MLS Week 5 Main Course Preview: A Peek at the Futures Market (& Fast Zombies)

The rest of Major League Soccer catches up to the six teams who played for the Week 5 appetizer during the international break…though, of course, all six teams play again this weekend, so…

First, and at long last, enough season has passed to where the meaning of the matchups don’t rely so much on last year for that little certain something - though, obviously, not all games have that (see below). That doesn’t mean every team has entirely out-run last season’s demons, just because they’ve started all right (e.g., Chicago Fire FC and FC Dallas) or stopped borrowing off the benefit of the doubt from last year’s glory or their reputation (e.g., New York City FC, New England Revolution and Seattle Sounders), but we’ve definitely arrived at a place where two, three steps will carry in the same direction will carry them there.

That’s enough context. These previews are meant to be movie trailers - e.g., some cool explosions that foretell bigger ones in the finale, maybe a little thigh, and some guy (or just me) intoning those magical words…”in a world.” Only in this case, we’re living in a world where Chicago is third in the Eastern Conference while Austin FC hangs on a cliff-face at fourth in the West. One’s personal theory on how long those two teams, along with a couple others, can keep ahead of the usual favorites will become the story of the 2022 regular season. Now, on to the previews.

I lumped all Week 5’s games into three categories below (habits are hard to break, y’all), but we’ve reached another point in this young season: discussing games within those broad categories no longer works. As such, you get blurbs. Oh, and I know I tweeted something about writing stand-alone previews for FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers this week, but, nah, ain’t happening. You’re not going to believe this, but I’m toying with a change in approach, something I will not have to do if the MLS production program starts posting the MLS in 15 in sufficient quantities. My guess is they made them for the MLS Week 1, took a look at the viewing numbers, and saw that only one sad fucker in the suburbs of Portland seemed interested, so they abandoned them. At any rate, I’ll know by Sunday and, when I know, you’ll know.

OK, moving on. And the categories seem self-explanatory enough, so away we go!

Portland Timbers (Lucky) 1-1 Orlando City SC: Thoughts on a Visit from a Gift Horse

Once again, a portrait of the author. (Call me.)

I’ve decided not to feel any particular thing about the 1-1 draw that could have easily been a loss for the Portland Timbers today. The darker side of me - and that’s the fellow I’ll be chatting with for most of my comments tonight - thought Portland was running out of ideas, options and time right around the time Orlando City SC’s Andres Perea tripped Cristhian Paredes at the top of their 18. That mistake handed the Timbers a shot at redemption, as well as a plausible hold on a narrative that says they have a fair shot at getting better as time, familiarity and the return of fresh, healthy faces has time to show up in the starting XI.

And, for what it’s worth, that feels like an important narrative to maintain somewhere between the foreseeable future and the if/when it falls apart. To be clear, I’m pulling for the “if” scenario - i.e., the one in which things don’t necessarily fall apart - even if I believe 2022 has already posed some tricky questions for the Timbers.

Speaking of questions (and I’ll have more below), the big one I had after today’s game: how much did what happened today followed from Portland doing it to themselves versus Orlando doing it to them? Best-case scenario, the Timbers befouled a good game plan with poor execution - i.e., all you need to fix the problem is better execution. I saw Gio Savarese frame this as a “lack of urgency” in the attack, and I more or less accept that, if with a couple re-writes - e.g., maybe favoring early crosses that give attacking players space to run into, instead of tapping and dancing for the perfect cross against an organized defense…and I type that acknowledging that Portland found one of its better chances when Josecarlos “The Maddening” Van Rankin clipped a cross to the back post that Paredes could have buried and put the Timbers up a vital goal. That’s just one example; another could reduce all the way to something blunt and simple as pulling trigger on a half-chance instead of playing for the sitter. All that’s to say, the Timbers have a nagging habit of overelaborating in the final third, and it very much hurt them today…until Perea rescued Paredes’ visibly doomed run across the top of Orlando’s 18…get my mints, Stella, I’m going to French kiss that gift horse for…hold on, brb, and don't mind the tattered clothing…

To turn over to the bright side of things, and as much as the aesthetics favored Orlando, this was a cagey, tactical game. Portland gave them as little as the xG indicates for most of the game, but Orlando made the most of the one vivid breakdown when Alexandre Pato picked out Junior Urso’s run-from-the-depths and the latter calmly poked home the shot (though, on further review, Pato fairly clearly chopped blindly into space that found Urso, so how concscious was it?). And, sure, you could call the (more or less) free header that Benji Michel headed toward a goal in some alternate universe the moment when Orlando could have put the game away, but this was a decent performance for Portland on the defensive side. Diego Chara put in the usual heroic shift and Zac McGraw has given the Timbers good positioning with a side of aerial dominance that should have the people calling the shots thinking, if not second-guessing (and, if the theory holds, more competition should equal a better back-line). After that, Claudio Bravo achieved his usual balance of bad-'n'-ballsy, while Van Rankin played one of his better games of 2022, if only to about 10 minutes before his incredibly pointless self-sending off…again, I’m Team Bonilla/Bravo, risks be damned. Still, the defense more or less did its job, if against a team that plays like Victorian authors write, so, yeah, I’m more concerned about what the offense isn’t doing right than what the defense is doing wrong.

Charlotte FC 2-0 FC Cincinnati: Subject/Object

When they come, will you be ready?

This could be me ranting into a vacuum in response to nothing, but I’ve got something to get off my chest, so, here it is.

I see people talking and talking expectations for their team and evaluating results they’ve earned or burned with almost no reference to the quality and, more importantly, the form of the opposing team. It takes its most persistent form in assuming that what works in one game will somehow work in every game; the specific thing could be a tactic or a player, but the basic argument amounts to having a conversation about game as if half the people involved neither participated, nor played a hand in the result. I’m sure some percentage of this gripe follows from me reading a novel in between the lines (often of 280 or fewer characters), and it mostly comes up when I see people bitching about a result that should have surprised them half as much as it did, but this drives me all kinds of fucking crazy - i.e., this has become my king pet peeve in all sports.

Some of soapbox soliloquy pertains to FC Cincinnati’s 0-2 loss at Charlotte FC, though personal application may vary. Related, that hyperlink will be the last time FC Cincy serves as the subject to any thought in this post. Figuratively.

Because I had to wait for the replay on this game, I had an opportunity to absorb the post-game chatter before sitting down to actually watch (most of) the game. [Disclosure: I watched the first 28 minutes, then all the second half, so whatever good shit happened from the 28th to the 46th minute doesn’t exist for me.] As such, I went in knowing things didn’t go well, but without really knowing how or why.

If I had to tell an alien about this game, I’d start by telling Bleep-Borp (for that is its name) that most of the notes I wrote while watching pointed to things Charlotte was doing. To give a couple examples, I couldn’t help but note the energy and overall effectiveness of SuperDraftee, Benjamin Bender, or how Derrick Jones stomped around the middle of Charlotte’s half of the field like an colossus who stood 50% taller than everyone around him (this definitely applied to Luciano Acosta). I’d flag how Christian Fuchs and Joseph Mora’s names came up often enough on defensive actions/stops that I still haven’t been properly introduced to Guzman Corujo and Jaylin Lindsay, even if I’m willing to take it on faith that they actually played yesterday. And, yeah, Kristijan Kahlina made some impressive saves, but the only one that felt like robbery was his save on Acosta’s bright, shining moment at the end of the first half (okeh, yeah, I dipped back in for the last four, five minutes of the first half as well).

MLS (Early Bird) Week 5 Preview: Notes on the Baby Slate

Nothing says "refinement" like wavy Lays.

With the international break dominating attention (unlike, say, the NFL playoffs during the playoffs), Major League Soccer opted to serve up a small plate, a modest appetizer, if you will, for Match Day 5. Fortunately for me (wait…is it?), I have a personal/hobbyist’s interest in two of the three games on the plate, and the third one just fucking stinks with intrigue. With an eye to minimizing bias, I’ve decided to preview them in the order in which they’ll be played.

Charlotte FC v FC Cincinnati
A modestly revamped FC Cincy have given fans and observers hope and reason (respectively) to believe they might dump to ignominy of a “thrashing” by wooden spoon on another team for the first time in their MLS history. One might naturally see a natural inheritor in new kids, Charlotte FC, and yet…

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of a long visit (aka, a full 90 minutes) with Charlotte, but I suspect most people who follows MLS noted their Week 4 win over last year’s record-breaking/Shield-winning New England Revolution, as well as Karol Swiderski’s role in makingit happen. Lest any doubters think Charlotte beat a rotated Revolution team, they did not; most of the names people know started. Moreover, they went up early and, when the Revs equalized in the 54th minute, Charlotte knocked them back off stride three minutes later with the winner, and then added another just seven minutes later. It bears noting New England was playing on CCL-legs, but this wasn’t a case of crapping out down the stretch.

I did, however, spend 15 minutes watching Charlotte in their inaugural MLS game, a 0-3 loss at DC United, a game in which they looked very much up for it - i.e., that final score plus three fluky goals flattered the bejesus out of a DC team who later revealed more than a few cracks in their chassis. Related, I saw more of the same from DC when they beat FC Cincy in Week 2. Now, about that game…

All the things that brought FC Cincy two straight wins after that loss had their coming-out party in that same loss - e.g., forwards Dom Badji and Brandon Vazquez finding good looks with Luciano Acosta running wild ‘n’ loose underneath, and the central midfield tandem of Junior Moreno and Yuya Kubo moving the ball from the defense to the attack timely, quite possibly for the first time in FC Cincinnati history. All concerned have been doing the same since, and arguably better - definitely better in the case of the forwards - and that has Cincy on two wins on the trot, and without a Geoff Cameron chicken-wing to spoil the outcome. So…who’s gonna win?

MLS Weakly, March 22, 2022: Notes on MLS Week 4 & the First Steps in a New Direction

I’m still working out the kinks on these damn things, in the hopes of making them leaner and smarter. That already involves a damn rebrand and, it’s possible things will keep on evolving if, say, The Mothership ramps up production on the high-grade highlights reels, aka, the MLS in 15 videos. They posted two this week, and even picked good games (see below) and, sure, two games beats the hell out of zero, but it still leaves too much to what amounts to short videos of barely-contextualized goals, plus a couple shots thereon (aka, the baby highlights), the related box scores, and the Armchair Analyst’s weekly column (that links to this week's).

I bring all that up as full disclosure. While I might start watching the MLS Review Show (this week’s edition), that just looks like Baby Highlights strung together, I’m not about to start sitting through ExtraTime Radio, on the grounds it’s fucking unbearable, but I also think it’s perfectly fine, if not healthier, to have a sense of the league as opposed to knowing everything about it. Especially when no one’s paying you to know it.

As those who dipped into the MLS Week 3 Review/MLS Week 4 Preview posts, I organized all the teams in MLS into a set of classes that, frankly, proved unworkable, but, that frame still set expectations for MLS Week 3, and I’m standing by most of that stupid fucking hierarchy, if with some little nudges and twists courtesy of MLS Week 4. The Week 4 Preview posed some questions and posited some theories, so I’ll start with how those handled the stress test.

First, the annual CCL hangover continues to create what most people interpret as anomalies in the results for last season’s elite. In plainer English, it makes sense to lowball expectations for the teams still involved (so, no excuses Colorado Rapids and fewer excuses Club du Foot Montreal and New England Revolution) till they drop out of that tourney and get in a couple cups of coffee and/or dry days. For instance, I expected the Philadelphia Union to get a win out of leg-drunk New York City FC, and so they did by a 2-0 margin, even if the goals came earlier than I expected (and Philly barely looked at the ball). Against that, I had some expectations that the Seattle Sounders and the New England Revolution would have enough juice left to skinny wins or, worst case, draws against a pair of newbies; Seattle held up their end with a 1-1 draw at Austin FC, while the Revs got on the wrong side of what I’m guessing most people read as one of the biggest surprises of Week 4 - i.e., a 1-3 loss at Charlotte FC, and impressive debut by that Karol Swiderski…but does any of that actually change anyone’s opinion about those three teams, never mind the teams they played?

Back in the world where the signals broadcast clear and true, that left 12 results to sift through. In the order in which they felt predictable, going most to least.

FC Dallas 4-1 Portland Timbers: Some Color(ful) Commentary on a(n Ideally Irrelevant) Debacle

Only less good than the Blazing Sword.

As noted in early communications, I only realized today that I’ve been posting real-time narratives of every game I’ve watched for two, three years now. Here’s tonight’s transcript and, for what it’s worth, I think it catches the highlights, just so and all that. Now, to expand a little…

I’ve heard the phrase “a half to forget” to describe one of those 45 minutes in Hell stretches that every team faces now and again. That phrase is stupid, and may no one utter it every again, even in jest. Those are precisely the kinds of halves (halfs? calfs?) that a team should never forget. It should be the bulletin board rage-spiration that one gets from looking in the mirror on his/her/their worst day, an interminable 45 minutes where every player on the field contributed a little fuck up to create a great big Voltron of fuck up. So, yeah, #neverforget

The headless-chicken scramble you see in the highlights of each of Jesus Ferreira’s threefirst-halfgoals gives a fair impression of Portland’s first half, aka, the soccering equivalent of asking “what the fuck just happened?” two full fucking minutes after it did. It would take a miracle to come back from such colossal and repeated breakdowns. To their credit, the Timbers gave it a fair crack. And that’s real praise. Speaking for myself, I would have asked the refereeing crew for a towel throw in under the rules of Association Football, as currently written and adjudicated, to spare my eyes the sore.

 Portland took their first big step into the game - “back into” amounts to forgiving anything about that first half - when they started to, for lack of a better word, try. They ditched staying organized and vaguely interested for making Dallas work for just about any pass closer to Portland’s goal than Dallas’ attacking third. The second big adjustment came with Sebastian Blanco coming on for a theretofore pretty well useless Santiago Moreno. I’ll get into all that shortly, but first…

His joy = your pain.

This game ended in a 1-4 loss for the Timbers. It’s been about…nine months(? no, eight) since I’ve seen them fall apart like they did today. And, sure, I get the thing about Texas and March and the team will get better as [_______] player comes back. None of that explains away the sheer, collective uselessness of Portland’s first half. All they can do is play like it never happened…which, okeh, yes, I picked at the metaphor long enough to figure out the true meaning of “a half to forget,” it’s possible I found the true meaning of Christmas (don’t let dad drink before noon), and that’s pretty much my take-away from this…game. Portland kinda sorta punched back, if 36 minutes far too fucking late, but I’ve watched this team long enough to know how they work. Or can work. And, in their defense on most days, it does. Now, back to the action…

FC Cincinnati 3-1 Inter Miami FC: Shit, I Underwrote My Theme...

Junior Moreno, artist's rendering.

Here I’ve been posting twitter threads that double as game summaries since the pandemic started (at least) and I never thought to just link to the fucking things. In fairness, that’s more color commentary than summary - and the notes come at what I consider appropriate intervals (i.e., I’m very much a one-dude-in-the-broadcast-booth man) - but it flags every goal, notes some broader trends and even mentions the shirtless dude in the crowd with the great state of Ohio tattooed on the skin above his beating heart.

Now, to flesh that out a little…or a lot.

FC Cincinnati started the game as well as Inter Miami CF started it badly. They stopped everything headed toward their goal before it breached their defensive third - if with a massive assist from a globally sloppy Miami team - and piled on pressure with sharp passes and a selection of first touches and shake-‘n’-shimmies that kept the ball rolling toward Miami’s goal. Whether on coach’s orders or from a bout of the jitters, the visitors let Cincy play, only really trying to pressure the ball when it rolled into their defensive third. With the home team more or less camped inside Miami’s half, that proved disastrous: Cincinnati generally only had to go as far back as the impressively effective Yuya Kubo (who added a wrinkle with a shot on goal!) and Cincy’s new stealth-fighter No. 6, Junior Moreno, who would then feed it either to Luciano Acosta, one of the forwards (Brandon Vazquez or Dominique Badji), or Alvas Powell high on the right, or Ronald Matarrita high on the left.

Given how mightily Miami struggles to score - they’ve scored just two goals over four(!?) games, with one coming from the spot (today) - Cincy effectively won the game over the first 25 minutes. Their first goal featured a lot some of the good, good things I noted above - e.g., Badji showing to receive the ball, but instead turning and letting the ball run toward goal, poking it to Acosta, who found a wide-open (this is a theme) Vazquez running up Cincy’s right. With the fullback playing to contain, Vazquez pulled up, stepped inside and scanned for the third pass, who happened to be Matarrita, who passed home the goal from the far post. Miami’s shape was a disaster, both d-mids had stepped to Badji, leaving Acosta free to run with space in front of him and Vazquez all alone.

Cincy’s second goal followed the other half of the script noted above. After making a pinned-in Miami chase around the right for a couple passes, the ball went back to Kubo, who cycled the ball to Tyler Blackett (yeah, yeah, the ball went further back), who found - again, a wide-open Matarrita, who was able to pick out Vazquez as cleanly as the latter had done for the former just six minutes earlier. In short, a low-scoring Inter Miami found themselves down 0-2 by letting too much happen around them. They showed too much respect to one of MLS’s historically bad sides.

MLS Week 4 Preview: With an Assist from the Good Folks at Hasbro

Mixing the metaphors.

With about a month gone in Major League Soccer’s 2022 season, teams are starting to develop the outlines to the forwards to the stories of their season. That might sound like a whole lotta ain’t shit, but even rough drafts have storylines.

I posted something a couple days ago, where I organized all 28 MLS teams into four broad groups with a medieval-inspired class system: Nobility, Gentry, Free Laborers and Serfs. I explain those terms below, but the work of pulling that together finally helped me finish a thought that’s been bumping against the inside of my skull for a couple years.

I don’t know where it came from and, honestly, I think the talking point has died down a bit, but MLS either had or handed itself a reputation for being “unpredictable.” Like…five years go, someone clipped that into the phrase, “that’s so MLS.” (Like that damn car commercial…gawd, is it Buick? Yes, Buick.) Because a lot of shit that doesn’t make sense happens in MLS, something like that flew well enough to get off the ground and, for a time, become a thing. But it was always kind of crap. MLS is, and always has been, unpredictable week to week. Some of that’s parity, some of it’s the league’s built-in ceiling on talent (we ain’t the Golden Shores of Europe), some of it’s just sports shit - e.g., travel, weather, hating the coach, hating one’s teammates, tummy aches, slumps, slump-brain, drama…so I guess that’s sports shit and/or life shit...and I'm resisting cheap shots at the Timbers F.O. fucking heroically, people.

But, once you sit still long enough to actually think about every team in the league, it becomes clear you have opinions on most, if not all of them. In other words, once you look past the fusillade of curveballs, sliders, and even those duds that just piddle across the plate during any given week of any given regular season, you see teams with histories and habits, good, bad and FC Cincinnati. That’s not to say you don’t still get ups and downs - e.g., how long has it been since one-time dynasties like DC United, the Houston Dynamo, or even the Los Angeles Galaxy have fielded a team that looked like it would get to see a trophy because they walked on to the field to play for it? - it’s more that the state of most teams follow arcs that last several seasons. Those long-term trends stick with you…and that’s because they’re pretty damn sticky at the end of the day. Now, back to the Nobility, Gentry, etc.

Just three games have adjusted my opinion on a handful of teams one way or the other - and I’ll mention them after the definitions and which teams fit where (and the prior post shows my math) - but here’s how my little class system translates to results:

MLS Weakly, March 15, 2022: Results from Week 3 and the MLS Class System

Again, portrait of the author.

You know what I haven’t done yet for 2022? Lay down my markers. Shit, what the hell did I stop taking?

I had opinions going in, of course, teams I expected to do well, others I expected to struggle, and a handful I expected to stare at for 30 weeks before they made any kind of sense, and probably not even then. And, yes (be a drag), the season is very young, though, if you take the 34-week season and match it against the life expectancy for the thoroughly average American (as in, we’re all in this together (for once), and it looks like 77.3 across races and genders in 2020), the MLS Season is damn-near 7-years-old in human years. Young, sure, but it’s a pretty good bet it’s wiping his/her/their own ass.

Still, you don’t judge any kid based on what she’s done by age 7 (tap dance harder, Cassidy!) and, to be clear, this post passes absolutely zero hard and fast judgments on any team in Major League Soccer. The goal here tracks with my…more or less completely unobserved understanding of how the British documentary 7 Up works (and did I even do the title right? Nope!) - i.e., I’m going to organize all the teams in MLS according to how I see at seven in human years, and continue update my thoughts/judgments as the season progresses. Also, don’t worry: I won’t post something like this every three games; it’ll be more of a slow process of picking through “the bounty” The Mothership delivers for content every week. Now, if have nothing more to work with but the fully-abbreviated (e.g., the four-plus minute jobbers) and Matt Doyle recaps, it’ll be like looking out the wrong end of a spying glass. I’ll have more to work with if/when The Mothership ramps up production the MLS in 15 videos; those at least get you in the rhythm of the game and to where you catch stray snippets from the broadcast booth, so, please, hire more interns. And pay them. It’s not like I’m asking for your first-born, Don Garber…

With all the above in mind, I’m going to use the result from MLS Weeks 1-3 to show how what passes for my process works. Now, a week before the 2022 MLS regular started, I listed all the teams that interested me at that point in time. I didn’t nail the categories - made ‘em too broad for one and didn’t control for personal eccentricities - and that goes some distance to explaining the need to fine-tune, or even correct, how I think about all the teams in MLS, and a little early in the season. Now, to reorganize every team in the league based on what I wrote in that post, and to establish more functional categories. And, for the record, I’m doing my level best here to go back to where my head was before First Kick - and I’ll add brief little notes to explain my…let’s call them WTF choices. Finally, think I’ll go with a medieval theme this season - and, yes, these are loosely ranked:

Orlando City SC 1-2 FC Cincinnati: With a Nod to a Hero of the Salem Witch Trials

Translated to the modern idiom, "eat shit, prudes."

Had you asked me to pick the game FC Cincinnati would win from its first three, I would have picked away to Orlando City SC last. Had you told me they won it courtesy of a Brandon Vazquez brace, I would have asked for a taste of whatever you were on at the time of asking.

Chase the doubts and disbelief away because, I’ll be damned if FC Cincy didn’t roll into central Florida and win its first game of 2022. The game ended 2-1 and, numbers be damned, I thought they looked all right doing it. That’s to say, forget stats like possession and passing accuracy, look beyond Cincy’s thin passing network with its faintness of some far-off constellation, and scroll all the way to the bottom of The Mothership’s stats page to drink in the one number that gives a fair read of the game as it played out, the xG data.

In terms of timeline, Cincy stunned Orlando a mere 13 minutes into the game when Vazquez, a man not renowned for finishing his chances, buried a tidy li’l chip into the right corner of Pedro Gallese’s net. With the wake-up call duly delivered, Orlando proceeded to pile pressure on every available side of Cincinnati’s 18 yard box. The chiseling finally broke through the walls 30 minutes later when Orlando’s Junior Urso charged buck-naked onto a Facundo Torres cross to Cincy’s back-post at which point, I, like everyone who wishes Cincinnati health and happiness, commenced to listening desperately for the first-half whistle. The game, in short, had threatened to get away from Cincinnati.

After watching the way Orlando had a rich tapestry of ways to threaten the side fringes of Cincinnati’s 18-yard box, Cincy’s newbie head coach, Pat Noonan, made some adjustments to the defensive shape. On came Isaac Atanga to take up the right (left?) side of the three in a 4-2-3-1 and back went…I’d say fullback Ian Murphy (who several faulted to Orlando’s goal) more than Alvas Powell, into the four-man defense to better defend said side fringes. And then, somewhere between out of the pale blue sky and before all that had time to settle, Yuya Kubo sent newly-minted winger Dominique Badji into a foot-race against Orlando’s left back Ruan; Badji shouldered him off the ball (and to the ground), turned the ball inside behind Orlando’s defense and, effectively, ricocheted his cross off Vazquez’s head.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Austin FC: Forest Versus Trees; Even If I Can't Get that Metaphor Straight

We are in a good place, and we love each other.

Started a new tradition tonight: I didn’t write down notes of any kind until the second half. Except on twitter…also, there wasn’t much to say about that first half. It was a classic vague, mutual groping, a feeling out period that went on a little too long without going anywhere. Nothing of real note stood out, at least not beyond Austin FC having a lot of the ball and the Portland Timbers getting the best look. Bottom line, all that played to the Timbers strengths, only at an angle that arguably benefited Austin’s strengths more than Portland’s.

Now, I’m not a fan of the halftime speech. That could because I’ve never heard a real stem-winder, at least not one that didn’t involve me as a half-negative argument for inspiration (again, the frame was, “if he can do it”; true story, at least twice), but whatever Giovanni Savarese said before he sent his charges back onto the field, whatever adjustments he made, I’d put the number that worked at somewhere between 60-80%. The other part of that equation, and the one I’m least equipped to make: what adjustments to Josh Wolff make to what Austin did?

For all the noise that came between the whistle that started the second half and the one that ended it, the loudest came in the 62nd minute when Bill Tuiloma got a big step in front of whoever the hell wears Austin’s No. 4 jersey (Ruben Gabrielsen, huh), and powered home a point-blank header off a pretty-as-you-like Yimmi Chara set-piece to put the Timbers up 1-0. Some sweaty moments aside, if fewer than one might think, that was all the Timbers needed to pick up their first win of 2022.

Tuiloma had a wonderful game. Give or take 10 minutes after he scored, he cleared an absolute, no questions asked Austin goal off the line, and during a scrum that had Timbers defenders flying around their own area like clay pigeons. And that’s one of my take-aways from today: the Timbers bent their defense to the breaking point, but made sure that it didn’t. Tuiloma and Zac McGraw deserve a tip for all the clean-up they did today, but they got a decent lift from Josecarlos Van Rankin’s best game of the season, plus a…well, let’s just say we’ve got something to think about after Justin Rasmussen’s wholly impressive first-team debut. As much as I hate making judgments off a tiny sample size, I wasn’t nearly as impressed by Rasmussen’s defending - which wasn’t bad at all - as by his composure on the ball. Good passes forward, smart slip passes under pressure…suffice to say questions abound and the answers don’t seem so obvious all the sudden…

…no. No. Don’t give in. Cool your jets. It’s one game. It’s one game. Moving on…

MLS Weakly, 03 10 2022: The Review (Week 2)/(Week 3) Preview, Keep Your Damn Pants on, People

Portrait of the author...

To start with a bitter message to The Mothership: either make the MLS in 15 video clips or don’t. They posted just two for MLS Week 2 and chose the shittiest (or least interesting games) for subjects - e.g., New York City FC’s unilluminating draw at the Vancouver Whitecaps and Real Salt Lake’s mildly interesting, yet largely explicable, 1-0 win over Seattle - and, if that’s the M.O., why fucking bother? Ah, and now I see they've added the blandest, least-inspiring result from the CONCACAF Champions' League ("CCL"), Club du Foot Montreal's 0-1 loss to Cruz Azul this morning. We’re 26 (27?) years into this marriage, this league and I, which means the distance between nothing and a little something doesn’t fucking exist at this point.

Before I put away the soapbox, here’s another one: is there a dumber question that “is [insert team, barely matters which one] for real?” two weeks into the fucking season in a centrally-planned league like Major League Soccer? Drawing any conclusion from data that thin, never mind a firm one, borders on parody for one - and I know from small sample sizes (see every poll I’ve ever posted) - but it takes blowing past a lot of context to type that phrase. Every team starts every season carrying lighter or heavier baggage and you can’t say a team that struggled through 2021, if with a couple blowout wins slipped in the middle (both over my Portland Timbers), has turned things around based on two home wins over two historically shitty teamss. I don't think the subject of that characterization is a mystery at this point....

One last thing before skimming the details (You did this MLS.com! I pissed away my review/research time waiting for condensed games like somm asshole waiting for the Great fucking Pumpkin! SALLY LEFT ME!!), I’m pulling results by MLS teams in the CCL from the “where are they now?”  conversation because, 1) the New England Revolution excepted, they all posted lackluster results for MLS Week 2, and I’m even dubious on what they did (e.g., a 1-0 home win over FC Dallas); 2) I have neither the interest nor the bandwidth to dig into what each team did with its game-day roster to keep its legs lively for the CCL, and that’s because, 3) the never-ending story that is every MLS regular season means all those teams can drop a handful of points early and, with the quality…nearly all of them have, make a run at winning the only trophy anyone talks about (e.g., MLS Cup). And teams like Seattle and the Revs feel like plausible bets to win the trophy I care most about, the Supporters’ Shield.

As such, I’m putting the following results on the list of games I’ll note without comment (though, as always, I’m linking to the Mothership’s summary for each result):

Los Angeles FC 1-1 Portland Timbers: Poised on a Thread

Zac McGraw made me feel as safe as that tree tonight. Srsly.

But for a tap-in that only looked inevitable after it went in, the Portland Timbers would have left…whatever Los Angeles FC calls their home stadium 1-0 winners. Seeing as the exception has already been noted, yeah, LAFC scored a late equalizer - off a tap-in - and wound up with a 1-1 tie that feels…I’m going with complicated.

There was a lot to like in this game from Portland’s point of view. For one, they held a (fairly) front-footed, compact shape together for 90+ minutes today - and how often do Timbers fans get to say, “our defense won it for us today!” Portland’s one-man strategic reserve, Bill Tuiloma, played a role, as did Aljaz Ivacic - he looked confident today and made at least two beauty saves - but if Zac McGraw didn’t make at least one starter feel antsy tonight, they didn’t watch the game I did. Athletic, smooth, but smart more than anything else: Gio appeared to have tasked McGraw with putting out fires before they could ignite and the man got his Smokey Bear on straight.

Claudio Bravo looked super-sharp, at least until he took a dumb-shit tug on LAFC's Cristian Arango and got sent off…Josecarlos Van Rankin, meanwhile...I don’t know what that guy can do to make me comfortable but, whatever it is, he has yet to start doing it. I tell you, the guy looks as nervous as I feel every time an attacking player squares him up.

The returns diminish as I tick through the names from there. There’s no taking away the divine improv-glory of Yimmi Chara’s blind-looper of a goal, but the game-state ran him down to where he couldn’t find a pass. That left Dairon Asprilla as the only viable outlet for about 65+ minutes, but he got lonelier and lonelier for as long as (most of) the starting unit stayed out there; he got some more chances to run after Sebastian Blanco came on for Jaroslaw Niezgoda (who had moments, but…), but even that only happened after LAFC stepped to the edge of all-in to find a goal. Back on the happy side of things, I thought Cristhian Paredes put in a solid shift (while still believing he got subbed just in time), and Diego Chara just keeps on keeping on and in a way that makes me questions all kinds of things. Elsewhere, I’m still wondering whether Santiago Moreno was on the field tonight, or whether he just sat down on the field now and again with a look on his face that said, “can you believe this shit?” out of contractual obligation.

If that feels like putting the cart before the horse, I apologize, but I’m mostly processing this game as an opportunity both unearned and blown. Let me explain…

FC Cincinnati 0-1 DC United: That Unfamiliar Familiar Sting

This, but maybe with the left hand.

90 minutes with a hard kick to the balls at the end. That’s my dozen-word description of FC Cincinnati’s slow-death 0-1 loss to DC United at TQL Stadium.

After absorbing an early onslaught - and high-five to Tyler Blackett for nodding out a sure goal - Cincy got hold of the game in a way I either haven’t seen or can’t recall since gods know when. And that’s the real hairy bitch about the whole situation: today’s (comparatively) glorious effort came just one week after a season opener where it looked like just about everything surprised them one way or the other. Today, though, Cincy didn’t just connect the odd pass or three; they built sequences that knocked DC from the front-foot to the back in the blink of an eye. Sweet transition, baby. I’d direct any FC Cincy fan casting about for something to hold onto after a game that felt like a betrayal to the fact that they created actual, full chances in open play. That beats the hell out of trying to squeeze a ball through that familiar, rapidly-closing window Cincinnati fans knows so well. That’s not even the best thing that happened today.

Miracle of miracles, Cincinnati fielded a fully-functional midfield today, one that, as I saw it, actually controlled the midfield space. Credit newcomer Junior Moreno and Yuya “Mr. Plug-‘n’-Play” Kubo for putting in a pair of damn good shifts (and hold that thought), and (probably) Pat Noonan (or his shadow-master, Dominic Kinnear) for sorting out a better set-up, I only know it was refreshing to see an adjustment - any adjustment - pan out into anything besides fresh disaster. Kubo, in particular, looked like an entirely new player; he kept his work-rate dizzyingly high, but he looked totally different going forward, as if he understood where to find space and where to find, whether by turning into it on the dribble (the man got away with a scandalous number of spins today) or passing usefully out of it. All in all, Kubo did a helluva job getting the ball out of defense and into the attack - and I think that was the reason why Cincy’s transition game worked today…not that it mattered.

The passing improved all over and, better, just about every man dressed in orange looked like a full, dues-paying professional soccer player out there today. And yet, it wasn't enough. Cincy's best stuff came during the game’s first 50 minutes or so (dammit), all the way down to the butter-slick goal they scored just after the 20th minute, even if it got (rightly) called back for offside…ah, Brandon Vazquez, he does it wrong even when he does it right. My best guess is that DC worked out where or how to stall Cincy’s transition game at half-time, a shift that allowed them to shift the action toward the middle of the field and away from their own goal. Prior to…whatever happened around the 50th minute, other new arrival, Dominique Badji, either got or found some real quality looks at goal - just by smart runs, too, and he should have scored one of the two truly good ones he had - while fellow-frontrunner Vazquez chipped in with a handful of half-/quarter-chances. Now, brace yourself, because things get darker from here on out…

MLS Weakly, March 2, 2022: The (Week 1) Review/Preview (Week 2), Hopes & Expectations

Welcome to the first MLS Weakly Review/Preview of the 2022 regular season. As implied by the title the first half of this post takes a look back at what happened with MLS Week 1 and the second looks ahead to MLS Week 2. I’m also going to squeeze longer notes on the next two opponents for the two teams I cover on this site, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, so maybe call those the first and second thirds instead. It’s possible (eh, make it probable) I’ll start posting separate previews for both teams when I’ve got more with which to work. Speaking of…

People familiar with this site and its…sure, let’s call it a methodology, know that I’ve grown increasingly obsessed with results over the past several seasons. Think of it as the “G” in “xG,” only it’s Results versus expected results.

Now, because there’s just one game in the books all ‘round…hey, just noticed no one had a bye week. Huh. Back to it, a one-game sample isn’t even 1/10th of dick, so don’t expect any sweeping conclusions below, declarations of doom or glory, etc., but, that doesn’t mean assumptions haven’t been made. I wrote a pair of posts in the second half of January 2022 - one where (after a bunch of bullshit) I effectively dismissed six teams from each conference as irrelevant, and another where I listed all the teams in the league and talked about how I see them historically. If I didn’t mention it at the time, I wrote both those posts to provide some sloppy scaffolding for interpreting the first…call it 10 or so weeks of Major League Soccer’s 2022 season. For what it’s worth, I think it takes a dozen weeks' or so worth of results before one can really establish any kind of context for expectations for what should happen one week to the next. And, yes, after that a quarter of the teams will throw those out the window by either tanking (thinking Orlando City SC and the Los Angeles Galaxy for 2021) or thriving (thinking my Portland Timbers or the Vancouver Whitecaps for 2021) down the stretch. All this? It never stops being fluid.

If you didn’t read either of the two posts linked to above, I only linked to them for the curious or very bored. You won’t actually need to make sense of this post and these will get easier to figure as time goes on. With that out of the way, let’s kick around MLS Week 1.