Atlanta United FC 4-2 FC Cincinnati: Bewitched, Bedazzled & Kinda Weird

Plenty to go around, sadly.

As anyone who has interacted with the MLS Season Pass interface knows, it can still slip in the odd the spoiler. For instance, I caught the fact that Miles Robinson scored a goal out of the corner of my eye before starting the full replay, so I had that at back of mind when Atlanta United FC opened the scoring at the 15th minute. I only got halfway through, "nothing to worry about" when Atlanta scored a second goal. I spent the rest of the game hoping that the caption read “Miles Robinson hat trick.” It did not. Atlanta carried that early lead to the final whistle, and only a little uncomfortably, outrunning Cincinnati to a 4-2 win at home.

About the Game
Atlanta looked a (promising) mess over the opening ten minutes with balls played in behind to phantom runs and a full-field defensive shape that looked doomed to watch Cincinnati pull them apart; the two quality shots the visitors created – one a close solo run by Gerardo Valenzuela, the other a sparkling team effort – had the feeling of heavy knocks rattling a door. Next thing you know, Nick Hagglund went down and off on a hard charge by Emmanuel Latte Lath (“I'll show you soft, Ronny!”; weird injury, too; ribs and lung?) and, mere minutes later, Derrick Williams headed home what might have been Atlanta’s first competent pass of the game on a set piece and it was off to the races. Atlanta scored again, of course, with a tap-in by Ajani Fortune five short minutes later after Saba "Well Janice*" Lobjanidze bewitched and bedazzled Lukas Engel on Cincy’s left (* I get so much free delight from closed captioning). From there, a broadcast booth narrative developed that Atlanta had pounced on a defense still working out its assignments. That argument holds up better in a world where Latte Lath didn’t miss two massive, free-free-free opportunities (more on one of those later), all of which fell outside that crucial window. Atlanta had gilded chances at an even half-dozen goals - a rightly shocking note given Cincinnati's typically tight defense - but all those chances ran against an undercurrent of Cincy playing through them with relative ease. That's to say, this was a weird one.

No one knew the game would end where it did when Robinson’s goal finally came just after halftime, of course, especially with Taylor Twellman treating Atlanta’s woes over the first 15 minutes of every second half as a disaster to count on. That note came against the backdrop of some of the best attacking builds Cincinnati has produced all season; the chances rained and the shots poured until they piled up to nearly 30, with nine on goal. Not all of them made Brad Guzan sweat – I’d say Evander’s 60th minute effort gave his Old Spice the biggest workout – but his every save and the 21 shots off target (some of them more wise than good) meant more time playing catch-up for Cincy and with less time to get there. Another defensive breakdown – and on a set piece, again, and with the ball bouncing all over inside the six, again – restored Atlanta’s two-goal margin at the 66th minute, forcing Cincy back into a sprint. The Orange and Blue pulled within one a mere four minutes later when Valenzuela finally got his prize for a great game, but it wouldn’t take look for them to succumb to the game’s other defining feature, fully-bodied defensive breakdowns by the visitors. That hadn’t happened since the opening weeks of 2025 (e.g., the ass-kicking at Philly), but Jamal Thiare insured the win in stoppage time on what must have been Atlanta’s third clean break behind Cincy’s defense. Everything that could go wrong did, basically, and it was more than enough to erase a good amount of right.

Getting Reacquainted with Atlanta United FC, the Drunken Sailors of MLS

Pick his pockets! Pick his pockets!

Thumbnail History
As noted in yesterday’s post on Los Angeles FC, Atlanta United FC started the tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging. They arrived in the 2017 season like fun drunks livening up a wedding, finishing fourth overall and with the second best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) good Toronto FC team. Atlanta finished even higher in 2018 – if, again, second-best after a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield – but coming second almost certainly got lost in the dopamine when they won MLS Cup 2018 at…well, an unfortunate stroll over my Portland Timbers. The secret to pulling that off followed from near-perfect roster construction. It started with (more or less) flipping off that season’s Expansion Draft, finding two future stars in the 2017 Superdraft – Julian Gressel was the stand-out (Miles Robinson bloomed later) – and then going nuts with trades and transfers. Atlanta’s FO built a spine out of ol’ reliables from all over MLS – e.g., Michael Parkhurst, Jeff Larentowicz, and their apparently-fovever goalkeeper, Brad Guzan - but they had to scour the international markets for their crown jewels, Josef Martinez and Miguel Almiron. One gave them lightning-like verticality – Almiron, who seemed to bend time when he got on the run – while the other finally ended Roy Lassiter’s 23-season reign of terror atop the single-season record for goals scored. For two fun-filled seasons – 2018 and 2019 - defenses struggled to keep Martinez from scoring goals and all came perilously close to allowing him a goal per game. Atlanta’s Act I seemed destined to on forever, but, as every play does, the action moved on to Act II, aka, the one where the hero(es) look lost and everything looks impossible and the doom kicks in. The trouble started when Martinez tore his ACL in the first game of 2020 – he would miss the entire season – and then came COVID, chaos (aka, Gabriel Heinze) and, when it all ended, a 23rd-place overall finish in the final standings. That’s not to say Atlanta didn’t move heaven, earth and bags of money to avoid that fate: when Almiron moved on to the EPL’s Newcastle, they gambled heavily on Ezequiel Barco and Pity Martinez, two young, (reportedly) high-upside talents from Argentina. They paid a $15 million transfer for Barco and (I think) somewhere around $10 million for Martinez; Barco played more games (81), but Martinez got more in less time (39), but he was only around for 2019-20, while Barco lasted from 2018-2020, but both players are more memorable as cautionary tales than for anything they did on the field. Coaching problems plagued the team as well, starting with the apparent sociopath, Heinze, but, with respect to Gonzalo Pineda, they haven’t got it right since. Some entry-level farting around in the CONCACAF Champions’ League aside (see below*), things faded fast and, hard as they’ve tried, the color hasn’t flushed back into Atlanta’s cheeks since…or has it?

Kidding. It hasn’t. Not really.

Total Joy Points: 10

Portland Timbers 3-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: Struggle. Horror. Stroll.

It only looks innocent.

Huh, maybe I should title all these things in three word descriptions. Beats repeating cliches like, “a tale of two halves,” right?

The game started cagey, it took a moment of horror - and, arguably, a substitution - to change it, but, once the ball got rolling, gravity did its thing and Portland Timbers coasted to a 3-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy at home.

LA’s Derrick Williams brought the horror, and by way of what might have been a drunken-headed tackle a couple minutes before half-time that knocked Portland’s Andy Polo out of the game and off the field for gods know how long. It left LA and everyone associated with them blushing instead of complaining - a rarity in soccer - and Williams got a straight, justified red for it; fines and a couple more missed games should be coming as well. Regardless of whether Williams had a concussion at the time, that kind of tackle all but obliges you to make amends. Visit Polo to apologize, buy him a box of chocolates (the good stuff; not that See’s bullshit), maybe gift card to Dave & Buster’s with $200 on it, and that’s at a minimum. Williams’ tackle was the house-guest equivalent of shitting in the middle of someone’s kitchen; mens rea doesn’t even come into it.

That came just before the end of the first half, and the Wheels of Justice turned quickly from there. Less than two minutes after the second half whistle, Josecarlos Van Rankin dropped a dime into an arm’s length gap between LA’s Daniel Steres and (maybe) Julian Araujo for Felipe Mora to nod into the goal - and the Timbers…well, they didn’t quite never look back, but they took care of the game in one of the weirdest and most passive ways I’ve seen in a while. Allow me to explain…

Looking at the summary, I see that just 13 minutes passed between Mora’s first goal and his second - a head-on-a-swivel-alert put-back on a nice bit of collective lock-picking by Portland, in which a strong shot by Claudio Bravo set up Mora’s put-back - but something truly peculiar made that dozen-plus minutes pass slowly. For one, the Timbers did something familiar after going ahead: they let up. That could have followed from a conscious choice to drop back, stay compact and absorb, but it had the effect of giving the Galaxy, not just possession, but time to pick at the edges of the Timbers’ defensive third. While I don’t recall anything super dangerous during that time - related, I just confirmed that Logan Ketterer didn’t make a lot of saves, but that’s still three more than I remembered - LA had the ball in an area where control becomes chaos in the blink of an eye.