Austin FC 5-0 FC Cincinnati: A Comedy of Errors Without the Comedy

See? Already not laughing.

I’ll start with the confessions: I switched the game off from around the 62nd minute to the 70th and I checked out again before Austin FC scored its fifth goal (I’ve seen it now), but it’s also fair to say I switched off after Austin’s third goal. None of those choice make me feel bad or guilty and, on the plus side, yesterday I learned that I’d rather watch FC Cincinnati play the soccer equivalent of climbing a muddy hill with plastic bags on their feet than FOX’s pregame show. Lord, the fucking “Onside/Offside” segment…

And, to finally put the headline in lights, Cincy lost in Austin 0-5 yesterday. If you want to feel better, stare at The Mothership’s box score for the game for as long as takes for all those numbers and charts to meet closer to the middle. Hell, the MLS in 15 highlights might even cheer you up - e.g., Nicholas Markanich had a couple looks after Austin’s second goal (and hold that thought) and Brandon Vazquez almost made something out of nothing when he chopped the ball across his defender to line up a shot, etc. To get catty about it, the way Vazquez sliced that shot went a little way to explaining how he whiffed on the clearance on the Zan Kolmanic set-piece that led to Austin’s first, second minute goal.

That mishit feels like the right place to start the narrative because, when that first goal went in, chalking it up to some combination of nerves and a bad moment felt like a fair thought to hold, if only for morale’s sake. The happy talk felt a little desperate when yet another defensive blunder left Alex Ring all alone and on-side at the back-post for Austin's second goal, but you could pull it off so long as you smiled till the tears started. Whatever reasonable optimism held the average Cincy fans faith together surely collapsed with the timing and manner of Austin’s third goal, a smooth waltz through an overload that had Cincy’s Tyler Blackett (hold that thought) attempting an unfortunate eenie-meenie-minie-mo and from a step behind throughout the sequence.

From that point forward, the only question that remained was how many more goals Austin would score. Cincy fired a few shots from range early in the second half - a better one by Yuya Kubo (hold that thought) and a worse by Vazquez - but all that filed under keeping up appearances and, if we’re being frank here, that did not happen. Not only did Cincinnati not keep up, it’s not entirely clear that they’ve started moving.

A fourth goal came, crushing in its simplicity, and a fifth, the latter helped along by an over-eager lunge by Zico Bailey that Austin’s Moussa Djitte side-stepped with cartoonish ease. Call the whole thing a comedy of errors, only without the comedy.

Portland Timbers 2-2 New England Revolution: Bouncing Back Against the Bullies. Twice.

Remember, the Timbers survived this...

You can cut anything on as many angles as you like. For instance, you can call the Portland Timbers 2-2 home draw against the New England Revolution a failure to rebound from their MLS Cup 2021 loss. Or you could call it a strong result against 2021's record-setting Supporters’ Shield-winning team, and with some major starters - e.g., Larry Mabiala, Dario Zuparic and Felipe Mora - missing, and one regular starter/talisman - Sebastian Blanco - only available as a late sub.

The frame I choose: a short-handed Portland team went down to the Revs twice and came back just as many times with two genuinely beautiful, well-worked goals. One of last season’s heroes, and a favorite son to boot, equalized on the only successful version of the half-impossible play the Timbers tried to pull off all night (i.e., street ball up the gut), while one of last season’s workhorses scored the second equalizer with something beautiful and unexpected. Better still, last year’s attacking promise - aka, Santiago Moreno - combined to set up the first equalizer and generally showed a lot of what he could do.

Those compelled to find fault (and I’ve got one in my head; he lives in the left or right side of my head, still working on his residence) can find it, but I’m rolling with a narrative of resilience. New England scored its first goal at the end of one of those periods that have plagued the Timbers since 2019: one of those spin cycles where they get under a ton’s worth of pressure, where every clearance goes either awry or out for a corner and someone from the other team steps into the path of every outlet pass. Any which way the ball bounces, it spells the Timbers back under pressure. That happened for 10 whole goddamn minutes in the first half - from around the 30th minute to just past the 40th. The wheels spun fairly off during that period and that presented the Timbers with one of the greatest and best sporting cliches of all time: how does the team respond?

And that gets to why the resilience narrative works best in my mind. After struggling to pass out of the back like a man struggling to pass a kidney stone at the end of the first half, Portland/Gio Savarese found the reset from a decent opening 20 minutes to start the second half. From the great move early in the second half that freed Dairon Asprilla for his first, frustrating miss to the similar set-up he put away for Portland's first, the Timbers regained control of the game and set the tempo. And, yes, after Asprilla scored they planted foot on banana peel and let Sebastian Lletget score a go-ahead goal - and just minutes after their equalizer. Their heads could have dropped to their laps in that moment (wait…are you…never mind), sure, but they kept them up, high even, and persevered. As with any bicycle kick, Yimmi Chara’s goal was anything but inevitable, but, in my mind, that came off for the reason to so many Timbers attacks (including the first goal) had failed: they finally spread the field wide enough in the attacking third to open up space for passes. When Asprilla worked the ball to Josecarlos Van Rankin wide on New England’s left, he had the time and space to tee up a tricky cross. And that’s how the ball bounces to a largely vacant back-post and a moment Yimmi Chara will never forget and/or bore his kids with after every bad game they have in high school.

MLS Weakly/Portland Timbers Preview Addendum/and MLS Week 1 Preview

Portrait of the Author.

This preview post will be a rare content mash-up of the 2022 Major League Soccer season in that it will add to my preview of the Portland Timbers (posted here), preview MLS Week 1, and talk about expectations for the 2022 season as whole - and not in that order.

I already previewed FC Cincinnati, who haven’t done more than play a couple preseason games I couldn’t watch because stupid blackouts. Read all about it here, and do try to keep your chin up; they’ll sign that No. 6 soon. Hopefully. Related thereto, I don’t expect Cincy to figure prominently in the narratives about the 2022 season - at least not ones teams aspire to, not yet and maybe not till 2023 (or 2024...can I get a 2025?). With that, let’s look at the teams who either will or might, aka…

Teams That Interest Me in Various Ways
I plowed through the Matryoshka Doll that is The Mothership’s preview feature this morning as a way to (finally) limber up for Major League Soccer’s 2022 season, which will jump out of the bushes and scare the collective shit out of all of us next weekend. As mentioned in the last MLS Weakly, I made a resolution for 2022 that I’d only track the teams and games that interest me one way or the other. I’d hoped that would trim some fat off the Weakly posts, help with the focus, etc. Unfortunately, the head-count includes just over half the league, so the trimmings will have to come later. I list all my personal teams of interest below, along with the wherefores and whys for their inclusion, but because…I don’t know, fun(?), I’ll leave figuring out the omissions and the rationales for rejecting them to the reader. Think of it as Where’s Waldo, only Waldo is invisible and/or does not appear on the page (also, the creators of those books had to just leave him off once...right? Just for shits 'n' giggles?). To be clear, my position isn’t that those unnamed teams will never be good in 2022 (though a couple candidates do stand out), but that I didn’t see anything in their off-season that raises my expectations.

Now, I’ve dropped the teams of interest into two categories: 1) teams I expect to be good and competitive due to their 2021 baseline, and 2) teams that made enough compelling changes during the 2021-22 off-season to make me wonder whether they’ll do something in 2022. Starting with the first group:

The Good/Competitive, Mostly Unchanged Teams(listed alphabetically, fwiw)
Colorado Rapids
The Rapids neither lost (Kellyn Acosta stands out) nor added a lot (Bryan Acosta from FCD, and U22 No. 10, Max Alves), but they already stand on a solid foundation, and their midfield (Mark-Anthony Kaye, Jack Price and Acosta) is…just really good. And they've got room for some big signings to boot.

A Premature 2022 FC Cincinnati Preview: Because I Can't Watch the Preseason Games

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought the choice was about kids?

FC Cincinnati have hired and fired three coaches in as many seasons, not counting the two interim coaches - Yoann Damet and, just last season, Tyrone Marshall - they sacrificed to appease the Soccer Gods who had clearly cursed them. Ron Jans struck me as the most competent, but he turned out to have the social skills of a man born 50 years earlier, and not one of the bright ones, and that became his legacy. With the others, I'd like to entertain the reverse of a thought experiment: I wonder what either Alan Koch or Jaap Stam could do with a better roster - i.e., one not built on a philosophy that parallels a Supermarket Sweep shopping spree of just grabbing shit in a half-conscious panic.

FC Cincy have also tried swinging big on designated players (DP), and at a clip of about two per season during their time in Major League Soccer. The 2020 crop - Jurgen Locadia and Yuya Kubo - was particularly disastrous, even if that only applies to the latter based on what he was hired to do (i.e., generate offense). Luciano Acosta and Brenner Souza da Silva made up Cincinnati’s latest DP class and, even if didn’t mean much to the team’s fortunes writ large, both Acosta and Brenner will almost certainly unseat the current all-time leading scorer, and 2019 DP, Allan Cruz, a couple weeks into 2022. That record, by the way? Nine goals. Nine. Still, trending up every so slightly beats flatlining.

Flatlining describes FC Cincinnati’s history in MLS as well as any word. The phrase “wooden spoon” got thrown at them at the end of every season they’ve spent in the top flight, but it takes surfacing some blunt numbers gets at how hard. Cincinnati has won just...14 games over 2 2/3 season (the 2/3 comes from 2020, when they played just 23 games). That's just north of 15% of the time...ouch, and that earned them a total of 60 points. For perspective, three teams either tied or topped that “haul” in 2021 alone (the Colorado Rapids, the Seattle Sounders and, of course, the record-setting New England Revolution). I’ve obsessed/marveled over their repeated runs at all the wrong single-season records enough that I won't do it again here, but the cold, hard reality is that you can’t dig into Cincinnati’s numbers without hitting a sewer line. While you're down there, here's another one: would you believe Cincinnati produced its worst points per game total (0.59, people) just last season? Hence the point about Brenner, Acosta and fortunes writ large.

Blanco Re-Signs & Existential Uncertainty

Mood.

In all honesty, a large part involves not wanting to see another Portland Timbers great dissolve into a shadow of himself. Watching Diego Valeri play last season, but also mostly not play…I’m still not sure I can find the right word for it, but I’ll attempt an analogy: it felt like watching your dad reach a point where he can’t do things. Call it the unsettling feeling of mourning someone who’s still alive, and all that can mean.

But, no, I’m also not thrilled to read anything about a “medical condition” in Sebastian Blanco’s knee. And those two anxieties are very much related.

Anyone who follows this site knows I’ve been obsessing over the Timbers’ inevitable transition season since 2018*…which, factually, was never so immediately “inevitable” as demonstrated by two trips to MLS Cup between then and now. So, yes, I’m prone to worry, glass half-empty to a point that might make me an unreliable narrator, but, that transition is coming. Dammit. I’ll get a Yahtzee one of these rolls… [* I just searched my old posts and discovered the first time I talked about any kind of off-field transition (as opposed to the on-field tactical choice) was at the end of 2020…so maybe I’ve talked about it less than I thought.]

That another, smaller part of me felt a kind of relief at the idea of Blanco moving on seems implied in the above. Holding that dodgy knee in the back of my mind made the length and uncertainty of the negotiations read in such a way that helped me make peace with it. It’s not that I didn’t see the rumors of a potential deal with Real Salt Lake (think that was the only one), so much as thinking that the Timbers letting him go meant Blanco couldn’t possibly come back to haunt the team as some revenant dressed in claret and cobalt. About that...

“In an age where contract negotiations are becoming increasingly more public and visible, and players’ actions on social media are scrutinized to the nth degree. This raised some eyebrows and caused panic amongst Portland fans immediately.”