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”?

Portland Timbers 0-2 Philadelphia Union: A Meditation on an Attack

Is he angry because he doesn't know where to go?

Someone else fired the Portland Timbers’ first shot on goal - I don’t remember who it was, but also, does it matter? - but Bill Tuiloma got their best one. The fact he fired it well past the 80th minute, may have even been after the 85th, says plenty, but I’m less concerned about the specific identity of the man who fired it than I am by the fact that Timbers can’t seem to generate offense without the ball coming forward at just the right angle and to an attacking player in just the right space. You?

The last 10 minutes of the Timbers' 0-2 home loss to the Philadelphia Union gave a glimpse into an alternate universe where Portland threw caution to the wind for the full 90 minutes and made Philly sweat through every one of them. Or, more likely, the Union drew the obvious conclusion from the Timbers first 20 attempts to break them down after they'd compacted the defense and figured they could ride it out. Maybe it was something the Timbers started to do, maybe it was something Philly stopped doing, and a maddening snitch’s adherence to the rules by referee Allen Chapman aside, both Union goals felt like alarms that went off ten (or five) minutes too late to get to work. It took Portland too long to get going - which, here, means all the way going - while it seemed like the Union could revive their method at will. There was no point during this game…which I joined late due to a wrinkle in a stupidly specific rule in NASCAR, one that bears a grating fucking resemblance to Allen Champman standing gape-mouthed with an index finger cocked to the earbud in his ear like he was trying to see where he hit the right note in a Double-Mint Gum jingle…ahem, when I thought Portland had a credible shot at actually winning it.

I mean, bravo on the goal that Chapman called back against both the letter and spirit of “clear and obvious error” (failing to be a prick on behalf of pricks; Chapman’s an evil wizard), but sure as I see the Timbers damn-near even on shots and one-fourth of average in shots on goal (two; they got two), the attack just plain sucks right now. Shut your ears to the siren song of the Sporting Kansas City sacrifice, ‘twas the dream of the song, etc., yeah, yeah, yeah; for the love of all the over-rehearsed weirdness I’ve watched over the past…I’m going with ten games, which includes the wins over SKC and Vancouver, Portland has completely lost track of how to get to goal. They do better in transition, obviously - that’s why I lead with Tuiloma and his chance - but I’m getting close to calling the formula for stifling the Timbers something perilously close to fool-proof.

Being a mere 20% less obvious might help. How many Timbers attacks enter the critical phase (aka, anything inside the opposition’s defensive third) with a ball into the corner? Even if I admit that me answering “all the time, like every fucking one of them” is a product of watching for something and seeing it to the exclusion of all else, that’s all I see to the point where I think Gio might have branded that useless stab at everything but the dartboard. As much as it stood out tonight (luridly), a standard Timbers attack against a compacted defense tends to look like so: the ball goes into one corner (usually with nothing happening near the goal), and then comes back out to a supporting fullback; the ball goes centrally from there, a couple flirtatious in-and-outs to the top of the 18 and back follow before the ball goes centrally again, from whence it goes to the outside channel with the most open space; after that the receiving player flails the ball at some point either toward or above the middle, and to three guys making the text book runs, one near-post, one centrally, one far post. And so on forever, until nothing at all happens. On most plays when the cross wasn’t on, I saw Timbers players come out of the middle to support the wide player. It happened without any rhyme or reason that I saw. Just people throwing money at charities and hoping it all goes away (not being righteous; I resemble that metaphor).

Philadelphia Union 1-2 Portland Timbers: Opposite Day Was Fun, Mom!

Yeah, she's got a jet ski, but...

I’ve never been delighted to see so many of the (soft) expectations I had going into a game get up-ended (see twitter, JeffBull5). To start with an easy one, Jorge Villafana has made me nervous for as long as the Portland Timbers have dwelled in the blessed halls of The Magical Kingdom (now with working bathtub faucets and palatable lunches? presumably?), so an afternoon of watching highlights of the Philadelphia Union’s Brenden Aaronson tear up the right side of the field (that’s Portland’s left) made me wonder how much Jorge would have in the tank once Jim Curtin moved Aaronson inside and brought in Ilsinho to run at him. Villafana answered back with plenty, and then some! While I can’t say he locked down Portland’s left flank, he stretched the defensive equivalent of landmines and barbed wire across it and made Union attackers rue coming in there throughout the game.

My larger (largest?) anxiety was that Philly would spend the day absorbing pressure and timing their breakouts, something they’d proved adept at doing in every game through it’s long, and now-ended, journey through the Magical World of Major League Soccer (#MWoMLS). The Timbers rendered that broad strategy something short of requirements when Jeremy Ebobisse nodded home an early go-ahead goal (13th minute). Having watched that again (multiple times), I’m struck by where the Union went wrong: sure, Jack Elliott vacates the space around Ebobisse, but the way he chased Larrys Mabiala suggested, to me at least, that was part of the plan, even if that meant leaving Kai Wagner one-on-one against Ebobisse and Portland’s go-ahead goal says everything about how that went.

Before burying the lead too deep, the final score ended with the Timbers beating Philly 2-1, if by a quarter-man’s-body worth of width (feeling piratic themes; bear with me), the approximate measure by which Kacper Przybylko was legitimately offside when Aaronson squiggled through a clutch of Timbers defenders to set up what looked like the equalizer. Alas (for Philly fans), people interpret the rules by the rules (folly!) and, according to an exact reading of the rules, yes, Przybylko was, in fact, a quarter-man’s body offside, and thus endeth all talk of equalizers. Trust me, I hate it as much as you...

To draw back for a broader view, this game was built from a composite of game-states, and in a way not a lot of what I’ve watched from the MLS Is Back tournament have managed. I’m not saying one team or another hasn’t dominated the proceedings in this game or that (and gods know, I didn’t watch even 1/4 of all the games), so much as I’m saying this game felt tighter and less nakedly opportunistic than most of what I’ve watched so far. The trends/rhythms felt deeper, if nothing else. Then again, that could have been the agonizing process of the Union reorganizing around the concept of not scoring the first goal in a game…which they really had done in every game during this tournament until, oh, just a few hours ago. Back to those game-states…