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| I've been conditioned to this FC Cincy a certain way... |
I won’t call it a whole lot of nothing (or even a whole
lotta nuthin’). I’ve gotten more pleasure out of scores of games, maybe even
several hundreds of them (I’ve been around a bit), but Cincinnati FC’s goal-less
draw at the Pittsburgh Riverhounds’ (dinky*) stadium wasn’t paint-drying/grass-growing/old-people-fucking
level of torture. At the same time, check The Match Center for highlights, and
good luck with it!
(* I’ve had the pleasure of watching U.S. domestic soccer
live for over two decades, and I can’t remember the last time I sat in a
stadium as small as Highmark Stadium. In its defense, it is only the flip-side
of the farce of playing professional soccer at, say, Gillette Stadium.)
In an attempt to explain/analogize to this game through a
series of moments, I offer the following:
Pittsburgh’s Neco Brett received a nearly perfect cut-back
from a player whose name I don’t recall; he wound up losing track of the ball,
allowing his right foot to push it past his (so they tell me) preferred left
foot. Minutes later, maybe even as few as one, FC Cincy’s Emery Welshman knocked
a loose back pass around Pittsburgh ‘keeper Dan Lynd, only to stumble onto his
can at the end of trying to run it down. For the record, neither of these moments show up in The Match Center highlights.
The other moment happened in the second half - somewhere in
the 70s, if I had to guess (which I do) - when Cincinnati’s rather large Forrest
Lasso tried to shepherd a ball over the goal line with Kay Banjo hanging on his
back; Banjo whipped his leg around Lasso’s largeness, nearly creating another
chance. This also didn't make the highlights, and that's why I chose them.
Not every shot was terrible - Christiano
Francois and Romeo Parkes tormented FC Cincy’s defense in a way I’ve never seen
(even at 18 games watched, I consider myself a noob), and both Emanuel Ledesma and
Fatai Alashe put solid shots on goal (and all those made the highlights) - but that this game didn’t see many good
chances. The detail I flagged with Banjo is meant to draw out the idea that
Pittsburgh played the better game, thereby surprising FC Cincinnati, thereby
perhaps reminding them that things only get harder for the rest of the season
and (are you paying attention??) into some indefinite future given the path this
young team has chosen.
By way of translating reality to numbers, the best stat I
can provide for Pittsburgh’s visible edge in this game would be shots, general: the
Riverhounds had 18 to Cincinnati’s four. Credit Pittsburgh for being the team
most likely to; credit Cincinnati for making them the team that never did -
even if with moments of doubt (e.g., Lasso having to pull Brett’s jersey at
34(ish) or Hoyte flirting with an own-goal when Francois broke through (yet again)
down Pittsburgh’s left in the second half). I can’t think of any way in which Pittsburgh wasn’t
the better team yesterday, and that runs counter to normal for someone who,
like me, still has yet to see FC Cincinnati lose.
