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| Apt. And possibly copyrighted. |
Gonna just kind of riff through the match-ups. Make it conversational...if in the espirit d'escalier vein.
Just to note it, I have two questions in my head when talking about any game: what is the likeliest result and how much would any other result matter?
To be clear, I mean the word “matter” in the context of Major League Soccer, a league where meaningful change occurs at geological speed. On with it...
Major League Soccer’s Week 22 kicks off smartly with the New England Revolution visiting FC Cincinnati – and no doubt scheming about how to batter or otherwise breach the walls of Fortress TQL. I imagine the U.S. Men’s pulverizing of St. Kitts & Nevis means Cincy won’t have Matt Miazga for another week, so maybe that’s the lever to finally crack Cincy’s home form. Only bad gamblers believe random events can be in any way “due,” so I’ll only say this: a Revolution win would make a good argument that they’ve pushed through their blues. Related/unrelated, FC Cincinnati has built a reputation they’re now damned to uphold until that burden falls from their shoulders.
That theme carries through a lot of the other games, or at least the good ones. I’d call...let’s go with “clout maintenance” as the primary theme of Week 22. To wit: Club de Foot Montreal will want to maintain his Cincy-esque home form – and their lifeline – by beating a limping New York City FC; the same goes double for the San Jose Earthquakes, who face the horror of waking up Sunday morning knowing that thousands observers will no longer say “yeah, but their home form,” with the same breezy confidence that people say, “yeah, but it’s a dry heat” (as you’re sweating off eight pounds just talking to them) if they hand even one point to the visiting/suffering Los Angeles Galaxy; finally, St. Louis CITY FC should expect to feel a similar heat (now, with humidity!) if they drop points to a visiting Colorado Rapids team with a straight-up shitty record of picking up any points no matter how hard the other team drops them. Another commonality in all those games: wins by any of NYC, the Galaxy or the Rapids won’t change many minds or raise low opinions.
Seatttle Sounders v Houston Dynamo FC...well, it almost fits in the above. The Sounders have to start running if they want to get ahead of that whiff of desperation and no more than 3 of the 10 people surveyed for this post [NOTE: No survey took place.] believes Houston has a chance, but I don’t see, say, a “Seattle’s back!” narrative coming after if they win, or a “Houston’s fucked” bandwagon to roll to Hell if they lose...but I do think a Houston win would raise some eyebrows.
Just to note it, I have two questions in my head when talking about any game: what is the likeliest result and how much would any other result matter?
To be clear, I mean the word “matter” in the context of Major League Soccer, a league where meaningful change occurs at geological speed. On with it...
Major League Soccer’s Week 22 kicks off smartly with the New England Revolution visiting FC Cincinnati – and no doubt scheming about how to batter or otherwise breach the walls of Fortress TQL. I imagine the U.S. Men’s pulverizing of St. Kitts & Nevis means Cincy won’t have Matt Miazga for another week, so maybe that’s the lever to finally crack Cincy’s home form. Only bad gamblers believe random events can be in any way “due,” so I’ll only say this: a Revolution win would make a good argument that they’ve pushed through their blues. Related/unrelated, FC Cincinnati has built a reputation they’re now damned to uphold until that burden falls from their shoulders.
That theme carries through a lot of the other games, or at least the good ones. I’d call...let’s go with “clout maintenance” as the primary theme of Week 22. To wit: Club de Foot Montreal will want to maintain his Cincy-esque home form – and their lifeline – by beating a limping New York City FC; the same goes double for the San Jose Earthquakes, who face the horror of waking up Sunday morning knowing that thousands observers will no longer say “yeah, but their home form,” with the same breezy confidence that people say, “yeah, but it’s a dry heat” (as you’re sweating off eight pounds just talking to them) if they hand even one point to the visiting/suffering Los Angeles Galaxy; finally, St. Louis CITY FC should expect to feel a similar heat (now, with humidity!) if they drop points to a visiting Colorado Rapids team with a straight-up shitty record of picking up any points no matter how hard the other team drops them. Another commonality in all those games: wins by any of NYC, the Galaxy or the Rapids won’t change many minds or raise low opinions.
Seatttle Sounders v Houston Dynamo FC...well, it almost fits in the above. The Sounders have to start running if they want to get ahead of that whiff of desperation and no more than 3 of the 10 people surveyed for this post [NOTE: No survey took place.] believes Houston has a chance, but I don’t see, say, a “Seattle’s back!” narrative coming after if they win, or a “Houston’s fucked” bandwagon to roll to Hell if they lose...but I do think a Houston win would raise some eyebrows.
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| Half a scene after a sexual-tension drunk "fight"(/foreplay) |
That’s less true for Nashville SC v DC United, one of the weekend’s shinier undercards. Nashville’s up there in the standings – poised, in fact, to slip into the front of the pack chasing Cincinnati in the event of a (likely) New England loss – but, what with the way DC’s flirting with the beginning of a run...which is to say, if DC were a rom-com in soccer team form, this could be the moment where the love interest saw something in his/her/their hair and, as he/she/they removed it with the kind easy intimacy you normally see in the 12th year of (a good) marriage, felt the spark. Or, to untangle that, this leans toward clout maintenance for Nashville, but it has big game potential for DC. Red Bull New York’s visit to Columbus Crew SC shares plenty of similarities – e.g., a team in the early stages of getting its shit together (RBNY), facing a strong a strong home team. Moreover, Nashville and Columbus both have strong defensive records, plus they literally share the same home record), so the edge is there, if with one notable difference: New Jersey’s finest have scored 17 goals total in 19 games, with four coming just last weekend, while DC has things on the attacking side figured out to the tune of 12 more goals. In this case, the only unremarkable result would be a draw. A win in either direction gives you something to work with.
The whole “clout maintenance” theme slips out of the picture from there. That said, it gets replaced by something almost as interesting – i.e., visiting teams with a fair shot at sending the live audicene home unhappy. No small part of that follows from those same fans’ haunted familiarity with the sensation. What has been a rough season for Toronto FC, what has been a brutal season for Inter Miami CF and what feels sickening return to the bad old days for Sporting Kansas City should feel like a real opportunity for Real Salt Lake, Austin FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps, respectively. I think the latter faces the heaviest lift, but all three visiting teams should play these as winnable road games and therefore a gettable three points. They shouldn’t suffer much reputational damage in the near-term, but a team can only accrue opportunity cost for so long.
So...what’s left?
I guess I try to avoid thinking about it in these terms, but it took seeing that the Portland Timbers play Minnesota United FC this weekend for me to understand that Portland’s just a bad team this season. To borrow from the internet, this game’s for fans only. The sorrow I feel about that – and, here, “that” references the Timbers’ irrelevance and doesn’t comment on OnlyFans, a site I have never visited (phrasing copped from Doug J Balloon) – helps me empathize with Orlando City SC and Chicago Fire FC fans, because I could not give less of a shit about that game and feel like I could get 95% of MLS fans to agree with that statement in one of my fake surveys.
That leaves MLS Week 22’s trickiest match up: FC Dallas v Los Angeles FC. Both teams “need” the win, if in the “MLS version” of need (the conceptual equivalent of “needing” a snack, honestly), but I can’t see either team getting much or losing a ton regardless of the result. A win for either would give them about a month’s worth of “yes, but” rejoinders about any subsequent results. If I had to choose the worse struggler between them, I’d go with Dallas at this point – something feels actually off, which I mean in a bad way – but both LAFC and Dallas strike me as teams in need of adjustments, whether tactical or mental, that run deeper than simply “getting back on track.”
That’s the whirlwind tour. Hope you enjoyed it. I know I’ve said this 100 times, but this....this is the vision. I absolutely and totally do and don’t mean it this time.
The whole “clout maintenance” theme slips out of the picture from there. That said, it gets replaced by something almost as interesting – i.e., visiting teams with a fair shot at sending the live audicene home unhappy. No small part of that follows from those same fans’ haunted familiarity with the sensation. What has been a rough season for Toronto FC, what has been a brutal season for Inter Miami CF and what feels sickening return to the bad old days for Sporting Kansas City should feel like a real opportunity for Real Salt Lake, Austin FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps, respectively. I think the latter faces the heaviest lift, but all three visiting teams should play these as winnable road games and therefore a gettable three points. They shouldn’t suffer much reputational damage in the near-term, but a team can only accrue opportunity cost for so long.
So...what’s left?
I guess I try to avoid thinking about it in these terms, but it took seeing that the Portland Timbers play Minnesota United FC this weekend for me to understand that Portland’s just a bad team this season. To borrow from the internet, this game’s for fans only. The sorrow I feel about that – and, here, “that” references the Timbers’ irrelevance and doesn’t comment on OnlyFans, a site I have never visited (phrasing copped from Doug J Balloon) – helps me empathize with Orlando City SC and Chicago Fire FC fans, because I could not give less of a shit about that game and feel like I could get 95% of MLS fans to agree with that statement in one of my fake surveys.
That leaves MLS Week 22’s trickiest match up: FC Dallas v Los Angeles FC. Both teams “need” the win, if in the “MLS version” of need (the conceptual equivalent of “needing” a snack, honestly), but I can’t see either team getting much or losing a ton regardless of the result. A win for either would give them about a month’s worth of “yes, but” rejoinders about any subsequent results. If I had to choose the worse struggler between them, I’d go with Dallas at this point – something feels actually off, which I mean in a bad way – but both LAFC and Dallas strike me as teams in need of adjustments, whether tactical or mental, that run deeper than simply “getting back on track.”
That’s the whirlwind tour. Hope you enjoyed it. I know I’ve said this 100 times, but this....this is the vision. I absolutely and totally do and don’t mean it this time.
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