Pittsburgh Riverhounds 0-0 FC Cincinnati: Poop Just Got Real (and Thank God)

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.

Louisville City FC 0-1 FC Cincinnati: The Puddle Goal of Legend

Well, it ain't gonna fill itself, dipshit...

I have to start with this, mostly because I heard the name over and over: is the Louisville City FC broadcast team contractually obligated to say, “George Davis the Fourth” every time the guy touches the ball? Does George Davis the Third own Louisville, or something?

It’s not so bad to start with George Davis the Fourth - beats the howlers I had lined up about how Louisville closed out the first half with a flurry of goals, and it ended 72 hours and 38 minutes later (and don’t check me math, I barely did) - because the man with the long, formal name wreaked havoc down Louisville’s right. Or, rather, Blake Smith’s left side of FC Cincinnati’s defense. I’ve been high on Smith for as long as I’ve watched FC Cincinnati, and I’ve never seen a player make him work and/or guess as hard as…sigh, George Davis the Fourth (treat?). Fortunately, FC Cincy’s defense held, even where Blake did not - though they did have a trouser-filler around the 51st minute that neither I, nor Louisville can’t believe they didn’t put away - and FC Cincinnati walks away from this absurdist 90 with the 1-0 win.

Who knew they’d make The Puddle Goal hold up? (On that, I can’t wait till I can easily find isolated highlights for FC Cincy games, so I can show the water-logged freakshow that won this game for them. I mean, sure, sit through the highlights (at the Match Center, along with everything else you need!)). As goals go, it’s pretty fortunate and messed up. Corben Bone is clearly among the blessed.

For all the truth of “they all count” when it comes to goals, this game, along with the one before it, should make fairly clear that FC Cincinnati has real work ahead on its way to the 2018 USL Championship. (Also, has the league named its trophy? Shit, has MLS? If not, they both need to get on that shit.) I’m looking at the top eight in the USL East right now, and I’m seeing a healthy share of teams who gave FC Cincy a run for its money this season - not just Louisville and Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC (both of whom played well enough to get all three points), but teams like Bethlehem Steel FC and Nashville SC.

Back to the game(s) at hand (is it accurate to call these two games, were they that different?), Louisville’s best chances to win it dried up around the 58th minute, when Speedy Williams (who also received full-name treatment) skied what I and the broadcast agreed was a sitter. They had at least two great shots in the Saturday’s “first half” - both ably parried by a rock-solid Spencer Richey - and Louisville squeezed FC Cincy’s defense over at least two distressingly extended periods, once in Second First Half (i.e., the rest of the first half played earlier tonight), but also during this rather fascinating time in the actual second half that wound up turning the game.

Toronto FC II 3-3 FC Cincinnati: It's What You Do at the Rodeo

You beat eight fucking seconds for starters...

OK, yes, it took reviewing notes from the prior two games to firm up some context (this is from the win at North Carolina, and this from the draw at home to Bethlehem Steel FC), but the handle I’ve got on FC Cincinnati’s performance feels reasonably assured…

…my grasp o the state and standards of the rest of the United Soccer Leagues, on the other hand…still working on getting the fingers where they need to go more maximum grip. For instance, I kept hearing comments on the narrow-shouldered youth of tonight’s home side, Toronto FC II - something that definitely factored into at least two of Cincy’s goals - but that same aw-shucks-ma’am gaggle of teenagers came back from two goals down to tie the gameat 3-3 (you should have highlights through that link by tomorrow morning). Moreover, TFC II kept Cincinnati wheezing under pressure for the final 20+ minutes, they generally played the United Soccer League’s Eastern Conference leaders even, and three or four of those players rather neatly stood out - that includes players who got regular shouts from the commentating booth, like Dante Campbell, Lucca Uccello, Ayo Akinola (scored one, too), and, especially, Malik Johnson - and with an assuredly desperate Greg Vanney and Tim (probably) Berbashenko (probably) in attendance. Coaches like character a little bit more than the next professional, and TFC II’s (probably) teens interviewed pretty nicely this evening.

It makes sense, obviously, to ask where TFC II sits in the USL East? Dead last, you say? The point FC Cincinnati gave them tonight pushes them to three big points on the season, one for every draw they rescued from being another of their 12 losses. That -20 goal differential sort of rounds out the picture of a game one has to think Cincinnati should have won. They didn’t. Jordan Hamilton saw to that, along with the rest of his (apparently) young team, only they didn’t do it with the same dizzying combo of power and finesse (if/when they get to the highlights, do stick around for Hamilton’s goal).

On Cincinnati’s end of things, how bad is this really? They’re still 3-0-2 in their last five (they kicked Richmond hard and true while I was away)), and, at 9-3-4, still atop the Eastern Conference, if with two teams in reach (Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC and Louisville City FC) per games in hand. (Is that English? Roughly? If not, check the USL standings). In that sense, most signs point to no. Also, consider that (again, per the broadcast), Cincy has four of their next five games at home (Nashville SC is their lone road game, and that’s with Ottawa (woo-hoo!), Tampa Bay Rowdies (um), Charlotte Independence (uh-oh), and New York Red Bulls II (um) on both sides of that). More to the point, because I started watching when I did, I don’t know the 9-3-4 team that lives on paper nearly as well as I know the 1-0-2 team I’ve watched over three games now. That team might have beat North Carolina FC, but they also suffered hot flashes throughout; the same team should have taken all three points against Bethlehem Steel FC just as surely as they should have stolen three points from TFC II today.

They didn’t, again, and now I’m interested. So, what went wrong?

Guys, I've Met Someone: On a New Team, Swinging, and the Solution to Everything

Just 2015? No shit?

I’ve always prayed for this day, without believing it would arrive. At long last (fucking long, guys!) the much-fabled, oft-misunderstood Soccer Gods finally smiled on one of their longer suffering Jobs. (That’s me. I am Job. Or Gob. I hear some people do that.)

At various, yet shockingly consistent, and yet also virtually never wire-to-wire…um, years, since a severely misguided internet made it possible for every asshole (again, me) to write about Major League Soccer, without editing, never mind overseers, I have written about Major League Soccer. A three-four year stretch of me writing about the Portland Timbers in the lower leagues happened…and that might have two-three years, mind you. (And I can’t prove it either. Once I sour on a blog, I delete the motherfucker like I never knew it. Seriously, I am Cronos and I eat my children.) In most of those years, I tried to cover every part of whatever league I invested in most that season. That always ended with me overwhelmed, bummed, or jaded (in all honesty, it was jaded, like, 3/4 of the time) before the first ball rolled in the playoffs. Still, I could fake keeping up until, oh, 2010. Once expansion really kicked off…forget it. I’ve been gasping by Week 15, if not before, ever since. Even for the glory years with the condensed games.

That brings me to the miracle. Its name is FC Cincinnati, aka, the answer to my prayers and the solution to my problem. Also, the team that will join Major League Soccer in 2019.

If I haven’t mentioned that I was born in, and spent the first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio, yes, I spent the first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio. I once heard it said that Danny DeVito collects people from New Jersey, wherever he can find them; that’s me with people from Ohio, only the shy version of it. In other words, whenever I meet people from Ohio (or, sometimes, that general area of the Midwest, if mostly north of the Ohio River…um…), I quietly, but almost automatically love them. I left Ohio, basically, but it never left me. I’ll agree that identifying with a place you almost never visit doesn’t make much sense, but I still rarely go a week without thinking about Ohio. And which one of us is crazy, because I don’t think it’s me.

Close observers might have caught the pronoun I slipped in front of “Portland Timbers” up above. Yes, that was “my.” I stand by it. I love my Portland Timbers and I moved to Portland, Oregon not once, but twice in my life. I ultimately settled here  and that was very intentional. I love Portland. And yet I still look at real estate prices in Cincinnati from time to time…shit would blow the mind of a Portlander....