FC Cincinnati 2-3 New England Revolution: High from the Highest Tree-EEEE!

A little nod for all you Roger Miller fans.

“…put all that together, and it seems like the main thing Cincinnati will need to do on Saturday is keep up.”

So close, and yet so far. Hurts a little, honestly, but the sting of FC Cincinnati’s 2-3 home loss to the New England Revolution beats the holy hell out of the unholy hell of what past seasons have felt like - e.g., feeling one blow after another from a fetal position. I hate to do this, but, this one sentence from the (admittedly choppy) game thread on this game (I was cooking over the first 50 minutes), feels relevant to the discussion:

“Does #FCCincy go for broke at this point? Can they go for broke? And isn’t it nice to say that?”

To tie those two thoughts together, Cincy largely did keep up and with a visibly talented (yet still wobbly) New England team. Sure, the Revs won, but I’d put money on Tommy McNamara missing that shot nine times out of ten and not getting it at all more often still. Cincinnati’s defense dropped too deep, no question, and maybe they had run their legs out, but the Revs game-winner - all three of their goals, really - weren’t unlike rolling three straight, clean sevens in craps (and the lazy shits at MLS HQ didn't do pull-out highlights for this one, so the full four-minute reel is the only point of reference). Only they made each goal happen and credit to them. As loud as their Achilles heel screams (de-fense, de-fense), New England still moves the ball as well as any team in the league, Wilfrid Kaptoum and McNamara did well enough that they didn’t miss Matt Polster, Brandon Bye played a ridiculously effective game, etc. etc. etc.

But push a fair chunk of the credit to FC Cincy in this game for coming back into it twice - and they climbed the psychological equivalent of a mountain to do it. The broadcast booth called Sebastian Lletget’s opening goal against the run of play, but I’d call that valuing possession over effective use of it; New England had the better of the game to that point and they pulled Cincy like well-simmered pork on the goal. Good as Lletget’s movement was on that, Brandon Vazquez matched it on Cincy’s first equalizer, drifting back-post then, crucially, taking a step back allowed the other players to drift across his run and gave him a wee run-up to the ball to boot.

FC Cincinnati 0-1 New England Revolution: Inching Toward Competitive?

There was ample room for improvement, and yet...

If a game can feel busy and uneventful at the same time, I think I just watched it. All kinds of things happened - not least FC Cincinnati and the New England Revolution combined for nearly 40 shots, some of them quite good - but both ‘keepers spent most of the game looking unbeatable and both teams a step or two away from that defining moment when it all comes together and the crowd goes wild. Maybe it’s apt that the only goal came off a sleeper of a set-piece that didn’t feel any more dangerous than the rest of them.

That came in the 70th minute, when Cincy’s Ken Vermeer could only paw Adam Buksa’s header into the side netting (more later). With that, the Revs won a deceptively close game 1-0, leaving the universe feeling right and better at the same time.

My biggest takeaway is pretty straightforward: FC Cincinnati played a team that most people can see winning a trophy this season without squinting too hard and looked more or less competitive throughout. They got on the wrong side of dominated more often than any Cincy fan would like to see - an impression the xG numbers back up - but they also made more and better shots than they have all season, they had a shift of dominance of their own (about the 20th to the 25th minute), and after the Revs ended the first half strong, the defense adjusted and improved: if memory serves, New England ended the first half with 21 shots or thereabouts; they ended the game with just 26. (Related: if you watch the MLS in 15 highlights, the first half takes up at least 10 minutes of the run time.)

Now, to pick through the details…

Cincinnati seems to like the 5-3-2/3-5-2 they’ve used for the last couple games, even if they still struggle with getting the former to flip to the latter (that’s to say, neither Joe Gyau nor Ronald Matarrita impacted the game that much). They set a tone of “ain’t backin’ down” - see Caleb Stanko’s heavy lunge at Arnor Traustason and the fairly visible shove Jurgen Locadia used to throw off Henry Kessler to set up his first (pretty damn solid) shot - and I think that set a bar that referee David Gantar struggled to interpret consistently toward the end (and with no small part of that hovering in Kessler’s general vicinity). I can excuse all that on the grounds that it was the right tone to set - especially when playing in a new home Cincinnati both wants and needs to make into a fortress.