrowed line is about bankruptcy, but do correct me if I'm wrong…

After a first half decent enough to make one think the game could go either way, holy shit, was that second half off-putting. Then again, the utter failure of the Timbers’ defense on that second goal - three LA players unmarked in the heart of the area? seriously? - gave a warning as unmistakable as a wall of “Do Not Enter” signs guarding a freeway off-ramp. Sadly, that fuck up looked like a brick wall with a force-field in front next to pure drunken chaos that led to the penalty Portland gave up for the third goal; I doubt any of the players could tell you there were in the LA area, never mind where they shouldn've been on the field. Add a fourth goal that shared all the bad habits of the first (ball-watching to the point of paralysis) and there’s your favorite home team on the wrong side of a blowout that could have run to half dozen plus to one. The xG tells the tale as well as anything…

The few positives for Portland came in the first half. They moved the ball pretty well - Diego Valeri, in particular, had some great touches and layoffs - and the Timbers found the chances I thought they would. Jeremy Ebobisse scored one on the least likely of those chances, but, from that point on, the worm had turned and grew into something beastly. Because I watched the game this morning, there goes any hope of blacking out that second half. Sheeeeeeee-iiiiittttttt.

MLS Weakly, Weeks 14 & 15: The Super Standings Return

MLS, perhaps more than you think. But also less.

The Super Standings return! In this post, I’m looking at nothing but results over the last ten games for every team in Major League Soccer and strength of opposition over the same. My dog-shit memory will pitch in with what it can and, after I throw it all together, we’ll see what I get.

I made some tweaks to the Week 10 version of this post (which I referenced, like, a lot less than I thought I would), most notably: I added a loose scale - and trust me when I say loose - for the strength of opposition, something I thought would give further context for those last 10 results (there, T = tough, M = middling, and E = easy). It’s a lot of blah, blah, blah, after that, so the last step is organizing the teams into three tiers:

Competitive: Could win a trophy or, failing that, reach the semi-final
Playoff-Bound: A good bet for MLS's (over-expansive) playoffs, but a bad bet for trophies
Watch-List: Teams who might graduate to the above, no matter how narrowly
The Presently-Irrelevant: Teams who, based on evidence and history, will not

Again, it’ll make sense, honest. If anything stood out, it was the fact that the league’s stronger teams all seemed to play generally weaker schedules than the weaker teams. Then again, it was those weaker teams that made the softer schedules for those stronger teams, so there’s still a lot of big fish eating smaller fish and those smaller fish dying. That’s only part of the narrative, though, and some of the trends I see have serious potential to up-end a narrative here and start a new narrative there. For instance, think of what might happen if MLS’s Canadian teams, nearly all of whom have something better than nothing going for them, get to move back north for actual home games (aka, the “Canadian Asterisk”)? Also, there will be typos, in the numbers, especially, so do double-check as needed. That’s just one factor explored below, even if it doesn’t apply to so much to the top-tier teams, aka, the teams that are…

Competitive
Sporting Kansas City: 9-3-3 (5-0-3 home, 4-3-0 away), 28 gf, 17 ga
Last 10 Results: WWWDLWWWDW (EEEETMMTET)
Strength of Schedule: 50% soft (3 hard, 2 middling, 5 easy), so not too damn hard, but, fair warning, they’re slaying rivals.
Notes: Sure, the Galaxy went sideways, but wasn’t Kansas City part of what turned them? Also, a two-goal over Seattle away (even with the latter’s reasonable beg-offs; see below), pairs nicely with home wins over Colorado and LAFC. All those happened within the last five games, which announces the obvious: Peter Vermes side is, for lack of a better word, doing the steady work of taking names and kicking ass…literally everyone’s except Portland at Providence Park…which suddenly feels like some vampire shit (not inviting them in is step 1 and it solves the problem).
Forecasting: It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good. Given everything, they officially became the team to beat in the West this weekend.

Nashville SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: Problems Versus Solutions

Because no one wants to look at piles of shit.

Is there anything more to say than FC Cincinnati got beat comprehensively by a better team? Even with some surprises in the numbers - e.g., Cincinnati nearly tied Nashville SC for total shots (…when?) - but the real-time action and the balance of the numbers (0.3 xG for Cincy) all bear out the final verdict: an easy-breezy 3-0 win for Nashville.

The game started (very) poorly, and with a soft goal, and the only “but for” Cincinnati fans can point to is that time Brenner spun a Nashville defender near the center stripe and ran in alone on Joe Willis…only to see Taylor Washington take it off his toes at the decisive moment. Cincy was just one goal down at that point, so who knows what might have been? Back in the real-world, and outside that, I counted one good attacking move for Cincinnati - Brenner combining with Edgar Castillo and Luciano Acosta somewhere around the 50th minute - but that was the most they troubled Nashville’s defense, aka, certainly more than Joe Gyau’s spazzing raid up the middle or Haris Medunjanin’s free-kick from deep-left in Nashville’s defensive third.

The craziest numbers I see are possession/number of passes, the only area where one can argue Cincinnati ran up the numbers. Literally nothing came of that because Cincinnati struggled mightily to play through what I’d call “in-fill” by Nashville, a spin on the concept of pressing. The basics of the tactic (and it’s something I see against the Portland Timbers a fair amount) seek to clog the passing lanes inside your opponent’s half; it gets pressure to the ball, but without chasing it all over, and it mostly works by getting in the way. For all…wow, 653 passes made (again….when?), Cincinnati couldn’t get much of anywhere, at least not up the field. Nashville reined in the line sometime in the 2nd half, but that only translated to Cincinnati dicking around with the ball in a different part of the field.

To wrap up Nashville, I’ll start by thanking C. J. Sapong for backing up my prediction that he’d factor into the result - though I can’t say I saw a two goal, three assist game when I typed that into twitter….golly, last Wednesday. All in all, this was a pretty straightforward case of a team having a couple more piles of its shit together going against one with their piles a little more scattered and disconnected; Nashville hasn’t lost in seven games for a reason and they’re playing even against some of the best in the Eastern Conference (e.g., a 1-0 home win over the Philadelphia Union and a goal-less road draw at Columbus Crew SC). FC Cincinnati, meanwhile, is not.

Minnesota United FC 2-1 Portland Timbers: Legs, and How to Use Them + 5 Thoughts

'Tis a sign.

You can’t win ‘em all and, tonight, the Portland Timbers fell about 20 minutes short. Long story short, Minnesota United FC turned it on after the Timbers could not and they recovered from a smart early Portland/Felipa Mora goal to win the game 2-1. Now, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the fatigued.

First things first, I know I didn’t see Mora’s goal coming; even when it happened, but Dairon Asprilla read his run perfectly and served the ball to the correct side of Bakaye Dibassy, and that put the Timbers up by one deserved goal. Portland would spend the next 35 minutes or so in a pure defensive crouch - more later, and this is big in my mind - but Minnesota labored more than they succeeded; Portland’s step-ins were good where they needed to be and everyone seemed to have a clear idea of where to go when someone stepped to the ball (i.e., the defensive rotations looked good).

The remarkable thing is how well that held for…golly, 35-40 minutes. That means it's possible. But, of course, then it all went to shit.

Suffice to say the warning sounds rang loudly (at least in my head); around the 75th minute, when Timbers' 'keeper, Aljaz Ivacic, punched Emanuel “Bebe” Reynoso’s corner kick to the far side. Portland still had, literally, 10 defenders inside the 18, with the main thing they were doing in that small space was being tired; so, when Hassani Dotson floated a second cross into the area, all they had between Chase Gasper and goal was Dario Zuparic. Zup lost the one-v-one, and that’s how Minnesota equalized. Honestly, it was kind of fine: Minnesota had mid-week off, whereas Portland played Los Angeles FC wid-week, and then had to fly to Minnesota three days later besides to play a team that hadn't just skipped mid-week, but who had played at home the weekend before (the July 18 win over Seattle), and who hadn’t played since July 7 before then. So, yeah, Minnesota was well-rested.

While that’s fine, good and expected, it does not explain Portland’s decision to start defending both higher late in the gam, thereby opening more vertical space between their lines, and without any pressure on the passer - most notably, Reynoso, the guy who makes them “go.” He was somewhere around the center stripe when he carved open the heart of the Timbers' defense to find Robin Lod for the winner. Renzo Zambrano was, oh, five yards from him and laying off, but I’m less pissy about that than I am about the apparent decision to push the line of engagement into Minnesota’s half of the field, and without any intent to go after the ball. That’ll be my first talking point, but I want to cover some points about Minnesota for a tic.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Los Angeles FC: A Cinderella Story

Fixin' to kick yer ass with this shoe once I get it on...

Well, didn’t that end like a fairytale? Going the other way, Cinderella deserved her happy ending. Did the Portland Timbers?

The first, correct answer is, of course, who the fuck cares? The Timbers…. arguably stole all three points with a 2-1 win over Los Angeles FC, but they somehow managed to make it look legit. Or semi-legit. I’ll get to the whys ‘n’ wherefores of that in the 5 Thoughts section, but, in the big picture, this counts as a BIG WIN. And, yes, that’s circumstance specific: the Timbers hit a stumble lately, taking only 1/3 of the available points from the last six games, while LAFC took…4/5th (right?) of the points over their last five games. Despite the Timbers win, that gap still seems consequential - because LAFC was the better team tonight. Only they lost. Anyway…

The game started both brilliantly and historically, with Portland going up on a guilt built by hustle (Marvin Loria) and completed by timeless composure…just…to believe that ball would clear the defender, the chest it down like you were finishing a plate with brittle ingredients, and then to shatter LAFC ‘keeper, Tomas Romero’s five-hole wide-open like that. Diego Valeri couldn’t have scripted a better 100th career goal, not with the assistance of the gods…I mean, the slacker ones like Apollo and Baldir, the artsy-fartsy ones. And, lo, it was good…

…until it was bad, obviously. For all that the Timbers managed to seize initiative here and there, this was LAFC’s game to lose from somewhere around the 10th minute forward. Shorter version, the Timbers had their moments, but LAFC had more moments. A lot of that came from something I’ve seen from LAFC over the past couple games, but that I haven’t seen since somewhere around late 2019: the return of the avalanche. Jose Cifuentes, Francisco Ginella and Latif Blessing (one of the most underrated midfielders in the league for my money) had general control of the midfield and that reliably sets up the most doom-inducing dynamic for the Timbers: an inability to clear the lines, which leads to panic, which leads to chaos, which leads to goals against. If I had to credit anything for LAFC’s, mid-key, general dominance it came with shutting down Portland’s passing outlets and for most of the game. This should come at absolutely no one’s surprised, but LAFC won the xG battle tonight. They do that a lot as it turns out - they produced the highest reading I’ve ever seen in last weekend’s win over RSL (and it held up under the eyeball test as well) - but that didn’t buy them top of the West - Portland’s just two points behind them, in fact - and that’s a big, meaningful reality.

MLS Weakly, Week 13: The Wild, Wild East and a Prematurely Settled West(?)

Damn good movie...

With time just…stupid-short between now and the commencement of either Week 14 & 15 or just week 14 - depends on how they count the mid-week slate, something beyond my control - I’ll have to keep things (somewhat) brief in this one.

As with every week, I posted a thread with some theories on Week 13. Here’s the hit/miss ratio on that:

Hits
I had doubts about the Los Angeles Galaxy’s (@ Vancouver Whitecaps), the Colorado Rapids’ (v San Jose Earthquakes) and the Portland Timbers’ (v FC Dallas) ability to handle game they should manage and two of them - LA and Colorado - proved me right (VAN 2-1 LAG, COL 1-1 SJ; the outlier, POR 1-0 FCD; bless you, Jeremy Ebobisse; my extended notes on the Portland’s thin win over Dallas). I dubbed other games salvage operations - i.e., a chance to disprove the theory of a slump (even a modest one) - and Week 13 saw two of those teams - the New England Revolution (@ Atlanta United FC) and the Philadelphia Union (v DC United) - argue they can play out of a slump (ATL 0-1 NE; PHI 2-1 DC; the third team, Orlando City SC, are now winless in three games and in unseemly locales (e.g., TFC 1-1 ORL). I called a couple games “credibility duels,” but only one of those gave a loud signal: Nashville SC kicked the shit ‘n’ stuffing out of a Chicago Fire FC team (NSH 5-1 CHI) that found three ways to trip over the same dick…which brings me to the “credibility duel” that went right yet weird and, the rest of the…

Misses
Club de Foot Montreal may have been FC Cincinnati, but, golly, did they turn it into a comedy; sadly, Cincy smothered whatever positives they might have taken from this by blowing two, two-goal leads in the same game, and allowing five goals besides (MTL 5-4 CIN: my extended notes on that game). I did worst on the two games I couldn’t get a read on going in - Columbus Crew SC v New York City FC and Los Angeles FC v Real Salt Lake - but I probably over-thought both of them, if one, like, A LOT more than the other. First, ignore the score-line because LAFC kicked the holy shit out of RSL (LAFC 2-1  RSL), then came back for one more. As for the other, the home team won between Columbus and NYCFC (CLB 2-1 NYC), but one part of thought on that - e.g., that only a New York win would give a clear signal about where each team was headed - came through in the stats/video. NYCFC had every chance to win the game, only to get stuffed by Eloy Room every time they didn’t get in their own way.

Club de Foot Montreal 5-4 FC Cincinnati: ................You Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me

Another weakness: terrible box office numbers...

When I saw who Club de Foot Montreal had avaiable in defense, I had a sense they’d struggle at the back. When I saw who FC Cincinnati started in defense, the stench of trouble wafted into my nostrils.

Even with all those tells, I don’t believe a single human being who thinks and exists could have called the final 5-4(!) win for Montreal. “Hows” gave way to “whys” gave way to “what the fucks”: there’s almost no point in asking what went wrong when it’s that close to everything. Montreal gave up goals through sleepwalking nonchalance - if with an assist from Cincy’s press - but Cincinnati gave out both shots and goals like candy. For as many times as one could argue Cincinnati got robbed on this or that play - and I count three - Montreal found a shot and missed it by inches as many times. About those three times:

1) yes, play should have been stopped on Montreal’s first goal because the ref impeded Joe Gyau;

2) Montreal’s dude (think it was Victor Wanyama) fell into Yuya Kubo and that could have easily been called; and

3) it probably would have helped Kenneth Vermeer’s case that Mason Toye took a dive had he not got a cut on his forehead that clearly signaled some form of contact…and he came out too hot.

I’ll get to five thoughts on FC Cincinnati - and I’m gonna squeeze all the happiness I can out of them - but to start with Montreal.

They play soccer the same way one wears an ill-fitting sweater in general, but Montreal surprised me yesterday. The midfield spine (Wanyama and Emanuel Maciel) labored more than I thought it would against Cincy’s, but the defense…I mean, sure, Cincinnati pressed but their play was casual to the point of outright nudity back there - e.g, this should never happen anywhere outside pee-wee soccer. Going the other way, Montreal clearly have some decent pieces - new kid Joaquin Torres looks like one to watch (or Cincy’s bumbles made him so) - but, after watching them for a second full 90 minutes in 2021, my main question is....that [gestures toward Montreal] fourth in the Eastern Conference again? I get that I’m seeing them at their worst - maybe orange and blue hits them the same way the color yellow hits the Green Lantern? - but they’ve looked just as ragged every time I’ve taken 15 minutes to watch them. I’m not expecting them to stay fourth, basically.

Portland Timbers 1-0 FC Dallas: One Good Step and a Mess Besides

I fail. I succeed. I live. I die.

How can a game be everything you want, only less? That’s how I feel about the Portland Timbers’ narrow, yet necessary 1-0 home win over piteous FC Dallas. Neither team covered itself in glory tonight - in fact, one could argue that, if Portland strained that hard to beat Dallas, therefore… - but let’s dwell on the happy shit, for there was some. But first, a word on Dallas.

They have had a terrible season, without question, and…. yep, they’re the last team in the Western Conference again, but I see them playing most teams close every time I check box scores and the highlights, they get their chances, and so on. Still, why not sleep on a team that shows no real sign of waking up? As for tonight, and box score be damned, they had the better chances to go ahead early - Ricardo Pepi knocked on Heaven’s Door when he pinged the post on a great cross from Paxton Pomykal in the first half (and Pomykal had a great chance of his own later) - but I also suspect that’s Dallas’ season in a nutshell: a lot of not nearly enough. Call it the wages of life as a selling club (au revoir, Tanner Tessmann), and not getting enough out of players they bank on like Franco Jara (bordering on flop) or Matt Hedges (broken), but Dallas presents as a team all but screaming for an on-field ratio of mentors to mentees of 1:3 at a minimum.

A player like Justin Che provided a good example tonight: he got beat, he lunged, he poked he missed, and so on, but he also played the full 90 without allowing a total collapse. At the same time, against a team with a better idea of what they want to do in the attacking third? That shit’s fatal…

…sadly, Portland is not that team, or wasn’t tonight. There was so much nothing before Diego Valeri came on at the 65th minute, and even then it took some minutes before things - or, rather, Jeremy Ebobisse’s, on review, fairly low-percentage, and yet entirely wonderful goal - to come together. And I’m serious about that: 80% of this was a game of snatching coherence out of its opposite; getting into timelines and brass-tacks makes no damn sense. Somehow the same game contained an endless parade of soccer players making soccer plays (i.e., so many players did so many good things on an individual level to keep possession and/or the ball going where the team wanted it to) while still containing multitudes of futility.

MLS Weakly, Week 12: A Top 10 Storylines...that's right, we're using codenames.

No, look, there is a process...

So, yeah, I’m dicking with the concept again. Results rankings felt good for a while, but now they feel like a word salad with random names dropped in like tomatoes and bacon bits. In this post, I’m bumping that to the preamble - which is 85% about providing some notes on each game plus getting in links to all the Mothership’s game-data (embedded in the score, as always) - and going with a different approach:

A Top 10 Storylines from Major League Soccer Week 12. And it’s “a” instead of “the” because I don’t like being pushy. I’ll round it out with notes on every team that played last weekend. It’ll make sense by the end. Trust me. First, though, here are very short notes on all the games played between last Wednesday and last Friday, organized in the order I think they “matter.”

Los Angeles Galaxy 3-1 FC Dallas
The Galaxy’s prime directive in the here and now: keep pounding points out of punching bags. And, holy shit, did Dallas oblige. Oh, the errors.

New England Revolution 2-3 Toronto FC
There’s a (dangerous) whiff of complacency about the Revs right now; Toronto turned that into 25 minutes of mastery…which they later surrendered.

Club de Foot Montreal 2-1 New York City FC
I’ve been waiting for MLS’s mystery team to send a clear signal; this comes closest to a clear one.

Colorado Rapids 2-0 Minnesota United FC
Everything I saw said Colorado won this clean; Minnesota’s night can be summed up in Andre Shinyashiki scoring after playing a one-man give-and-go.

Red Bull New York 1-1 Philadelphia Union
Two teams that will fight you and both look like they have the quality to land a knockout blow. That's all I've got on both teams for now.

FC Cincinnati 2-2 Columbus Crew SC: Disappointed and It Feels So Good...

That's just to get the song in your head. As a mnemonic.

Can I even have five thoughts in my head when one big one - e.g., please don’t do that - drowns out the rest? I mean, is there even room for another thought?

After going up 2-0 in the first half, and Columbus Crew SC going down a man during the same period, FC Cincinnati allowed Columbus back in with two of their own. With that, a game that started brightly as any I’ve ever seen Cincinnati play ended in a 2-2 draw that it’s very hard to feel happy about. But, come, let's try.

Circumstances loom large because, one, the first half might have been the best half of soccer I’ve ever seen FC Cincy play. They got the kind of start every team aims for by pouring numbers forward and taking a chance on catching other team off-guard; Luciano Acosta opened up a world of possibilities when he slithered around Columbus’ left and pulled a grass-cutter into the heart of the penalty area: when Edgar Castillo slammed it home after it appeared go astray, it looked like a night for the unlikely. The idea they owed it all to luck slowly evaporated as Cincinnati paced the game with (overly?) patient passing and ball movement and, from about 20 minutes on, discombobulated a normal steady Crew team with an aggressive, targeted press. That pressure forced Columbus to chase backwards too often and scramble, which scrambling let Cincinnati force in a second goal through (again) Acosta after too many wires got crossed in Columbus’ area.

All the above also caused Columbus to lose their heads a little with Jonathan Mensah, in particular, making a couple statements (aka, tackles) that spoke loudly enough for everyone this side of referee Terry Stott to hear. He ultimately sent off a Crew player, but Stott’s worst habit came with dishing too many cards for the wrong reasons - dissent being one of the dumbest. That’s the worst kind of referee: the guy who loses his cool when people point out he’s wrong. I wasn’t dumb enough to think Cincy had it in the bag when Harrison Afful was shown a second yellow for falling over Acosta from behind, but I failed to see several things coming - with Lucas Zelarayan’s first-half goal being the first thing to come to mind.

I came to the second half about five minutes late (burrito run!), but didn’t see cause for alarm when I settled in again: Columbus withdrew deeper than I thought made sense and just absorbed, absorbed and absorbed some more. To paraphrase the famous saying about bankruptcy, Cincy’s collapse happened gradually then suddenly. When the Crew started to push out of the bunker, they found Cincy’s midfield pretty easy to play through and the work of getting from their defensive third to Cincinnati’s surprisingly easy. Zelarayan’s near-equalizer came from one of those, “well-if-you’re-going-to-let-us-play” moves, and Columbus buried the real thing about 10 minutes later. It was a bizarre/semi-inexplicable moment - after Zelarayan rode one tackle, a decision was made to let him run(?), from which trot he found forward Miguel Berry in a gap between Castillo and Gustavo Vallecilla, a situation in which everyone seemed to see him, but somehow still lost him - and Berry made the finish look easy.

MLS Weakly, Week 11: Results, Their Meaning (& Movie References)

Very near your high school, probably.

I waffled a bit deciding on a format for this edition of the Weakly - e.g., results rankings versus the context-driven Super Standings (referred to as "The Week 10 Recap" below) - but went back to results rankings for a couple reasons:

1) it offers more room for narrative, more time to capture detail; and

2) a string of results will always tell a body more than a scattered sampling of results, so I'll go back into The Week 10 Recap format after we've got another handful to poke around.

That said, all of what’s below build from The Week 10 Recap, a sort of “Where Are They Now”...only the “where” doesn’t imply losing track, like it does for famous people or high school. All in all, this turned out to be a compelling week. Every result down to the last two have some savory wrinkle that hints at spicy twists to come in the 2021 Major League Soccer season as we’ve collectively known it so far. That’s a good thing. Going the other way, some narratives have deepened - see the first two results for reference - but, overall, Week 11 threw its share of curveballs…and I'm hearing that last word in George Plimpton’s voice from Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary, for some damn reason.

As to format, I’ve organized all Week 11’s results in the order in which they either underscored or disrupted the sacred time-line (and guess what I'm watching more recently). I put an asterisk next to every game that got the Silver Service Review - e.g., a careful look at the MLS in 15 video (and I took notes!) and a respectable stare at the stats - nothing next to the games where I reviewed only the highlights and the stats, and I put “90” in parentheses after any game I sat all the way through (just one this weekend, with apologies to my Portland Timbers, but the bowling league calls when she does). In other programming notes, I’ve decided to push this feature to Tuesday nights; that's the only way I can get in all the Silver Service Reviews and do this up right (and also while still posting the music timeline histories that constitute the other half of my pointless, yet beloved obsessions). Oh, and I link to the MLS summary pages in each score below. Those things are pretty damn useful, honestly, no matter how tight they’ve been with the highlights since, like 2018. Finally, I included the category I assigned each game in my weekly preview thread - in this case, Big (e.g., big teams battling it out); Obvious (a superior team against its alleged inferior); and Make Me Care (two alleged inferiors battling over scraps). And away we go...

Houston Dynamo FC 1-1 FC Cincinnati: ...Better...

The road to success means figuring this out.

Overall
A game that started rife with opportunity (via fuck-ups), gave way to about 20 minutes’ worth of Houston Dynamo command and (less) control (more later), which then devolved into what I’m going to call a fan’s second half - which, here, means a fair amount of nothing with rare and late bursts of hopeful interest.

Or, shorter, FC Cincinnati choked out the Dynamo for a 1-1 road draw. They also never really looked the lesser team, which brings me to:

A Brief Note on the Dynamo
The one dominant thought: they’re sloppy. Even during their period of dominance, Houston stopped their own attacks as often as Cincinnati defenders did (…Geoff Cameron excepted; great game) by way of a combination of forced and/or mis-hit passes; if you're wondering how Cincy edged the home team in xG, that's my answer. They play to force mistakes for a reason, basically, and that means maintaining a certain pitch and ferocity of upfield tackling. Because Cincy was able to play out of that pressure fairly reliably, Houston’s game-plan fell apart. They’re spinning their wheels generally at this point, Cincinnati was just the latest obstacle they couldn’t get over. And am I alone in thinking Tyler Pasher looks like a young Bill Burr?

5 Thoughts on FC Cincy
1) They Did Their One Job
A personal or collective lack of composure was the one thing Cincinnati’s defenders couldn’t afford and, until Nick Hagglund’s weird late fuck-up, the worst mistakes made by the back four + ‘keeper Kenneth Vermeer came with the odd errant pass and Gustavo Vallecilla waltzing out of pressure only to shank his clearance out of bounds. The defenders found the midfielders fairly easily, then the midfielders found the seams to break the pressure. This allowed them to absorb Houston’s pressure until the home team all but gave up. Related thereto…