FC Cincinnati 1- 0 Seattle Sounders: Smooth Like Victor...

Victor Mature, in a less than mature moment...

I can’t tell you how much hearing the broadcast booth dip into the cliche about tonight’s game being “kind of like a playoff game” got under my skin...

...and yet the sons o’ bitches got it more right than wrong. The game labored under the pacing of a slow-burn drama, but FC Cincinnati’s 1-0 home win over the (once) red-hot Seattle Sounders (I’ve earned that; Portland Timbers fan) came to life shortly after Seattle decided to take chances. To that point, yep, both teams really did play it in the risk-averse fashion of a playoff game – something I find utterly bizarre given how little any given game counts in the MLS regular season. I get playing for the win, but I also get swinging for the fences when points matter as little as they do right now, aka, buckle up for 20 weeks’ worth of loose claims about this result or that one “proving [YOUR TEAM] really belongs this season.” Yessir, “statement win” articles are already dropping.

As noted/argued in my game thread on this one, a watchable soccer game relies on one team sincerely believing it’s the better on as a starting premise. If Seattle felt that tonight, they didn’t show it, at least not at the beginning. To harp on a theme I expect I’ll be playing all season long, Seattle pumped up their aura with two season-opening wins, but...had you described the setting and opposition of each – i.e., the Colorado Rapids and Real Salt Lake, both in Seattle – I doubt you’d have to make a long case for them getting all six points. As implied at the top of the game thread, I saw Cincinnati away as Seattle’s first real challenge of 2023.

Before going any further, I want to make one thing clear: I will not be indulging in any “your team really belongs” narratives until sometime after the 20th week in the season. Going the other way, Cincy put together an impressive evening, maybe even a complete one. Call it a mature performance, the kind of wily veteran shit you see in a team that feels a breeze at its back. That’s not always entertaining to watch – won’t lie, I was bored for fair stretches of this one – but a well-managed game provides comforts and satisfactions of its own.

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Houston Dynamo FC: Notes on the First Engagement

Bygone era, my friend.

First, where the hell was the beer boot? You can’t get that level of (admittedly, highly-specific) juice on the internet and then fail to feature it? Was it Cincy’s fault for failing to sell them like the hot cakes they are? Was it AppleTV for missing an opportunity to find one? (That said, the camera team kept flashing to a kid eating dipping dots as if he'd discovered love for the first time...in a Disney channel kind of way...wait.)

I’ll start with the good news: FC Cincinnati won its home opener against Houston Dynamo FC by a 2-1 scoreline. Was that line fat enough? Not for my liking, but not every trip to the park can be a stroll, at least not this early in the season.

A couple Cincinnati players looked regular-season-ready – going with Roman Celentano and Obinna Nwobodo as the big, bright stand-outs (and what a time for the latter to break his duck?) – and, outside them (and a couple others), the overall performance rated somewhere between respectable, decent, and good. I’ll flag a couple soft spots later, but I really like two players as human stand-ins for the kind of night Cincinnati had.

Alvaro Barreal is the big one for me – and you can cut his effigy any number of ways. For instance, you can say (and/or theorize) that after seeing its more famous names get blocked out of the game, Cincy made adjustments to open a wide lane for Barreal on the left. To his credit, Barreal took swashbuckling advantage of that space – here, I’m thinking of the pass he picked up in the first half that sent what was left of Houston’s defense into a fire-drill – and, despite being positioned high left to the point Cincy defaulted to a back four (as opposed to the back five shown in Pravda’s line-up) for large stretches, the man made a man-of-the-match’s share worth of defensive interventions...

...and yet, that one time, when Nelson Quinones torched him so bad up Houston’s left that Barreal took a yellow, if just to save his dignity? If that broad concept wasn’t Cincinnati’s performance in a nutshell, I ask you what was?

And do I see Yerson Mosquera standing as another candidate? I have what I feel like accurate recollections of him single-handedly cutting off Houston’s attacking lanes with turf-eating recovery runs on three separate occasions. He didn’t give up much in the air, not that I saw anyway, and most of his actions fell somewhere between “no comment” and “oh, that’s good...”

FC Cincinnati 2023 Preview: A Case for Optimism from the Outside In

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...

How You (And I) Should Have Known the Timbers Would Miss the 2022 Playoffs

This was how I told them apart. Now?

It becomes rarer with each passing season, but I still see people argue it’s impossible to support two teams at the same time. My rebuttal: it’s as easy as wanting one of those teams win every game and wanting the other to win every game except the ones where they play that first team. And that’s how I feel about the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, respectively, and I’ll never understand how that’s complicated.

Going the other way, and unlike past three seasons, watching the Timbers play all season while I watched/tracked Cincy had more value than it did in the past – i.e., most of the past three seasons saw the Timbers wake up sometime in late summer and roll into the playoffs, while Cincy typically started wilting somewhere around late may and continued to the end like some overwrought Shakespearian actor counting his wounds until he rather loudly expired. There has always been a whiff of ne’er the twain shall meet about the experience, in other words, but that changed with Major League Soccer’s 2022 season.

To start with the full disclosures, yes, I really did believe that both Cincinnati and Portland would make the 2022 playoffs. That bet panned out for one team – FC Cincinnati – but not the other...whose name shall go unmentioned. Both teams needed to get something out of their final game of the season - Real Salt Lake away for Portland and DC United away for Cincy. I read both of those games as winnable, hence the whole thing about both teams making the 2022 playoffs, but I also overlooked something, arguably out of habit. The thing that makes that remarkable was how obvious it should have been in retrospect. And that goes back to something I would never expected going into 2022 – i.e., how similar Cincy and Portland would be by season’s end.

First and foremost, Portland and Cincinnati tied a lot - 13 games per team, i.e., tied for second under 2022’s undisputed masters of sharing points, Columbus Crew SC (who had 16 draws and who also missed the playoffs). Another fun fact (and unless I miscounted): Cincy and Portland had only six clean sheets all season, a detail that points to something else that’s obvious - i.e., both teams gave up goals with very real reliability. By the final tally, Cincinnati actually gave up three more goals than Portland did, 56 to 53. Moreover, just four points separated the two teams. And yet Cincy’s in while Portland’s out. And yet, that’s not even the weird part.

FC Cincinnati 1-1 Nashville SC: On Forgetting What It's Like to Feel

This, only drooling to stay interested.

I don’t have a lot of say about FC Cincinnati’s 1-1 draw at TQL Stadium against Nashville SC, because what is there to say about more of the same? Cincy has now drawn six of their past eight game, enough to keep them alive, but too little to take them in a direction of any particular interest. The point kept them above the playoff line, and that’s nice, but they owe that somewhat to Charlotte’s surprise/loud choke at Toronto FC. Also, look who’s looming in the rearview (Chicago Fire FC; and to think I wrote them off just last Friday.)

Twenty-four hours passed between the time I half-watched the second half and the time just spent struggling to stay awake/interested and the main thing I want at this point is those 50 minutes back. The more I look at the xG lines the data-nerds traced onto the stats page, the more I wonder whether I’m clear on how those things work...and, I’ll be damned if that isn’t the last interesting thing I have to say.

Several Cincinnati players had good-to-great games – e.g., I continue to marvel at Obinna Nwobodo’s range, movement and soccer intelligence (man has Spider-sense, swear to gods), Ian Murphy should start so long as he’s fit, at least in my mind, and Brandon Vazquez scored another great goal and he’s already three goals above what would have made me happy (what? oh yeah, Nashville scored too...eh). A couple players didn’t do so hot – e.g., I have nothing but respect for Yuya Kubo, but he still holds the ball too damn long; I feel the same about Alvaro Barreal, he got a lucky, yet useful assist, but that doesn’t mean there’s a No. 10 shirt in his future – but that’s the game.

Cincy has...eleven games left (? that can’t be right, but I’ve counted three times and...fuck it; it’ll happen) to find another gear. A tough stretch of the season that started as somewhat inspirational – see the 1-1 draw at the Philadelphia Union and the 4-4 home draw/party versus New York City FC petered out into home draws versus Red Bull New York and (most of) the Vancouver Whitecaps and....pffft. After that, what else do you say? It’s not progress, it’s not failure; it’s stasis.

FC Cincinnati 2-2 Vancouver Whitecaps: It's Time to Fly, Little Chickadee

I'm going to need you to flap those wings like you mean it.

First, I want to applaud The Bailey for chanting “Cody Cropper” after Vancouver’s goalkeeper went down after a, frankly, terrifying foul. That’s class, no further comment. Now, about that game...

To expand on a phrase I typed throughout 2022, “there are no moral victories.” There comes a time when a team (say, FC Cincinnati) kicks off three seasons on training wheels (this was on a busted-down trike inherited from an eccentric grandparent) and builds a certain amount of expectation. They leave the nest, wings spread, out in the world and...that’s just it: they keep flying or they fall back to the ground.

It’s in that full, little chickadee in the big city sense that I view Cincinnati’s 2-2 home draw against the Vancouver Whitecaps as a bad result. Worse, the goal that pulled the ‘Caps level was a two-fire-alarm fucking disaster; as a (side-piece) fan, I’m angry that Cincy’s last line of defenders didn’t direct more anger at the midfielders and/or Tyler Blackett, all of whom fell so far behind the play and didn’t look all that interest in catching up. That left Toisant Ricketts with at least two wide-the-fuck-open players to pass to inside Cincinnati’s 18 and, in a game where the imperative to “leave it all on the field” was sharp and urgent, they did not. There is no universe in which that is not the worst, defining moment of the game.

On a meat-‘n’-potatoes level, I don’t think Cincinnati deserved to win this game – that’s despite having quality chances to get all three points (they posted a win-worthy number of shots, and with enough on goal.) Debutante Sergio Santos had two good-to-great looks – including one that any eager fan would love to see a new signing put away (e.g., the one shot with his feet) – Obinna Nwobodo had a non-crazy shot from range, Alvaro Barreal forced a good save out of 20-year-old substitute ‘keeper, Ian(?) Boehmer (and that’s on top of attempting an olimpico on every corner), and so on. Cincinnati had chances to put a little padding between them and a Vancouver comeback, They never managed to pull it off leaving Vancouver free to walk through a door they left open, and end of game

 It hardly helped that a fair number of Cincy players had off nights. That happens, obviously, but eve accounting for key absences and injuries (to name the bigs, Luciano Acosta, Junior Moreno, and, circumstantially, Alvas Powell....Ronald Matarrita’s been out long enough that losing him amounts to losing an arm – i.e., that’s just something one adjusts to), Cincinnati didn’t have anything to overcome Vancouver didn’t (Cincy’s broadcast team would not let this go, btw), and it shaped the game in...a way. Nwobodo was loose on the ball in a way that led to too many turnovers, Blackett’s passing out of the back ranged from dubious to bad, John Nelson failed to add much in the attack and Raymon Gaddis...every player makes mistakes, and fatal ones come with defending. Had Gaddis done everything else all right, you can still salute the outing...but he did not. Basically, the combined team put out enough collective “bad” for Cincinnati to drop two points last night and can I get a “goddammit” on that?

FC Cincinnati v Red Bull New York Preview: Keeping the Bulls at Bay

Their logo compels them.

It’s been respectable for FC Cincinnati lately, good even, and they’ve battled multiple Eastern giants to one point per. It looks another week of the same thing on the menu, but, fuck it, it’s 2022, so let ‘er rip and dream big. First, some relevant facts:

Red Bull New York
Record/Basics: 9-5-5, 32 points, 3-2-4 home; 6-3-1 away; 29 gf, 20 ga, +9 goal differential
Last 10: TTTLWLWLWW (1-3-1 on the road, including all three road losses of 2022; hmmm...)
Oppo: v POR, @ PHI, v CHI, @ MIA, v DC, @ CLT, v TOR, @ LAFC, v ATL, @ SKC

What We Know About Them
Taking inspiration from the corporate logo on their shirts, the Red Bulls chase every pass, ball and player like blood-doped demons. Oh, and their forwards – mostly Patrick Klimala and Tom Barlow – have been crap this season (just 7 goals and 3 assists between them). Still, they’re difficult to play against and just as hard to beat and their road form, though worse lately (see above, maybe celebrate a little), ranks near the top of the league.

When it comes to goals for/allowed, they’re on the right side of average (24.7) in both categories; going the other way, they scored nearly half their goals in just four games - 4-1 @ TOR, 3-0 @ ORL, 3-3 v CHI, 4-1 v DCU. Game-to-game, then, they don’t score a lot (that’s good!), but, with that defense(/defensive scheme), they don’t need to (awww); then again, they’d given up two goals in every road game prior to their last, a 1-0 road-win over a serially hapless Sporting Kansas City team. About that...

Notes on Recent Form
Big picture, they’ve won four of their last six – a pretty compelling feat regardless of team/venue/form. It’s that specific context that makes their offensive production borderline embarrassing: they posted shitter-level xG in three of their past five games (0.7 or less), and topped out at 1.4 at home against Toronto. That said, that 0.7 xG fails to capture the way they seemed to flick a switch at the start of the 2nd half at SKC and find great looks (four for sure, maybe five) until Aaron Long nodded home off a corner. They went down a man for the final 20+ minutes of that game (due to stoppage time) and, a couple chances aside (one of them cleared off the line), they made SKC piss ‘em them all way with a combination of rabid-hyper-puppy harrassment and shithousery (Klimala, in particular, who found his special purpose).

New England v FC Cincy Preview: New Sensation (and I Did the INXS Song Just Get Stuck in Your Head?)

First image for "a bright shiny future." Wow.

I tune in with anticipation for FC Cincinnati games in 2022. Not dread. Beautiful. Starting with some numbers...

New England Revolution
Record/Basics: 6-5-6, 24 points, 4-2-3 home; 2-3-3 away; 27 gf, 26 ga, +1 goal differential
Last 10: LWTTWTWTWT* (2-0-3 at home; more favorable than not, tho shit’s done changed)
Oppo: @ DC, v MIA, v CLB, @ ATL, @ CIN, v PHI, @ SKC, v ORL, v MIN, @ VAN

What We Know About Them
First, there have changes since the last time Cincy played New England – e.g., no more Matt Turner, no more Adam Buksa (ergo, no more this) – but something else changed as well: the Revs haven’t lost since the last day of April (30 days in April, right?). Still, hey have plenty of talent – your Bous, your Gils, your...rest of the team – and, after starting slower than an 80-year-old getting out of a low-slung sedan, they’re presently breathing down the back of Cincinnati’s collective necks. And the Orange and Blue play this one on the road.

Notes on Recent Form
[* Fucking Form Guide and its shifting dates...]

After watching, oh, 2/3 of last Wednesday’s 0-0 draw at the Vancouver Whitecaps and poking around some box scores, I noted some commonalities. New England generally likes possession, whether at home or on the road (they got ~60/40 in three of their last five, but had a 6% margin at lowest), but they no longer run up the chances (as I recall them doing). The 1-1 draw at the Union aside (danger, Will Robinson, danger!), they’ve generally gone shot-for-shot against the opposition; perhaps more tellingly (or hopeful), they’ve posted modest xG lately – e.g., from a low of 0.5 against Minnesota, but the rest (again, Philly excepted) fell in the just over 1.0 line.

Some details run between the numbers – e.g., they got an assist in the win over Sporting Kansas City with an Uri Rossell red card around half time, and they played up the gut (and got a little lucky) against the Loons, but they showed some tendency to play toward their left – i.e., toward newbie Dylan Borrero’s – in a couple other games. One more thing to flag, they’ve run over their season-average goal differential and/or pattern lately, but not by much. You can see who they played over their past five games, and where, I’m just providing some context for the results.

Philadelphia Union 1-1 FC Cincinnati: What Does One Break Out Before the Bubbly?

Or am I getting carried away?

I can think of a dozen ways that FC Cincinnati’s 1-1 road draw at the Philadelphia Union would have left me feeling more relieved than happy - most of which involve Cincinnati scoring first and leaving their fans biting their nails bloody to the end.

The actual game reversed those scenarios, almost exactly. If either team made their fans sweat, it was Philly. And who saw that coming?

The draw boosted Cincy back over the playoff line - wherefore I know not why; what the weird hell is MLS using for tie-breakers this season? – but I got a bigger boost out of, 1) seeing them both manage a game that 90% of neutrals would call tricky-on-paper, and 2) doing it with a juggled line-up. Pat Noonan gave several regular starters – e.g., Luciano Acosta, Junior Moreno, Ian Murphy(?), and Dominique Badji(?) – the afternoon off for reasons I missed and that hardly matter now, but that lone detail raises possibilities and expectations at the same time. That’s so say, holy shit, does FC Cincinnati have actual depth?

Geoff Cameron plugged in for Murphy, Haris Medunjanin for Moreno, Alvaro Barreal for Acosta and Brenner for Badji and that make-shift line-up did more than hold up: it grew into the game. Cincinnati was the better team for fair chunks of it, as well as by most of the numbers, and they had the Union misfiring on passes and movement for 50+ of the game’s 90 minutes. The pessimist in me (trust me; that fucker talks loud) wants to temper my expectations with arguments like, “Pat Noonan knows Philly’s system like the back of his hand”; my wee cowering optimist mutters back, “true, but it’s up to the players to execute, and they did.”

In other words, for all the “there but for the grace of” – e.g., the Union’s fairly-hot Daniel Gazdag missing at least two looks he often sees into the goal or Nick Hagglund dodging a red card for his flying demolition of Kai Wagner’s right(?) leg – Cincinnati has good reason to feel like they could have won this game. For perspective, how many people think “that’s three points” right after hearing “Philadelphia on the road”?

MLS Monthly (HA!): 10 Things to Expect Over the Next Five (or Six) Games

Forseeing a minimum of such shenanigans.

Major League Soccer’s regular season restarts this weekend, if under something like a yellow flag with only five games played between today and the regular season’s full, flushed return on June 18. I decided to use this calm before the storm to map out the likelier scenarios before the weekly flash-flood of scores and other data gets me, and everyone else, transfixed by the week-to-week grind.

As I say in all these forward-looking posts, everything below should be read as my expectations for what will happen over the next five (or six) games, as opposed to predictions. Moreover, I chose that five- (or six-) game time-frame very deliberately on the theory that, while anything can happen in any given game, most teams in MLS established a sort of mean over the first 13, 14, or 15 games of the 2022 season (or just 12 in Seattle’s case), and that they’ll revert to that mean, or somewhere around it, over the next five (or six) games. And yet there are questions...

Over the longer-term, players will start coming and going when MLS’s second(?) transfer window opens on July 7. Oddball moves aside – e.g., it looks like Adam Buksa will play his last game for the New England Revolution on June 15 – said arrivals and departures will come after the next five (or six; sorry, I’ll stop doing that) games, but that’s still something file away for the last 15, 16, 18 games of the 2022 season. The Mothership ran a couple articles on trades/transfers – one on players who are varying degrees of likely to go elsewhere during the transfer window (and some are big shit; e.g., Taty Castellanos) and another on players on contracts without active options – to help people organize their theories and wagers on the longer-term futures market.

Second, and more relevant to the next five games – I believe all of what’s below projects to July 14 at the latest, and only to July 10 for a healthy majority of teams – teams have had the past two weeks to examine what’s working, what’s failing, and to adjust accordingly, to get injured players back or closer to it, and so on. We won’t know which teams’ fates will change, or by how much till it happens, but here’s the real point: if just two or three teams deviate from the mean they set over first 14 games of the season, it could upset two to three times as many apple carts. If, say, Atlanta United FC goes on what I’d call an unexpected run (v MIA, @ TFC, @ RBNY, @ NYC, v ATX) or Orlando City SC face-plants through a fairly soft schedule (v HOU, @ CIN, @ NE, v DC, v MIA), that scrambles expectations for not just them, but all the other teams involved.