FC Cincinnati 0-2 Philadelphia Union: Alternate Timelines & Lassoing Metaphors

They do dress better over in that timeline...

To start with a notice from the Department of Corrections/Over-Reach: my preview tweets suggested that FC Cincinnati might benefit from the Philadelphia Union playing in a 4-4-2 diamond. Nope.Oh, and before getting rather existentially into the weeds below, I don't intend any of what's below to stand as "what it all means" judgments about FC Cincinnati, or their larger fate in 2019. If anything, this loss complicated all that.

If you missed the Philadelphia Union’s 3-0 win over Columbus Crew SC, you caught a fairly linear encore with their 2-0 win over FCCincinnati. It featured the same feeling of suffocation, of no way to keep the ball going where your team wants it to, and no thorough way of keeping it away from where they don’t. It seemed like Philly won every 50/50 ball, that they always had a player where they needed one to be and, even when it was one lone Union player that had to perform in order to keep bad things at pay, that player performed.

The Union had a better afternoon on the slippery turf of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium, pure and simple. That left me more curious than usual to see how that game looked according to the box score, and FC Cincy’s tiny handful of shots feels like the number to highlight – even more than Philly firing off three times as many (and, just to note it, the duels/tackles data says the Union didn’t win every 50/50, and that says something about the function of perception). To hang a frame on it, this was the performance that critics of FC Cincinnati’s roster build expected to see in 2019, present company included. And, after yesterday’s loss, I mean that globally: expansion teams are supposed to look out of their depth, lacking in polish and sophistication, and on both sides of the ball. And that brings me to the Union’s second goal.

Matthieu Deplagne has impressed me as much as any player on FC Cincinnati’s roster; I’m also a Forrest Lasso stan going back to last June, think the world of the big lug and his upside, etc. And yet, examining the anatomy of that goal reveals that both players fucked up in that moment – Deplagne with his clearance-in-two-minds that dropped the ball at David Accam’s lurking feet, Lasso for biting on Accam’s cut eagerly as the world’s dumbest trout. Mistakes happen in these decisive moments (when mommy and daddy love each other very much, this is how goals happen, etc.), but that split second in time captured the macro-trends of the larger contest: the Union forced Cincinnati to do things…sub-optimally all game long. For the just the second time in 2019, FC Cincinnati looked like the out-classed expansion team.

Chicago Fire 2-0 Real Salt Lake: It's Just the Mistakes Sometimes

Smooth 'n' creamy.

Well, that was pretty straightforward: Real Salt Lake gifted the Chicago Fire a couple cock-ups, and did a more or less creditable job of keeping out RSL, if abetted by at least one shocking miss by Salt Lake’s Yura Movsisyan, who looks more like an MLS 2.0 guy with each outing. I’d call RSL’s attack more coherent – especially over about 30 minutes in the second half (and is that “tale of two halves thing just something observers don’t even have to note anymore? Doesn’t that seem closer to the norm than wire-to-wire dominance?) – but superior approach play doesn’t win a team games, no matter how superior.

So, that’s that: Chicago scored one weird goal (Nemanja Nikolic’s; Sunday “Sunny” Stephen ruined a pretty damn clear offside call by poking into his path) and a great, if preventable second on an Arturo Alvarez solo mission, and they walked off 2-0 winners. I tell you, man, Alvarez has been Chicago’s most consistent attacker since the middle of 2016. That said, big credit to Dax McCarty for the ball that forced Sunny’s error; cut through two lines like room temperature butter…

Some notes on both teams…like I said, I want to keed these things simple.

MLS Snapshot, 09 01 2016: (Loose) Rankings, 10 Topics, Timbers v. FCD Preview

#Endorsed!

See what I did there? "Review" became "Snapshot," and instead of tying this post to Week [DON'T CARE!], I just typed in the date, today’s date. That one little change just freed me to post on MLS without thinking about the day of the week. I’ll still try to avoid stale content...just less neurotically.

Uh, what else? Generally, I won't talk much about specific results, not unless my timing lands just right, or if there's something that I didn't see or hear someone else pick up on (in my incredibly infrequent forays into the news) (A choice that totally rules out bringing up (for long) Toronto FC’s Game of Total Loss v. the Montreal Impact (see injuries) – but, while we're here, I think they'll weather it; Toronto survived Giovinco's scoring drought and Jozy's back besides; I think they're a little likelier for the Shield than they are for MLS Cup). In the end, I think most games possess a certain je ne sais quoi, res ipsa loquitur, so it's best to just assume that most people have clocked the results and watched all the videos they're going to by the time they find me. By and large, I want this to be a space for stretching the envelope (too far), conflating small data points into burgeoning trends, and Magical Thinking (e.g., creative, and ultimately pointless, leaps).

I'm kidding. I do my best to stay grounded, but I really do love playing with puzzle pieces, even the ones I can't actually get my hands on. With that in mind, here's what I hope, pray, and shall hereafter strive to achieve in these Snapshot posts:

MLS Week 28 Review: Blow-by-Blow, Team-by-Team

Our interns, hard at work.

As regular readers know, we at C & C Labs (Conifers & Citrus Laboratories, LLP) experiment continuously with framing, formatting and concepts, all with the long-term goal of presenting the perfect readable post. Yes, we've laid some mutant eggs – let us not forget...well, shit, already forgot it, apparently, but, suffice to say, we've laid some eggs that the mother not only walked away from, but quietly pushed off a cliff. And she's right. Fuck those things.

At any rate, somewhere in the middle of spacing off during...again, I dunno, some game, we came up with another approach, this one involving a full-spectrum review of Major League Soccer review that taxes neither writer nor reader. And doesn't that sound...just nice? This is really straight-forward (for once): I frame every game that happened in the week just past and wrap it up in one of two ways:

1) I provide three talking points for each club for the games where I went the full 90; and
2) Just one talking point per team for each game where I only took in the 20-minute mini-game.

Nifty, I think, and clear, I hope. The "interest rankings" have been updated at right. So, let's get rolling.

MLS Week 28
It's pretty easy to frame the week as a whole: the clubs that look ready showed it by winning where and when they should. The clubs that didn't? Well, they choked, didn't they? Some more than others, too, but most begged questions along the way. In the former column (winners!), you've got Columbus Crew SC, New York Red Bulls, the New England Revolution, and, if you're stretching, FC Dallas. So, who blew it this weekend? How about the Houston Dynamo, the Seattle Sounders and...goddammit, the Portland Timbers. Yeah, we're in there...especially given what Orlando did to Sporting Kansas City just today. Jeez-and-Us. Then again, guess who else slipped? The mighty, mighty, almighty Los Angeles Galaxy. So the league condenses again!

On to the games, full 90 first!

Portland Timbers v. Sporting KC; already written up, and in some distress.

Chicago Fire 2015 Season Preview: On Breaking the (Countless) Deadlocks

Good enough. They were ties, man.

What Happened Last Year
The Chicago Fire tied over half of their games in 2014. Literally. Think about that. That's less a season than an intellectual/physical exploration of mediocrity as a philosophical construct – e.g. can mediocrity to have "heights" and, if so, how many draws does it take to achieve the Platonic ideal? I didn't watch Chicago much in 2014. With the outcome at least heavily implied – again, literally, over half the time – I figured I knew how the games would end. I caught enough, however, to form some impressions, among them: Quincy Amirikwa's solid season as a bee-in-the-bonnet forward; Harrison Shipp's Rookie-of-the-First-Half-of-the-Year season; the now-departed Bakary Soumare, by all appearances, not giving a fuck (an impression confirmed by later comments); the essential wisdom of Gonzalo Segares' recent retirement; the nice send-off for the long-serving, lately-suffering Logan Pause; long-time midfielder Jeff Larentowicz shifted to the Fire backline midway through perhaps per Soumare's visible lack of shit-giving; Juan Luis Anangono...he played in Chicago last year, right? (Barely, but right). The Fire had a crap year by anyone’s standards. Six wins is the unpalatable flipside to all those ties...that's blue balls frustration. Worse, something larger loomed over the franchise – specifically, an apparently widely-held belief that the front office is reluctant to invest in winning (uh, turns out the evidence is scarce; swear it showed on message boards; or something). The contrast with the original, winning Fire teams must sprinkle salt in the wounds.
Final Stats: 6-10-18, 36 pts., 9th in the East; 41 gf, 51 ga