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| I hear his screams from beyond... |
Thinking about that time when DeAndre Yedlin gave himself a cramp by falling into the back of some now-forgotten Inter Miami CF attacker somewhere after the 60th minute. That one quacked like a penalty kick, but Tori Penso didn’t call it and VAR didn’t second-guess her, so what’s the point in picking through the log for that particular piece of corn…
…related, anyone else get the feeling MLS keeps controversial calls/non-calls out of the highlight packages they throw together? Just noticed they didn’t include the late winner they yanked away from Miles Robinson in the full highlights for this one either...guess you bury the bodies where folks can’t find 'em… (To their credit, they did post a whole sidebar video on Robinson's thing.)
Inter Miami CF 0-0 FC Cincinnati
About the Game, Very Briefly
Looked sweaty as balls down in Florida and even Miami’s players looked half-cooked by the 80th minute, but both teams played a lively game in the swamp air. The hosts had the better of the game, but Cincy looked to have the better of the chances – particularly after an unstoned viewing of the highlights – and that captures the way the game played out in as few words as I can manage.
Miami’s high, aggressive defending made it hard for any Cincinnati player ahead of Roman Celentano to play the ball facing forward. Balls into the midfield space went backwards or sideways eight times out of ten and seven balls of ten played forward were long and hopeful. The latter (mostly) kept Miami from turning Cincy over in or around their defensive third (mostly; there were some inevitable miscues), but the Orange and Blue did a lot of defending and passing inside their own half. Miami created more chances – Luis Suarez probably shot and teed up their better ones (e.g., the back-post cross to Fafa Picault, saved by Celentano) – and overlapped around Cincy’s left a couple times, but they had to survive more shots on goal and have decent reason to count themselves a little lucky to escape with a point.
Cincy, meanwhile, looked a couple steps off their sharpest. With Miami defenders breathing down their necks over every part of the field, every loose touch and long dribble by a Cincinnati player got picked off (many from Luca Orellano) quickly and surely. They still did enough in their best moments to win the game – on top of the goal Penso/VAR (aka, the Illusion of Justice) stole from Robinson, Evander wrong-footed a shot he would bury on a better day and Sergio Santos came within a foot of cleaning up another shot 30 minutes later) – but they just…didn’t.
Analysis gets complicated when two good/competitive teams face off in the long middle of Major League Soccer’s regular season. Often as not, the only thing to say is we’ll see what happens if/when such teams meet in the playoffs. Neither team has enormous flaws to repair and both will beat most of the teams they play – which begs the old question of how much of MLS’s regular season is so much pointless kicking. Still love you guys, but the pacing on this TV movie sucks.
So…do I even have 10 thoughts after that? [Ed. – Nope!]
Some Further Navel-Gazing re Cincinnati
1) The Missing Head on the Two-Headed Beast
I’ll start by copping to overlooking some slick hold-up/give-go interchanges between Kei Kamara and Gerardo Valenzuela – coulda been goals, I tell ya – but I spent a lot of last night wondering whether Cincy could have managed better possession near Miami’s end of the field if they’d had Kevin Denkey available. Denkey doesn’t always do great back-to-goal work – one might even make a case that Kamara’s better at it - but he would have provided another burly target for those long balls out of the back and his open-field play has improved so much since March, or even May.
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| Miami's defense: a visual |
Besides wondering about how much Cincy misses Nwobodo’s ground-chewing range and aggression, I wondered about how Cincy can improve against Miami’s swarming press – or other teams’ version of the same thing - because it proved useful. Evander coming back to find the ball helps a bit, even if it drags him far from goal; Pavel Bucha’s good enough(?) on the ball, but Miami forced him to play diagonals into the corners all game and Tah Anunga is…well, Tah Anunga (see below). Cincinnati managed well enough, credit where it’s due, but actually breaking a press is a glorious achievement that I’d like to see them get closer to mastering before “Go Time,” aka, the playoffs.
3) Building a House of Sticks
The idea of building a team around a player is a familiar theme in sports, but the discussion is typically framed around a player that lifts a team to the next level. Anunga, for me, flips the conversation to how you make a team work around a player with a limited set of positives. He ventures forward now and again – e.g., the memorable moment when he dribbled into left side of Miami’s area and, for lack of a better word, froze – but Anunga’s chief/credible talents center on winning midfield battles and getting the ball to Cincy’s creatives like the damn ball's on fire. And that’s something Pat Noonan needs to adjust to – aka, build around. To any frequent readers who wonder about such things, yes, I am obsessed with Anunga. He’s quite good at playing to his strengths, but making those things work in Cincy’s larger scheme feels like the big switch they need to find and flip.
4) Lucky to Have Lukas
Because I’ve basically stopped looking at reddit, and rarely got to any of the Cincy subreddits when I did, I don’t know where most Cincy fans land on Lukas Engel, but that dude’s a blessing in my book. Athletic enough to play a sideline-marauding fullback and sturdy enough to manage as an outside CB in a 3-4-1-2: players with that amount of real flexibility don’t grow on trees. I believe/appreciate that guys like Teenage Hadebe, Nick Hagglund and Gilberto Flores are all coming back to their best, but seeing Engel start over all three still feels telling. And yet…
5) The Knock-On Effects
Noonan sat Yedlin for something like a month as he auditioned Orellano as a right wingback. I never liked that experiment (and celebrated quietly when it ended), but have since moved on to wondering about how the decision to switch Orellano to the (and, for me, his more comfortable) left side and how what might be a genuine preference for Engel has squeezed Hadebe, Flores and Hagglund out of starting jobs. Engel can join Cincy’s attack, Steven Moreira-style, in a way those three can’t…has anyone picked Noonan’s brain about this?
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| My faith is strong. |
When Columbus kicked the crap out of Cincy in Cincy (yes, it was worse than the final score), it raised the fraught question of how well Cincinnati would manage against the East’s finer teams. Taking four points off Miami, home and away, and with a decent claim they should have taken six, put that question to bed, even if it didn't fully tuck it in (e.g., it raises the separate question of how you, personally, rate Miami). Even that second question has caveats – e.g., what missing Messi and Jordi Alba, not to mention what Rodrigo De Paul (about whom I know nothing) does for their long-term chances – but I do have some faith that the home loss to Columbus has been exorcised and that kicking all of Columbus’ ass at the next pass would be the best way to cast that demon back to the fiery abodes of Hell.
An Aside on Messi-Less Miami
I came away impressed by their press and a feeling a little “wow” about the number of ways they found to get at Cincy’s defense (if half-successfully) without Messi and Alba leading the way. Suarez’s ability to drop into midfield and pull some strings helped and they got good afternoons out of promising understudies Tadeo Allende (who got around the right/Engel more than once) and Telasco Segovia. I didn’t even know Gonzalo Lujan’s name going into last night, but he stood out of a defense that held together all right when called upon; the same goes for Marcelo “Chelo” Weigandt, who might have been Miami’s most effective player after Suarez. Between all the above and the three soft games Miami have lined up between the end of Leagues Cup and the end of August (v LAG, @ DC, v CHI), I like their chances of making good on their three games in hand they have, which, here, means I hate them. Cincinnati, along with the rest of the East’s leaders, would do well to keep a close eye on their six.
Right, that’s all for this one. I had dreams of staying on top of the Leagues Cup, plans even, but my schedule for this week is such that I doubt I’ll post anything on the Monterrey game (shit!), so I’ll have to circle back for whatever happens versus Juarez and Chivas. Till then…
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