St. Louis CITY FC 5-1 FC Cincinnati: Beaten, But How Bowed?

The spirit I hope to see...just not next weekend.

I stopped watching the game at the 58th minute and I don’t care who knows it. That’s right, I had to dip into the highlights to see Sergio Santos pull back FC Cincinnati’s one, lonely goal against St. Louis CITY (every time) FC’s five-goal onslaught.

To start, some stray notes from the preview I posted on Thursday night:

“First and foremost, expect a battle. If St. Louis CITY gets Cincy on the back foot, the game becomes 40/60 proposition until they get their steps right again.”

“...the real trick with surviving St. Louis comes with working through their press and matching their intensity (which, here, means tackle-fouls, aka, tackles that come close enough to fouls as to constitute a new species).”

“This game will feature some tricky matchups – e.g., the bruising and active Joao Klauss versus (pretty sure) Matt Miazga, Brandon Vazquez trying to get the better of Tim Parker, and the question of whether St. Louis tries to play Nikos Giaocchini into the space behind Alvaro Barreal...”

My primary motivation for pulling those quotes from that preview isn’t about patting myself on the back, because I also typed this:

“For what it’s worth, I think a lot of the matchups favor Cincy. St. Louis has talent – I didn’t even mention Eduard Lowen, who acts more as a distributor than a No. 10 (based on what I’ve seen) – but there’s a lot of MLS-slightly-above-average in their regular eleven. Don’t get me wrong: I’d take all the ones I recognize on either team I follow, but the 'league-elite' stuff does fall off.”

A fair amount of “what might have been” lurks in the spaces of FC Cincinnati first, and frankly crushing, loss of the 2023 season. What if Alvaro Barreal hadn’t made that pointless shove in the 2nd minute, i.e., the one that handed St. Louis the free kick that led, somewhat indirectly, to their first goal. There’s also the question of what would have happened had Santos pulled one back for Cincinnati at the 13th minute as opposed to the consolation goal that came 60 minutes too late, or why Junior Moreno didn’t shoot first time on a loose ball at the top of St. Louis’ 18 not five minutes later. And that brings me to one more note from the preview:

“...a St. Louis win wouldn’t surprise me in the least – and Cincy will drop points, even dumb ones (and these wouldn’t be dumb) some time this season – but I’m mostly watching this as a test for how high Cincinnati can raise the intensity.”

St. Louis, during warm-ups.

Whoever called this game (and does anyone have any idea where I can look that up?) would not shut the fuck up (was it Marcelo Balboa? because that sounded like his brand of gibberish) about St. Louis shoving Cincy off their collective moorings, even in the first half. While that time absolutely came – why, hello, end of the first half and start of the second! – I thought Cincinnati did all right job of ramping up their intensity after the first goal. They didn’t always do it responsibly – e.g., see the two free kicks they handed Eduard Lowen, plus Obinna Nwobodo’s yellow card at the 28th minute – but I’d argue the game didn't take its sharp turn into Hell until St. Louis’ John Nelson (et tu, Brute?) made something out of nothing with a run up Cincy’s right that saw him beat Santiago Arias and Nick Hagglund before, again, a sequence of very direct, yet somehow indirect, plays led to St. Louis’ second goal. Any or all three of Arias, Hagglund and Roman Celentano could have done better on that play, but they didn’t. And, apres that, the deluge, plus a little salt for the wound.

I have one more moment I’d like to flag, mostly because it gets at the very simple thing that makes St. Louis tick. At the end of an early, promising sequence around St. Louis’ area not more than 10 minutes after St. Louis’ opener, accidental starter Arquimides Ordonez got the ball in a fair amount of space on the left side of the field. He squandered the opening with a touch, but it’s what happened next that mattered most: first, one St. Louis player came in for a tackle; then came another, and then came one more. On the one hand, sure, it took three players to pry the ball loose (how many St. Louis players does it take to screw in a light bulb? Hey-oh!), but that set them off onto a counter that could have easily been an earlier second goal for St. Louis, but for the ball winding up on Stroud’s wrong foot.

Fast zombies, the Borg, the meat-waves the Red Army threw at the Nazis to win Stalingrad: pick your “collectivist” boogie man, the analogy fits St. Louis CITY FC when they’re at their best. They play a relentless, bruising brand of soccer, one that looks almost mindless as you watch it – and their routinely shit passing percentages back that up – that shit is working to league-leading effect.

To loop back one more time to something I typed in the preview (and sorry for all the self-love; I’m blushing over here), another question I asked was whether Cincinnati would look like two teams that went wobbly against St. Louis – Austin FC and my Portland Timbers – or more like the Seattle Sounders team that coolly dismembered St. Louis just over a week ago.

As most people know by now, that same Seattle team got run the fuck over by the Timbers last night – and it was glorious, obviously, as well as pants-wettingly funny (oh, the looks on their faces). As much as I enjoyed that (ever so much, thanks!), I’m actively choosing not to read too much into Portland’s win – i.e., it didn’t erase the memory of all the just fucking terrible soccer that the Timbers played before that and all season long. Hell, they didn’t look much better over the first 60 minutes of the win over Seattle, stuff that didn’t make my match report because I wasn’t about to throttle the good vibes.

On the reverse side of the same token, this loss didn’t suddenly make FC Cincinnati a bad team - again, they will drop points this season, because that's just what happens in the beautiful game. That said, if you read my notes on Cincy’s past games (scroll down), you’ll see concerns about this player or that not being particularly clean on the ball and minor fretting (“we’re just a Minor Fret!”) about the margins not being as wide as I’d like them to be. Again, none of that erases a great start to Cincinnati’s 2023 season, but they do look a little different after St. Louis got their fingers inside and pried them open. Very much related, I can only imagine how amped they got about playing the then-league leaders at home after suffering two straight losses...

...and, man, does this result and Portland’s win hand a bright, lurid frame around next weekend’s game, when the Timbers go to Cincinnati for a visit. Don’t know about you, but I’m expecting a hoot! Till then....