Level Set 15, Austin FC: Of Tulip Bulbs & Poor Construction Choices

An investment was made...

What follows is a brief history of Austin FC, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
Austin FC came into MLS pretty hot, publicity-wise – look, Matthew McConaughey! He’s got a drum! – the fans showed up with drums of their own (and trumpets) and did “Keep Austin Weird” proud enough. The stadium looks great and there’s something charming about the way they bathe it in green light every time the home team scores (wait for it). The stage looks great, but…

Austin FC threw everyone a head-fake in 2022, when they finished second in the West and made a deep run in the MLS Cup playoffs (semifinals!). Their inaugural-season ringer, Sebastian Driussi, looked like a brilliant buy by their second season, his supporting cast of Maxi Urruti, Ethan Finlay and (particularly) Diego Fagundez combined with him in beautiful, four-part harmony, and the defense was…average, and goalkeeper Brad Stuver did everything he could to keep it that way (“Stuuuuvvv!”); Alex Ring directed traffic in midfield, Julio Cascante played better than he ever did as a Portland Timber: everything was clicking and the future looked bright. My memory's hazy on this - Austin's not a team I follow closely - but 2022 might have been the same season that pundits never stopped talking about how much Austin was over-performing their metrics. Even if that convo wasn't in 2022, having one super-freak of a season in what has otherwise been a short, barren history makes for a fitting way to wrap one's head around this team. Austin didn't make the playoffs in 2021 – no shame in that, debut season, etc. – but, after that 2022 miracle season, they missed again in both 2023 and 2024. They definitely showed better in 2025 (see below), while somehow still presenting as a team stumbling through another lost season. If you bought Austin FC stock after 2022, that would make you the proud owner of a bunch of tulip bulbs no one else wants. That expansion team stench doesn’t always wash off so easily...

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Austin FC: It's All Coming Up Evander

Mistakes can be made, that's all.

Today has been unexpectedly Cincinnati heavy. Before wrapping up FC Cincinnati’s broadly satisfying 2-1 win over a visiting Austin FC, I caught the tail end of an episode of the Partridge Family titled, “I Left My Heart in Cincinnati” that was positively drunk with old footage from Kings Island. Seeing the Blue Racer running against the Red one and The Banana Splits took my back to a world both of and before my time and it did me good (awww) and bad (so, so old).

About the Game
Cincy somewhere between a couple and a few chances to run riot over Austin over the opening 20 minutes. They took an early lead at the 12th minute when Yuya Kubo ran against a retreating Austin back-line that seemed open to giving him whatever option he wanted. After some briefly bobbled connections, the ball found Lukas Engel still farther to Austin’s right, who slipped a one-time pass into Evander loitering around the left side of the 18. I went with the verb “loiter” to capture the easy freedom of Evander’s positioning, but the opening goal showed the danger of leaving him there without an army of angry chaperones. And that puts Chehkov’s gun on the table for future reference.

Luca Orellano had come close two minutes before the opener and Kevin Denkey spurned a good opening with a shot straight at Austin’s Brad Stuver a mere three minutes on the other side of it. Consult the full highlights for some more highlight-reel adjacent moments – e.g., Denkey and Evander danced as well as they have all season Saturday afternoon – including what would have been an easy candidate for Goal of the Week (have that at around the 20th minute) had Evander clipped the curl on his one-time shot from 35+ yards out a degree or two shorter. Despite a bevy of invitations, Cincy’s second goal wouldn’t materialize for some time.

Austin pushed back, of course, and threatened to pull back a goal as early as the 17th minute on a cross that Brandon Vazquez should have put somewhere between on goal and away (which doesn't appear in the highlights due to the enshittification of MLS's video product), but, per the official stats they didn’t create a ton of chances and fired just two of them on Stuver’s goal. I don’t know how all that useless energy translated for Austin fans, but I’m guessing it felt like Purgatory for Cincinnati fans, or worse, the last episode of Lost. If you found this post, I don’t need to explain the perils of 1-0 lead to you, but seeing Cincy come within a desperate lunge or two of coughing up a stupid equalizer for the simple, stupid reason of failing to decisively clear a long ball provided a sobering reminder of said perils. It takes just one mistake, right? Say, an arm left thoughtlessly hanging when covering a cross from Cincy’s left?

Austin FC 0-0 Portland Timbers: The Littlest Possible Win

How I watch with my ears...

Nobody won yesterday’s 0-0 draw between Austin FC and the Portland Timbers, very much up to and including any and all fans who turned up or tuned in. In its defense, the highlights reminded me of some…action I either forgot, or that didn’t enter my consciousness during the periods when I let my eyes rest and took my best shot at watching the game with my ears. Then again, the five-minute run-time tells its own story.

About the Game
Austin played the 4-3-3 that I touted for in the Scouting Report and still believe suits them best (the official line up was a lie). It never generated much offense for them, though spendy new striker, Myrto Uzuni, did bookend the game with looks on goal at either end that showcased what he’s all about – or can be. That accounts for two of Austin’s eleven shots total and their only shot on frame came when Brandon Vazquez sandwiched a point-blank header at Portland’s James Pantemis in between stumbling at the feet of Jimer Fory and chasing the ref to demand a penalty kick. Think that happened…somewhere close to the 80th minute and, sure, that does get me ahead of the game, but I wanted to wrap up Austin before turning to the Timbers. Back to the game writ large, after 30 minutes of…not a whole lot (and the first attempted nap*), both teams took more interest in attempting to forcing the ball through one another’s lines. And then came the halftime whistle, which referee Drew Fischer couldn't blow fast enough. The first team to stir was Portland. After posting a meager three shots with one on goal over the opening 45 minutes, they started to find ways to get the ball into Austin’s defensive third. One popular route saw David Ayala step higher into central space to receive a short pass inside, which he then carried into the teeth of Austin’s last line of defense; seems like a nice move to file away for the future use. While that, and other options, got the ball closer to Brad Stuver’s goal, Austin’s last line did a good job of pushing Portland’s attacking moves outside the frame of the goal, forcing them to cross or take shots from diagonal angles (Santiago Moreno probably fired the best of these). The Timbers held a very real competitive edge over the opening 20-25 minutes of the second half and, over the entire 45-minute period, they grew their top-line attacking numbers from three shots with one on goal to 13 shots with seven on goal by the final whistle. Nothing I saw from Portland struck me as outright dangerous – it’s even possible Austin had the best smattering of chances – but, as I type this, I’d rather be Portland than Austin.

Austin FC Scouting Report: Eating the Sandwich

EAT IT, WUSS! (...and never shit again)

The Portland Timbers hosted Austin FC in Week 2 of the 2025 season, so who knew the Texans would be returning the favor so soon? Portland won the game on a late, weird goal and a wrote a whole damn match report that more or less dismissed Austin’s chances for the season…and what do they do but win three straight?

In other news, I can't get the video on the Mothership to fly and that is scrambling all of my shit. Not that this is immediately relevant…

Austin FC
4-2-0, 12 pts., 5 gf, 3 ga (+2); home 2-1-0, away 2-1-0
Last 6 Results: WLLWWW
Strength/Location of Schedule
v SKC (1-0 W); @ POR (0-1 L); v COL (0-1 L); @ LAFC (1-0 W); v SD (2-1 W); @ STL (1-0 W)

Notes from the Field
Both teams have little streaks going, of course, but Austin has three games to Portland’s two and they smuggled six points out of tough venues – e.g., Los Angeles FC’s BMO Stadium and St. Louis CITY FC’s Energizer Park. Slide the win versus the theretofore unbeaten San Diego FC as a nice slice of well-cured pastrami between those two and you have yourself one hell of a sandwich. New head coach Nico Estevez has them grinding out every result they earn – show me a multi-goal win in the above list of results – and the secret to Austin’s early rise to second MLS’s Western Conference owes something like 60% of its success to its defense (i.e., five goals scored, three goals allowed; don’t call it stupid, a major economy just adopted the same logic). After sitting through about 30 minutes of Austin’s win at St. Louis and around 45 minutes of that home win over San Diego, two big-picture details stood out: a broad aversion to risk and the absence of a player that presented and played like a No. 10.

Notes on Formation & Personnel
Estevez has played a 4-3-3 and a pair of 4-4-2s (par example), but he has so far only tinkered with the personnel. The back four typically starts with Brendan Hines-Ike paired with Oleksandr Swatok as center backs and Guilherme Biro and Jon Gallagher to their left and right, respectively. Both fullbacks get forward quite a bit, but Gallagher gets way the fuck up there, more like a wingback. Owen “Son of the Prior Coach” Wolf and new kid Besard Sabovic have been the constants in midfield and, for what it’s worth, I’d call Wolff the closest thing they have to a playmaker. Ilie Sanchez generally starts and/or provides a composed, deep-lying passing hub and I think they like to get their live-wire No. 8, Daniel Pereira, out there often as they can (he missed the road win at LAFC, don’t know why). I suspect a 4-3-3 suits them better because it allows them to start a midfield three of Pereira, Sabovic and Wolff and to push Osman Bukari into a pure attacking/winger role – a choice that pressured St. Louis’ left just long enough for Austin to go ahead through Albanian striker Myrto Uzuni. I haven’t seen much of Uzuni – he didn’t play versus San Diego – but he presents as a poacher, i.e., I didn’t see a ton of him coming back for the ball or combining. Brandon Vazquez leads Austin’s line in just about every way you can think of. He finally broke his duck against San Diego, but a sterling season for FC Cincinnati aside, he appears to have reverted to his hard-working, low(ish) scoring roots as a forward.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Austin FC: Between Happiness and Satisfaction

This is not a highlight, but that is Ted Unkel.

Yes, ma’am, my homework is late. Yes, ma’am, it’s won’t happen again.

“Grappling with the possibility that I’m watching two mediocre teams play some JV shit.”
- Me, a Bluesky game thread, the 80th minute(?)

Upon further review, that overstates the case a bit. Portland Timbers players attempted at least two (hopeful) bicycle kicks, for one. Still, if I had to offer a key thought to hold in your head as you read everything that follows, that’s up there.

About the Game
The second shortest available video review of last Saturday's game (the "snapshot" is shorter...and pointless) reminded me that Austin FC fired a few more than I remembered – also notable, they fired a few more shots than Portland – including two that forced quality saves out of James Pantemis. Those came early and late, so credit to Pantemis for staying alert even as I was…nodding off, but none of the above has lured me into the Pantemania I saw popping up in various social media threads. You do you and all that, but I can’t think of what it would take me to take sides in a goalkeeper controversy, but assume it lands somewhere between insisting he must wear his “lucky sombrero” to reach his full potential or that three saves every game must be made by the famed scorpion-kick to build his social media brand. Seeing a defense limit the opposition to shots from range will consistently make me happier than anything a goalkeeper does.

Another telling detail in that short video review: the amount of time devoted to showing yellow cards. Few things stage-whisper “dud” quite like two teams failing to produce enough chances to fill a seven- minutes highlight reel.

Austin’s new signing, Brandon Vazquez, gets my credit for the best shot of the game – which, by the transitive property (associative? distributive?) hands Pantemis the best save – but Portland’s fucking new guy David Da Costa scored the goal that counted. It came (very) late, it took a little luck, and it was one of just two shots on goal for the Timbers (out of eight total), but I’m not above dipping my hand into the proverbial unflushed toilet if it means fishing out three points in the end.

Getting Reacquainted with FC Cincinnati, MLS's Maddest Makeover

Picture the "before" house on fire.

Thumbnail History
FC Cincinnati came into MLS like a paper-mache wrecking ball, starting with one of the worst roster builds in MLS history. They invested heavily in No. 8s for that inaugural 2019 roster - not a true No. 6 in sight, never mind a No. 10 - and rounded it out with a thin foundation of center backs, a couple attack-oriented fullbacks, plus a couple random wingers and two or three forwards with a history of needing service to be effective. The first of their three consecutive Wooden Spoons followed surely as night follows day. This year’s absolutely woeful San Jose Earthquakes team just unburdened them of the record for the most goals allowed in a single season, but Cincinnati may never let go of their claim to the all-time worst goal differential. They barely improved over the next two seasons (seriously, see the goals allowed by the 2021 team), and some of that surely followed from the wild game of musical chairs around the coaching seat - Alan Koch gave way to Yoann Damet, gave way to Ron Jans/some casual racism, then came Jaap Stam, there might have been another coach in there, who can say, really, then Yoann Damet again. Rebuilding from that first, fucking terrible roster was always going to take time, but doing it headless was madness. Small wonder the rehabilitation took a lot of time and, at last, some smart hiring. The Organization helped and hurt on the way to that – by throwing money at all the problems here, and (I think mostly one owner-dude) meddling on the wrong (i.e., soccer) side there – but the former translated as a willingness to burn money until the (many) problem(s) was(were) solved. The Organization kept faith through the failures – e.g., the Spoon-spank’d 2021 team had the still-capable Geoff Cameron and Haris Medunjanin, plus Luciano Acosta, Brandon Vazquez and Brenner, if in pre-threatening form – and, more crucially, seemed to genuinely learn from failure. The biggest shift came with two hirings: first, coaxing Chris Albright away from Philadelphia to act as general manager, then betting on Pat Noonan’s potential by anointing him head coach ahead of the 2022 season; second, they signed Nigerian midfielder, Obinna Nwobodo, at the beginning of the same year, a man who chews real estate and wins 75% of the battles he engages. Those two changes alone made some prior investments – e.g., Alvaro Barreal, Vazquez, and, even if it took a minute, Yuya Kubo – look a whole lot smarter. With all that in place, it took just a couple, if big, defensive signings (Matt Miazga and Yerson Mosquera) and the arrival of a budding goalkeeping star (Roman Celentano) to turn Cincinnati into a Supporters’ Shield-winning team by their 2023 season. Cincy made the semifinals of the MLS Cup playoffs that same season and might have gone farther had (Defender of the Year!) Matt Miazga not lost his whole goddamn mind at the end of a playoff win over the Red Bulls. At any rate, they lost some key players either before (Brenner, gone by April 2023) or during (Vazquez) the 2024 season, but Cincy has a remarkable talent for finding new players when they need them…it’s like they figured out how the rules work or something…

Total Joy Points: -1

FC Cincinnati 2-3 Columbus Crew SC: The Tragedy of Alvas Powell

From googling "tickle palace."

I don’t know what to call that besides a game that leaves you muttering, “c’mon, not like this.”

Last night, FC Cincinnati ended the best season in its – and I want fans and pundits to linger on this next word – brief history with a devastated and dizzied 2-3 loss at Tickle Palace against its dread rival, Columbus Crew SC.

First and foremost, nothing hit the gut half as hard as the blunt fact that Columbus deserved the win. Outside 15 minutes somewhere during the first part of the second half (sorry, I work real estate law), Columbus ran at a Cincy defense that toggled between adjectives all night: sturdy grew to heroic, before a quick journey through desperate yielded to a word I slipped into the conversation above, i.e., dizzied. One of the twits in the broadcast booth called the Columbus’ first goal a turning point, but I’d argue that the second pointed to where the game would ultimately end up. The only question was whether Columbus could get there before the final whistle turned the game over to soccer’s infamous tiebreaker, aka, the test of wills we all call a coin-flip, aka, the penalty shoot-out.

Columbus beat the whistle, of course, and Cincy didn’t look any better on the third goal they allowed than they did on the second. Or the first, for that matter. They didn’t just get outplayed last night; Cincy got beat. Thinking about what that does for the rivalry is the only positive I can take from the loss…

…going the other way, how dim that fire burns against what could have been had Cincinnati won ugly on the back of Aaron Boupendza putting a little more mustard on his best shot of the night? Back in the real world, Patrick Schulte came good in that moment and, I think most observers would accept that justice was served. However much it hurt to send Timmy upstate…

On a purely personal, slightly petty level, I have a notepad full of tantalizing questions that just went to waste – e.g., do you start Aaron Boupendza or Dominique Badji in the MLS Cup that will never happen? Or, if Obinna Nwobodo can go, do you start him or do you honor continuity and Yuya Kubo’s (sturdy?) service over the past two, three games? And to what percentage of a Nwobodo does that answer apply.

All those questions just got kicked to 2024.

FC Cincinnati 1-0 Philadelphia Union: (Back-Up) Paths of Glory

Again, that's 2 15/16th by one measure.

I wasn’t going to start this post with the question of whether FC Cincinnati’s big, CB-birthed late winner was or was not offside, but then I opened the phone and saw both the image and the measurement at right. Ian Murphy’s nod into the goal-mouth mosh-pit did look half a body offside in real time, but the call survived VAR’s second look and that ushered in Yerson Mosquera’s put-back and Cincy’s 1-0 win over the Philadelphia Union into the history books…

…that said, if that 2 15/16” measurement is accurate, that makes one hell of a statement on the OCD-madness of the post-modern offside rule. That is a fucking fraction, not a cheat-code.

Next thought: bring on Columbus Crew SC and getting the lighting dialed in because TQL Stadium is hosting a goddamn party next Saturday. A body usually has to go to Hollywood to get such perfect plotting.

To acknowledge the obvious, yes, this site fell off the FC Cincinnati beat in August of this season…and then again after the beginning of October. The explanation for that lapse in this boy scout’s duty speaks the thought that will carry this post to its conclusion – i.e., there’s not a lot to say besides, FC Cincinnati good, fire bad, and, whatever else you do, keep on lashing the hounds until they expire or reach the perfect destination, aka, MLS Cup 2023. Just two games stand between Cincy and one of the most thoroughly-redemptive doubles you’ll ever see in this budding whack-job of a league. As others have pointed out – which, here, means MLS’s in-house scribe Matt Doyle in the preview hit for last night’s game – the fact Cincy won anything at all in Year 5 constitutes enough of a miracle. The fact that the trophy in hand is the Supporters’ Shield – i.e., the one that requires consistent, almost grinding success – already gets the story of their 2023 season halfway to Hollywood.

Toronto FC 2-3 FC Cincinnati: And They Threw in a Shield...

This came up in a search for "early onset nostalgia." For real.

Take your hat off to Toronto FC for playing with more ability, and even pride, than they’ve managed through their long, dreary and biting 2023 regular season. Seriously, the only thing that saved them from playing like shit in their win over the Philadelphia Union was Philly playing even worse. Toronto played a strong one last night: their passing was clean, they stayed organized defensively and, for all the (many) shots FC Cincinnati fired, they by and large kept the visitors in front of them. Even the numbers show that the worst team in Major League Soccer played its best one pretty even.

The fact Toronto had to rally out of a two-goal deficit only makes that doubly-impressive. The outlines of another painful rout took shape early, when Cincy fired one shot after another toward TFC’s goal starting around the 20th minute – and too many from inside the box. All that knocking finally opened the door when Brandon Vazquez fired home from a couple steps in from the spot. Cincy doubled its lead eight just eight minutes later when Alvaro Barreal and Aaron Boupendza played in-out-and-back-in Toronto’s right side to create the shot that led to the deflection that (again) Vazquez put away.

Still, Toronto had laid the foundation; they only needed someone to build something on top of it. The sometimes-maligned Federico Bernardeschi set to work on that, taking charge of Toronto’s attack and doing to Cincinnati’s left what Cincy had just done to their right. He took the first ball inside, past first Vazquez then Junior Moreno and drove a shot at Roman Celentano...who, in a moment that probably still haunts the young ‘keeper, let it squirt from out between his legs. Jonathan Osorio spotted the loose ball before anyone else and poked it home to make it a 1-2 game. Bernardeschi struck again minutes later, this time cutting toward the end-line and around Cincy’s defense; his cross left Celentano flapping and Osorio, again, the first player to the ball. And could anything be more fitting than seeing local legend Jonathan Osorio score both of those goals?

Sadly (for them), the universe still works according to certain rules, one of them being that we all wake from our dreams. As everyone knows by now, FC Cincinnati walked off the field as the 2023 Supporters’ Shield winners last night. Toronto threw all the rocks they could into their path and Cincinnati stumbled over a few of them – e.g., momentum killing slop on the left from Barreal throughout the second half, uncharacteristically loose touches from Obinna Nwobodo; Vazequez and Boupendza hitting good clean looks to Toronto ‘keeper Luka Gavran as if the man had a magnet stitched into his chest – but the chances still piled on (most of the cleanest made the highlights), as did the pressure.

FC Cincinnati 3-0 New York City FC: "A Damn Good, Exquisitely Well-Timed Win"

A still from TQL Stadium, August 26. (I kid, I kid.)

First, do an aging gentleman a favor and tell me that you needed to remind yourself FC Cincinnati wasn’t in orange yesterday. Every time the mind went drifting (as it does), I kept thinking Cincy suddenly looked wayward and baffled. It was New York City FC wearing orange, of course....but that wasn’t the weirdest thing I saw yesterday.

After a couple weeks of watching defenses assign either goon or goon squad to suffocate Luciano Acosta, seeing New York City FC opt against the obvious approach? Well, it was a decision. Nick Cushing (probably) directed his charges to go out and keep the shape, which allowed Acosta to do the whole float like a butterfly sting like a bee thing (“Joe Fraser can’t hit what he can’t see”; just read that full quote from Muhammed Ali this week and it really is a thing of beauty). Lucho Unlocked led to two decisive plays that commenced the scrambling of NYC’s defense on Cincy's first goal and that opened the backdoor on for Junior Moreno on their second. That amounts to a death sentence in a game where chances came often as the 25 bus (i.e., not often enough). The only major plot-point from there was NYC opting to defend space instead of players – most notably, Nick Hagglund - on a 58th minute corner kick. With that, FC Cincinnati walked off the field at TQL Stadium last night, 3-0 winners in what looked like a stroll.

And yet that impression was at least mildly illusory. Between wrapping up dinner (a decent tuna casserole, fwiw) and getting about 5 mg ahead of myself, I wasn’t totally locked in for the first 20 minutes of the second half – and that meant missing how close NYC came to either leveling the game, or pulling back one goal, something I saw (among other things) after re-watching the beginnings of the first and second halves this morning. The specific order and timing of it all escapes me, but Monsef Bakrar came within a quarter step of beating Roman Celentano on a near-post run to a deflected cross, (think it was) Julian Fernandez later forced Celentano to lay down to stop a shot from range and Keaton Parks put at least two great shots on goal over the course of the second half – one a five-hole shot, the other a header from just outside the six. That last sentence may very well contain the entirety of NYC’s attacking output for the afternoon, but, if you sprinkle in some dubious set-piece defending on FC Cincy’s part (lots of balls hitting ground, with some “danger! danger!” pinball thrown in), you’re just a couple but-fors away from a game that doesn’t look so comfortable.

If that sounds like a paragraph’s worth of quibbling, fair. Just about every game includes moments like that and all that mischief got managed, so what to do but celebrate? Even with the Philadelphia Union and (impressively) Orlando City SC winning, Cincinnati now holds a ten-point lead in the Supporters’ Shield race and an 11-point lead over the rest of the Eastern Conference thanks to losses by the New England Revolution and St. Louis CITY FC, respectively. They also padded their goal differential by three, something that could break some useful ties when such things come up and that brightens the bigger picture a little. To expand on that...

FC Cincinnati 3-1 Nashville SC: The Hardest Easy Thing

Simplifies where you focus, really.

It starts with a question: did FC Cincinnati’s 3-1 win over Nashville SC look easy as the final score to you?

Answer however the spirit moves you, but, when you do, I’d encourage you to think as broadly as possible. Think of all the questions you want answered, basically, and go from there.

With all that in mind, here’s what I saw:

A Cincinnati team forever on the brink of breaking through versus a Nashville team forever falling short. Sure, Nashville knocked canyon-sized dents into their own chances when two of their players did two very stupid things in as many minutes – I’m talking stuff that someone who paid them to throw the game would tell them not to do, because it would telegraph the con (guys! call me!) – but they also might have had their better moments when they had the fewest players. But even that nods to the flipside of the final result – and the game.

Badly as they played – and put me in the “very” camp when it comes to a vote – Nashville still came within a penalty call that (rightly) fell apart upon review of tying this game (should be in here somewhere, if not blame them, not me). They produced flurries on either side of that and it all came after Taylor Washington got his second yellow for...he tried to grab the ball, I think(?), and Fafa Picault picked up his second yellow for, honestly, what do you call Picault’s lunge into Santiago Arias (right?)? A protest against uneven refereeing? A you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit cry for attention? Both came so close together that we never had time to figure out how one sending off would affect the game...

...and yet, can you think of a time when Nashville ever really looked in this game? They scored the first goal, but that blew through a vast fucking desert like the last tumbleweed in the world, a singular sign of life in a vast, expansive nothing. Nashville struggled to step into Cincinnati’s defensive third under any kind of control, which means they struggled to find Hany Mukhtar, and that’s how Nashville ends a game with six shots total and just one of them on/in goal. And that’s more or less what I mean by “forever falling short.” 90% of everything Nashville tried fizzled out. Maybe it’s simple as having no Plan B for the Plan A, aka, “Get Hany the Ball,” but, again, Nashville made their best attacking moments during a last-ditch push for the equalizer – i.e., after Mukhtar came off. More than anything else – and this thought is by no means original to me – Nashville ended the night as a team in desperate need of a Big Think...

...so, why did it take FC Cincy so long to put that team away?

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Portland Timbers: That Hurt, but It's Over, Bring It In, Guys

Bad man, tenuous metaphor.

If you haven’t watched Peacemaker (which I'd call both specific and 2/3 recommended), and want to duck any spoilers, now is a great time to skip to the third (sorry!) fourth paragraph.

For those who have, you’ll recall that Peacemaker has this horrible, actual-Klan bigot of a father who raises his two sons on violence. They get along great, no clear sibling rivalry, etc. (stick with me through this stretch), but he still has them fight to, in the white supremacist tradition, “toughen them up” in service of the terrible idea that motivates such assholes. At any rate, one time he sends them into a pit he dug in his front yard (again, these are not deep thinkers) for another fight and he’s nakedly pulling for one brother over the other and, wouldn’t you know it, his favored child catches a punch wrong and dies...

...that’s less a perfect analogy than the latest pop culture reference I’ve read about obviously favoring one child over another and things going sideways.

First and foremost (and unlike the fight in Peacemaker), FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers put on a better-than-expected show tonight. They traded somewhere around the same number of blows, fought roughly as hard - though, to my surprise, Cincy out-muscled the Timbers – and deviate too wildly on the numbers. While the Timbers had their share, Cincinnati ultimately found the wider openings, held off something of a grabasstic (two “s’s” in that or...?) rally, and ultimately held on for what I’d call a by and large deserved 2-1 win. And, unlike that horrible bigot of a father, I still love and support both of my sons.

I went into the game more worried about the Timbers, naturally, but I’d argue tonight showed them still progressing. They managed to pace more than one portion of the game – the start of both halves, mainly, and then the end after Cincinnati fully committed to the counter to close out the game. Cincy, meanwhile, took over longer stretches – particularly the 20-minute spell of the first half, when they clawed control of the game back from Portland and pressed and pressed until they broke through (hold that thought), and again after stifling the Timbers’ attempted rally at the start of the second – and all that feels like a good shorthand for the state of both teams. Portland’s improving, but Cincinnati has a capacity to stomp its foot on the game in a way the Timbers do not...

...have a mentioned how hard it is to focus on both sides of the ball yet? Which, as implied, goes against the concept of focusing? So, doing my best on the rest, with an assist from the highlights.

Orlando City SC 0-0 FC Cincinnati: More Dutiful Than Beautiful

You can move a lot without going anywhere...

In last week’s Review/Preview, I called Orlando Ciy SC v FC Cincinnati a “Big Early Test.” The hosts failed the test harder than the visitors in yesterday’s 0-0 loss, but Cincinnati doesn’t have a lot to cheer either.

Damn that stray glance I caught while bouncing between games last night, because I knew the final score going in. I still watched every damn minute...well, a lot minutes (a solid 85%) of this game just now and don’t entirely regret the experience. If nothing else, Cincy tidied up the mess in midfield after the opener. Junior Moreno looked steady and I liked the way he (mostly) set up to allow Obinna Nwobodo to prowl further up-field – and to pretty decent effect. Nwobodo set up what may have been the best shot of the game - i.e., the one a happily more-visible Brandon Vazquez chipped against the crossbar – and that speaks to a larger truth, i.e., if either team was going to score yesterday, it would have been Cincinnati.

Turning to the flip-side of that thought, Orlando simply does not generate much offense – or at least haven’t over their first two games of 2023. They’ve fired 13 shots total so far (see this and see that) and with just two on frame (and was one of them the penalty that won it against Red Bull New York?). Having sat through my first full(ish) 90 with them, yeah, can confirm it's a lot of aimless shit, moving in and about the top of the attacking third and to no notable affect. Honestly, you have to assume their fans are bored shitless so far.

I heard talk from the broadcast booth about Orlando “heavily-rotating” its squad ahead of Tuesday’s CCL game against Mexico’s Tigres UANL, but Orlando still squeezed 45-65 minutes out of several clear starters - e.g., Mauricio Pereyra, Robin Jansson, Facundo Torres and Ercan Kara – though let the record note the rumblings from the broadcast booth about looking for options beyond Kara to give the attack some kind of juice.

So, that’s who and what Cincinnati was up against. And, sure and to their credit, they did all right with it. The team found a minimum of two great looks for Luciano Acosta, Brenner fired at least one shot in anger, and Vazquez finally made his 2023 debut, making smart passes – if I recall right, he dimed the big, fat diagonal that teed up Acosta’s better chance - spreading the field with hard, effective running and getting into decent-to-good places in the box. Unfortunately, Orlando’s Pedro Gallese saved all of those, most of them comfortably. To sum Cincinnati’s evening into one pithy phrase...it was fine.

USA 0-0 Colombia: Mom, Dad, I Don't Know How I Feel About (January) Camp

Me tonight, only 20 years ago and with a lot more hair.

I was a little torn about the line-up the U.S. trotted out in tonight’s positively somnolent 0-0 draw against Colombia. January camp is, or has become, all about calling in players from the fringe and giving them a moment – I get that - but I would have rather seen interim coach Anthony Hudson name and stick with a starting XI over both games. Instead, he played the camp like a bad hand in draw poker and swapped out 10 players between Wednesday’s loss and tonight; unless I’m miscounting, only Walker Zimmerman started both games (and he lasted longest in this one).

Now, had you presented me with both line-ups and asked me which would do better, I’m pretty sure I would have picked tonight’s line-up, regardless of opponent. If nothing else, it featured the more experienced/accomplished players, particularly with the national team set-up – e.g., Paul Arriola, Aaron Long, Jesus Ferreira, Kellyn Acosta, Sean Johnson – and yet they delivered less in every category I could name outside the spine of the defense.

To state the obvious, Serbia and Colombia are different teams that played different styles. Perhaps knowing they could get something lethal going given the right circumstances, Serbia gave the U.S. more of the ball while Colombia played its defense high enough to force errors and broke from there; call it a second cousin to a press, twice removed. I don’t know what Wednesday’s line-up would have looked like against Colombia, in other words, and mostly hope that that multiverse got treated to a more entertaining game because, my god, was tonight’s game like watching old people fuck in front of drying paint....you have my apologies for the mental image...

The Mothership’s stats page doesn’t post xG for U.S. games, but the Yanks’ five total shots suggests something in the 0.5 range. The only two shots on goal involved Matthew Hoppe – he set up Paxten Aaronson for one (and he could have done better) and fired from the channel for the other – but those didn’t amount to anything besides easy-ish saves for “A. Montero,” Colombia’s ‘keeper. The only other decent U.S. chance I can recall from my times of full, attentive consciousness was the chance Ferreira opened up with a smart first touch. The way he lost that ball to a swarm of Colombian defenders sums up the game in a singular moment. The Colombians broadly overwhelmed the Americans tonight, but without ever coming close to beating them - i.e., boredom, by any other name.

MLS Weakly, January 28, 2023: A Thermometer Enters an Orifice

If you know, you know.

The U.S. Men’s National Team wraps January Camp 2023 with a friendly against Colombia tonight. Be there, or expand your cable package/antenna TV offerings (c’mon, antenna TV, old buddy, don’t let me down). That wee nugget is the biggest shit in domestic soccer today, but all that will change. And soon.

Since I started with the national team, I may as well finish the thought – though I have less to say than I thought I would (and I’ll have notes later tonight). A rash of consternation at the soap opera state of U.S. Soccer flared up across the twitters this week – one tweet flagged looming tournaments and other future events like a maid of honor staring at a wide-open to-do list through one eye and a calendar through the other – and...I just couldn’t give less of a shit about the comings and goings of Earnie Stewart, Brian McBride, and whatever the hell’s happening with Claudio Reyna. To offer some words of comfort to that hypothetical maid of honor, the big day will come and you’ll be ready for it or you won’t and you’ll celebrate or despair accordingly...and who knew this site would age into naked fatalism? I blame society, society is to blame...

After that, if you want to know what Walker Zimmerman and DeAndre Yedlin think about the state of the National Team, here you go. My main takeaway from that piece...gods preserve us, I forgot that the U.S. (and Mexico and Canada, right?) won’t have to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, courtesy of its (their?) hosting duties (I’m not looking it up). That makes me far more nervous than whatever’s happening in Salem (shout-out to Days of Our Lives...which I just discovered is set in the...Midwest. Did anyone else know this??). Oh, and this was a fun little nugget (from this):

“Setting aside the top five leagues in the world -- in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain -- MLS had the most rostered players (36) of anywhere else. It was represented by more countries (12) than any league outside the top five and, for the first time in league history, it had a player on the winning team: Argentina's Thiago Almada (Atlanta United).”

The U.S. had that midweek loss to Serbia, of course, and I queefed (sp?) out some thoughts, but Matt Doyle had a couple nice additions to my vague gesturing in his notes on the "shaky start" to the new cycle. Two things I didn’t talk about in my post: 1) I agree that Columbus’ Aidan Morris wasn’t great where he lined up...but did you expect him to be? and 2) how good could Brandon Vazquez be with the regular U.S. Men’s line-up behind him? And that segues nicely to...

USA 1-2 Serbia: Their Coach Seating Is Better Than Our Coach Seating

No. How are you really?

How do you talk about something that didn’t matter?

With just a handful of well-known exceptions – e.g., Walker Zimmermann and Aaron Long – just about every player who started for the U.S. Men’s national team tonight are only in the picture if you’re looking at the edges or deep into the background. And, given the comparative youth of the current starting set, providing a novel approach and/or skill-set strikes me as the only way any of tonight’s bubble boys can bounce into the first team. That’s where you start...

The place I want to go from there is a back-to-front TED talk about what worked and what didn’t tonight – and, no less significantly, when. But first the recap.

I don’t know much about the Serbian national team that beat America’s freshest B-Team 2-1, but I have a pretty good idea about how it won the game. Taking advantage of the rift that opened on a lonely free kick in the first half helped (think this is a full highlight package; go nuts to the extent it is), sure, but the game turned at the beginning of the first half. That’s when Serbia started pressing the American back-line and deep-lying midfielders. That pressure didn’t force mistakes, so much as exploit and punish them. A Serbian player ran down every long touch – which had ample company, unlike Serbia’s free kick – and they read every telegraphed past like they were jamming the channel. The winning goal came well before the pressure evaporated – and it followed from chasing a loose touch and a soft, telegraphed pass – and that left it up to the U.S. to claw their way back to level terms.

As in the first half, it took the U.S. a while, maybe even too long, to tilt the field toward the Serbian goal. The Portland Timbers’ Eryk Williamson kicked off the hottest rally of the 2nd half with a flying tackle and a great leading feed to an overlapping DeJuan Jones, a move that forced a save from...hold on, yeah, the lineups are up. Guess it was “D. Rosic” who made that save. I count that as one of the U.S.’s brighter team moves of the evening – it was a lot of soloist stuff prior, with the best of it coming from the San Jose Earthquakes’ Cade Cowell – and, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see those 20 shots, but I doubt I felt all that inspired by a quarter of ‘em, maybe a third...

The First MLS Preview Post of 2023. Probably: Eyeing the Baseline

So bright you gotta wear shades...

The turning of the calendar feels like a good time to start to wrap the head around Major League Soccer’s 2023 season. Before I get started a warning: very little of what comes below will constitute “news” to your more devoted followers of the league. To put that another way, this is a post for people who follow the league like me – e.g., those who can say, “Oh, I’ve heard to that guy” when a good/rising player’s name comes up, but who can’t drop (literally) all the relevant stats.

For the people who drop in for notes on either FC Cincinnati or the Portland Timbers, you’ll find those at the end, and in that order. I wanted to start with the big picture. With that, let’s get those fingers framed and get things into focus.

Thanks to all the baggage and clutter around the 2022 season – there, I’m thinking of a luridly tainted (yet mostly satisfying) 2022 World Cup and the rolling scandals that clouded the Timbers season and cleaned out (most, but not all) of the front office - I want the 2023 MLS season to be both as good and as normal as possible. And, there, I’m optimistic: just having the playoffs feel less rushed and, without a looming World Cup as a distraction, less like an opening act begging a restless crowd to let them reach the end of their set. That should help the 2023 MLS Playoffs feel like the closing event of the domestic soccer calendar all on its own. Now...what else?

The new [Apple]+ TV deal will be in place, for one. I’ve seen some gripes about the cost – and, now that I no longer have SlingTV, I’m feeling the slings ‘n’ arrows of the exclusivity (e.g., my access to random soccer leagues has cratered) – and I fully sympathize with anyone who either can’t or won’t find a path to squeezing that into his/her/their personal budget. Speaking solely for myself, I calculate the real cost of things by breaking things down into individual units. What I mean by that is, even at the highest subscription rate - $99 for a full year – you’re looking at $3.30 per game to watch every game for any given team and, unless they’re blowing smoke up my ass or it’s getting lost in the other smoke, you get to watch it on your time, however and often you want. And if you’re like me and like to follow two teams, that cuts your per-game cost in half. Bottom line, the way you value MLS’s new TV deal tracks almost perfectly with the number of games you want to watch.

That’s to say, I like that and it makes me happy. Now, for some things I don’t like.

FC Cincinnati 2022 Season Review/Preview: Competence's Unexpected Dilemmas

The view from 2019-2021. Fucker looks massive.

I decided to park on a review of FC Cincinnati’s 2022 season for a variety of reasons – the choice to check out in mid-July among them (it’s possible my middle name, “Anders,” is Norwegian for “erratic”) – but not really knowing how to read their season-ending 0-1 loss to the now-MLS-Cup-bound Philadelphia Union played its part as well. In so many words, I understood Cincy had defied virtually every observer’s expectations, but couldn’t really place them in a league-wide context.

Seeing both Philadelphia and Los Angeles FC kick great lumps out of the opposition in their respective semifinals – though, just to note it, LAFC played a more one-way game – went some distance to filling in that blank. FC Cincinnati didn’t just have their best-ever season, they had a very good one. To lift a line out of Matt Doyle’s year-end review:

“’Everything from June 18 to Decision Day is the highlight’ also has an argument, as over that 20-game stretch, Cincy lost just twice. That’s the best of anybody in MLS.”

The bitter little boy who lives inside my head compels me to point out that 10 of those games ended as draws, a point Doyle concedes sotto voce when he notes that “Cincy dropped more points from leading positions this year than anyone but the Revs” (and is it just me or did five teams drop the most points from leading positions? I’ve read that stat somewhere for at least three teams). That bitter little boy missed a deeper truth that I thought I’d written at some point this season, but, because I can’t find it, here it is again: those ten draws meant that Cincinnati went toe-to-toe against all kinds of teams, six of them future playoff teams (including New York City FC), and gave away very little. Call that a long of saying that all those dropped points didn’t matter after Decision Day: what mattered was that Cincy showed they stood just as high as (literally) half the teams in Major League Soccer. And, when you’ve got that, getting into the playoffs amounts to having a chance in every game going forward. As Red Bull New York learned in the hardest of ways.

All that’s better than laudable. It’s beautiful, especially given the dark slapstick that came before. From there, the question becomes how to get better in 2023.

Red Bull New York 1-2 FC Cincinnati: Can I Make This a Tale of Good Versus Evil? Yes, Yes, I Can

Earlier today, I saw a tweet celebrating the fact Red Bull New York crashed out of the playoffs. If I had to write a concurring opinion, I’d mourn how far they’ve fallen since the Thierry Henry/Tim Cahill/Sacha Kljestan/Dax McCarty days. Like watching 11 drunken men trying to climb a goddamn greased poll, I tell you.

I don’t have a headcount of how many neutral Major League Soccer fans wanted FC Cincinnati to come out of the...is it a play-in, or a conference quarterfinal (does it matter)? At any rate, on a day when Cincinnati managed the more controlled approaches to goal, while the Red Bulls flailed in some fortunate something from distance, Cincy left Red Bull Arena with the ticket to the next round of the 2022 MLS Playoffs. And there was much rejoicing (yaayyyyyy).

I haven’t written about FC Cincinnati since...shit, July, but I’ve dipped in here and there to stay current. Between the opposition and the plethora of draws they played in the second half of the season, I fully braced to see today’s game slump into penalties. Instead, and with the housekeeping crew at McMenamin’s Kalama Lodge impatiently tapping at the door, I had the good luck to see Brandon Vazquez’s game-winner and to miss the overstuffed stoppage time minutes tacked on to the end of the game. I doubt anyone quibbled with the final score (have I mentioned it was 2-1 to Cincy yet?), I only know I found it satisfying.

Because Pat Noonan has trotted out something like the same line-up for as far back as I’ve noticed, there’s not a lot to say about the roster beyond, I think he’s on to something. Not every part of the set-up clicked – e.g., the Red Bull Collective did a great job of keeping the ball away from Vazquez and Brenner for something like 86 minutes (Brenner’s point-blank header, saved by Carlos Coronel notwithstanding), but an in-form player needs only a chance and a (again) collective breakdown on Red Bull’s right side gave Vazquez the one clear look he needed.

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?