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| Chicago, shortly after equalizing. |
This post won’t take long and it turns on a single question:
If someone just gives you something, did you really earn it?
Both FC Cincinnati goals came from mistakes by Chicago Fire FC - in a spin on something familiar to the sport, one of them indirect, the other direct as it gets - and those gave them their margin of victory. You can argue - as I would - that, when it came to shots fired, Cincy made up in quality what Chicago offered in quantity. And that concept carries over into the game as a whole - e.g., Cincinnati didn’t move the ball nearly as much, but did it more effectively than the home team.
Still, the timing of the second, indirect gift in Cincinnati’s 2-1 road win over Chicago bears noting. After 65-plus of running and kicking like it was the point of the game, the Fire started to apply real pressure toward the end of the game. And, almost immediately after I mocked their slurry of half-effectual corner kicks on my in-game twitter thread, Chicago tied the game at 1-1 with a glancing headed goal by Jhon Duran on a run to the near-post. For all that amounted to trying the same thing over and over until it works, it finally paid off (or just did) and the broadcast booth started talking about how much a comeback win could help get Chicago’s season back on track.
And then every neutral’s favorite goalkeeper, Gabriel Slonina, mishandled a back-pass and cut off that conversation mid-sentence. Credit to Cincy’s Luciano Acosta for making it count - and that’s after giving real, nerve-addling indications that he wouldn’t (see the "indirect" mistake above) - but after a long, blindfolded walk to nowhere, Chicago had at long last ripped off the blindfold and started walking in a good and useful direction. And then the boy-‘keeper who has the world raving commits the inevitable rookie error. And Cincy wins, Cincy wins.
Once you put all the above together, I don’t know how to get a read out of this game beyond, yep, good enough. A couple Cincinnati players stood out - e.g., Nick Hagglund won an eye-catching number of aerial duels at the heart of the defense and you love to see Junior Moreno clogging the channels inside the 18, as he did more than once - and the Orange and Blue made the result stand up collectively and with a lot of attacking options off the table (with the baseline value of those options - e.g., Brenner, Isaac Atanga, Calvin Harris - left an open question). In the broadest of terms, Cincinnati did its job as a team and cashed the checks Chicago left unsigned in their mailbox.
If someone just gives you something, did you really earn it?
Both FC Cincinnati goals came from mistakes by Chicago Fire FC - in a spin on something familiar to the sport, one of them indirect, the other direct as it gets - and those gave them their margin of victory. You can argue - as I would - that, when it came to shots fired, Cincy made up in quality what Chicago offered in quantity. And that concept carries over into the game as a whole - e.g., Cincinnati didn’t move the ball nearly as much, but did it more effectively than the home team.
Still, the timing of the second, indirect gift in Cincinnati’s 2-1 road win over Chicago bears noting. After 65-plus of running and kicking like it was the point of the game, the Fire started to apply real pressure toward the end of the game. And, almost immediately after I mocked their slurry of half-effectual corner kicks on my in-game twitter thread, Chicago tied the game at 1-1 with a glancing headed goal by Jhon Duran on a run to the near-post. For all that amounted to trying the same thing over and over until it works, it finally paid off (or just did) and the broadcast booth started talking about how much a comeback win could help get Chicago’s season back on track.
And then every neutral’s favorite goalkeeper, Gabriel Slonina, mishandled a back-pass and cut off that conversation mid-sentence. Credit to Cincy’s Luciano Acosta for making it count - and that’s after giving real, nerve-addling indications that he wouldn’t (see the "indirect" mistake above) - but after a long, blindfolded walk to nowhere, Chicago had at long last ripped off the blindfold and started walking in a good and useful direction. And then the boy-‘keeper who has the world raving commits the inevitable rookie error. And Cincy wins, Cincy wins.
Once you put all the above together, I don’t know how to get a read out of this game beyond, yep, good enough. A couple Cincinnati players stood out - e.g., Nick Hagglund won an eye-catching number of aerial duels at the heart of the defense and you love to see Junior Moreno clogging the channels inside the 18, as he did more than once - and the Orange and Blue made the result stand up collectively and with a lot of attacking options off the table (with the baseline value of those options - e.g., Brenner, Isaac Atanga, Calvin Harris - left an open question). In the broadest of terms, Cincinnati did its job as a team and cashed the checks Chicago left unsigned in their mailbox.
