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| I'm not enjoying me either! |
After reports surfaced that AppleTV used a preseason game between Orlando City SC and the New England Revolution to test-drive the broadcast platform, I’d hoped to use that whet the salivary glands before I sat down to write this preview. I can’t find the re-broadcast, sadly, so that’s a whole goddamn preseason of which I saw neither hide nor hair. And I’m still bitter.
FC Cincinnati kicks off its...shit, fifth(!) MLS season next Saturday at home against Houston Dynamo FC – which, to me, gives them a better than even chance of a positive first step into a season that’s somewhere between flushed and drunk with optimism. Most of (the few) things I’ve read and seen over the offseason take Cincy making the playoffs as either a given, or something close enough to that it squeezes out any daylight. And, so, here's where I step in like an uptight father trying to talk his kid past the “indestructible youth” phase. In other words, what's say we start this preview with a splash of cold water?
Let’s start with a fun-fact: Cincy went into the 2022 playoffs tied with Inter Miami CF for the worst defensive record of all the teams that qualified, with 56 goals allowed over the regular season’s 34 games. No less notably, they allowed more goals over the back nine (aka, the second half of the season) at 29 than they did over the first half, when they allowed 27 goals. The latter set of numbers includes the season-opening massacre at the hands of Austin FC, as well as the two heartbreakers against Club de Foot Montreal; taken together, those three losses accounted for 13 of those 27 goals. That’s not to say the defense didn't get the vapors over the 2nd half of the season – it allowed four goals versus New York City FC and at Miami in the second half of the 2022 season – so much as to acknowledge that, outside a glorious late-summer stretch where they kept three clean sheets and kicked the shit out of all comers, Cincy allowed goals at a steady clip throughout the 2022 season.
That’s a long way of saying Cincinnati scored its way into the 2022 post-season. Just three teams scored more goals – and all of them finished in the top two spots in their respective conferences, along with those bastards, Montreal, who scored one goal less than Cincy with 63.
I don’t bring any of that up to shit on last season – particularly not after three God forsaken seasons of lying prostrate at the bottom of Hell and screaming up to an uperturbed heaven. That Cincinnati not only qualified for the playoffs but carried into the Conference Semifinals lands in the galactic/karmic spectrum between the surreal and the miraculous. But, to return to the analogy, consider the above an exercise in reminding my randy teenage son that brakes exist and that it is perhaps wise to tap them now and again...
FC Cincinnati kicks off its...shit, fifth(!) MLS season next Saturday at home against Houston Dynamo FC – which, to me, gives them a better than even chance of a positive first step into a season that’s somewhere between flushed and drunk with optimism. Most of (the few) things I’ve read and seen over the offseason take Cincy making the playoffs as either a given, or something close enough to that it squeezes out any daylight. And, so, here's where I step in like an uptight father trying to talk his kid past the “indestructible youth” phase. In other words, what's say we start this preview with a splash of cold water?
Let’s start with a fun-fact: Cincy went into the 2022 playoffs tied with Inter Miami CF for the worst defensive record of all the teams that qualified, with 56 goals allowed over the regular season’s 34 games. No less notably, they allowed more goals over the back nine (aka, the second half of the season) at 29 than they did over the first half, when they allowed 27 goals. The latter set of numbers includes the season-opening massacre at the hands of Austin FC, as well as the two heartbreakers against Club de Foot Montreal; taken together, those three losses accounted for 13 of those 27 goals. That’s not to say the defense didn't get the vapors over the 2nd half of the season – it allowed four goals versus New York City FC and at Miami in the second half of the 2022 season – so much as to acknowledge that, outside a glorious late-summer stretch where they kept three clean sheets and kicked the shit out of all comers, Cincy allowed goals at a steady clip throughout the 2022 season.
That’s a long way of saying Cincinnati scored its way into the 2022 post-season. Just three teams scored more goals – and all of them finished in the top two spots in their respective conferences, along with those bastards, Montreal, who scored one goal less than Cincy with 63.
I don’t bring any of that up to shit on last season – particularly not after three God forsaken seasons of lying prostrate at the bottom of Hell and screaming up to an uperturbed heaven. That Cincinnati not only qualified for the playoffs but carried into the Conference Semifinals lands in the galactic/karmic spectrum between the surreal and the miraculous. But, to return to the analogy, consider the above an exercise in reminding my randy teenage son that brakes exist and that it is perhaps wise to tap them now and again...
