MLS Off-Season Weeky (01 25 2020): Welcome to the Weird Season! (Plus Some Moves)

Preseason.

Ah, preseason, the heady days when teams across MLS can nurse delusions of grandeur – whether Real Salt Lake claiming they’re “not that far from competing for the title” or Dax McCarty pretending new kids Nashville SC won't do the soccer equivalent of a flex-arm hang from the playoff line in its inaugural season.

The Chicago Fire (the rebrand didn’t run off with their OG name, right?), meanwhile, stung by a lost decade, takes the sober course: “I can guarantee them that we will work hard every day.”

We will try, the city of Chicago, they say. That’s really all any team can say ahead of any given season. To flip the script, Los Angeles FC can talk about a title all they want, but no promise can stop them from another stumble in the playoffs. At any rate, what will be will be. And some teams have already taken their first steps toward their 2020 fate.

Preseason, MFs!
I’ll clock some playa moves below, as well as what’s going on with the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, but I wanted to start things off with actual preseason play.

Does it matter that (weird) Atlanta United FC beat the (weird) New York Red Bulls 2-1 in hot MLS-on-MLS action yesterday, or that the (weird) Seattle Sounders dropped their first preseason game to Uruguayan giants, Penarol? Nah. Everyone’s knocking off the rust (no matter what the copy says about Josef Martinez) and the regulars knock off after the first 30 minutes, and a bunch of randos come on to replace them: the silly season continues, but welcome to the “weird” season. (Related: I’ll be placing “(weird)” in front of every team’s name until either real games come around or when a given team plays some version of its expected first team in the late-stage preseason.)

MLS Off-Season Weekly (01.17.2020): Dismissals, Courtships, and More

What?

Guys! They released the 2020 preseason schedule!

Yeah, yeah, 93.7% of fans think that preseason is bullshit. Personally, I think of it like Advent – i.e., a prelude to the main event, only without the Bible verses and the shitty chocolate. (I know carob when I taste it, mom; don’t you fucking insult me.) It’s when I finally get to see games (guys!), when I finally get to address (and/or wildly extrapolate) from actual player performances; I get evidence, dammit (no matter how subjective it gets once you traverse past hard numbers like goals, assists, and clean sheets). The day I can stop guessing how, say, Gadi Kinda will do in MLS versus telling you he’s either, 1) a storm-driven revelation raging through every MLS defense he encounters, or 2) that name you can’t place in this week’s traveling 18; that's my Christmas! (Which has been true since my kids grew up: so, so transactional; I’d kill that fat jolly son-of-a-bitch on sight, if I ever saw him.)

For what it’s worth, that’s a paragraph-long version of me saying, I’ll care about Chicarito coming to MLS when he makes me care, not before then. Swear to God, fucking hype-trains leave the station daily till about the 10th week of the season…

Personal shit aside, yeah, I’m just excited to see anyone connected to any MLS team kick a ball around. Bring on the shitty live feeds with Jake Zivin muttering over the silence; I’m here for every 90-minute serving of that. Truth be told, FC Cincinnati has a lot more going on this preseason – they start before January ends, in Tucson, and against…Phoenix Rising, I think (do I care? It’s January 29 regardless) – but they’re scheduled to hand in five more games before the regular season starts, and I can’t wait to see how much all the kids, new, young, old, all of ‘em, can impress me (or give me ulcers) before the season can even start. I want my barely-supported opinions and I want them now, basically.

The Portland Timbers, meanwhile, have committed to a trip to Costa Rica (which I’m fine with, even as I don’t fully understand the tradition), followed by the…hold on, Old Trapper Beef Jerky Bowl, or some shit like that. Given my rooting interests, yes, I’m more geeked up (in both senses of the word) about what the Timbers look like going into 2020, but they’re just not doing much this preseason, or much that readily translates. That happens to carry over to player movement/activity. Portland’s being really boring right now – by which I mean, there’s nothing outside the potential/expected signing of Jaroslaw Niezgoda on the Timbers’ horizon, so the roster they have is…it, right? So, yeah, let’s talk about what FC Cincy’s up to…

MLS Off-Season Weekly: New Year's Day Feelings Check

'Bout to get tripped.

I decided to start the New Year by thinking about the general road(and home)-worthiness of the two teams I follow. To remind people, that’s the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati. Both teams come from very different worlds, obviously. Even if the Timbers’ 2019 ended early, they were just one year removed from an MLS Cup final and they still have a competitive core. FC Cincy, on the other hand, get the functional equivalent of a mulligan on a disastrous-for-the-ages 2019 season. Still, so long as promotion/relegation doesn’t take hold…

…and it never will in the States, so, please, stop kidding yourself. We live in a crony capitalist/lazy rich motherfucker society, something that won’t change until we do.

Politics/society/culture aside (and they’re all to blame, and for everything), what do Portland and Cincinnati need to do in order to be competitive in 2020 - or, to get real jiggy, challenge for any kind of honors? To answer the obvious question – i.e., can FC Cincinnati even do that? – no, probably not, at least not without insane luck twice over in the transfer market – e.g., 1) finding players with the right talents, and 2) convincing them to move to Cincinnati. (Also, don’t get me wrong: Portland’s an easier sell, but it’s not LA, New York, or even Chicago or Seattle.) Still, I’m going to start with what I think Cincinnati needs to do in order to…let’s go with make the playoffs in 2020.

FC Cincinnati, Their Yellow Brick Road
As of the New Year, FC Cincinnati has an exhausting mix of new blood and old baggage. I used the word “exhausting” on the grounds that their big attacking signing – former Philadelphia Union midfielder, Haris Medunjanin – still seems to lack the kinds of players he needs to rack up his quota of assists. In other words, unless Brandon Vazquez comes good to several degrees beyond expectations or Fanendo Adi gets his groove back – and does anyone else wonder if that’s not why Cincinnati hasn’t already sold him for peanuts? – Cincy will need to call in some attacking players. I understand that players like Joseph-Claude Gyau and Kekuta Manneh remain in the mix, and that they’ll probably get similar numbers out of Allan Cruz next season, but, unless you think that Medunjanin’s passing alone will buy Cincinnati 10 more goals in 2020 than they saw in 2019, they need a couple better-than-them signings before First Kick kicks off. I understand they’re looking, but I also know that Cincy’s front office signed yet another defender, Swede Tom Pettersson...

MLS Off-Season Weekly (12/4/19): No News Is...[For Both Teams] & (Night) Moves Around MLS

My idea of a good time. Just add bourbon.

Another week, another MLS Off-Season Weekly. As always, I’ll start this (hopefully) short little spin around MLS with the two teams I follow…in the order in which new developments have occurred. Which makes the starting point fairly obvious.

No News Is…The Soggy Status Quo
Spare me your forced analysis of the Portland Timbers defensive depth, The Mothership (and damn you!). Fans and pundits can’t know how Dario Zuparic will do, or whether Bill Tuiloma and Julio Cascante will improve, until all of them either do or don’t. Beyond adding the new guy, the state of the Timbers defense is unchanged till further notice.

That said, I got a little grist on Jorge Moreira out of that post. First, he has only six months left on his loan, but the organization is looking to extend, and for several seasons (please, please, PLEASE! More Ira is fun as ejector seats and boomerangs!). It sounds like the deal is done to add a “young right back”(Pablo Bonilla still?), but that’s it for excitement around these parts. Oh, and I will miss the “safety first” feel Zarek Valentin provided when the Timbers wanted a little less swashbuckling up the right side, but that bird’s flown to Houston (and Jordan Morris exposed that Plan B somethingawful the last time it was tried).

In substance, there is only waiting to learn what’s up with Diego Valeri. And whether the team will get another DP. (Again, please, please, please!).

No News Is…Cause for Full-Blown Panic
Another website asked me to write-up a snapshot of where FC Cincinnati stands at this point in the off-season, something I just forwarded for review. I’ll let that post speak for itself when it goes up – and I don’t want to preview too much of it here – but I will say, it’s hard to appreciate just how fucking messy Cincy’s roster really is until you delve into the mechanics.

The Short Version: FC Cincinnati has more needs than options, or at least that’s how I see it. As much as I think next season will be better than last, I expect neither greatness nor enjoyment for Cincy in 2020.

FC Cincinnati, 2019 in Review: A Puzzle and a Carousel

The problem, in WPA format.

For starters, I’ve never followed a team that suffered so much in one season. The world around me turned clockwise or counter-clockwise, but I’ve lead a charmed life when it comes to spectator sports.

And yet is was worse than that for FC Cincinnati in a lot of ways. In the big picture, they had their brightest moments early in the season; but for their March 30 loss to the Philadelphia Union, FC Cincy could have had the strongest start for an expansion team in Major League Soccer history. It probably wouldn't have mattered, but that game marked the turning point in Cincinnati’s 2019 season: after one more promising result – a 1-1 home draw versus Sporting Kansas City (that later provided both irrelevant and predictive for both teams, aka, more time for golf!) - they wouldn’t just lose, they’d lose in bunches: first five straight games, then six straight games, then four straight games, then four more. The end of the season looked a bit brighter, or at least fulfilled the theoretical promise of the team’s original roster construction – the defensive team they designed finally showed up, and that let them ruin a couple seasons (e.g., the Chicago Fire’s and Orlando City SC’s) – but it was too little and too late, on top of being basically unwatchable.

I’m going to (finally) close the chapter on FC Cincinnati’s inaugural 2019 season today. Rather than make anyone but the emotionally sturdiest people stick around till the end in the hope that I’ll have something bright, never mind helpful or insightful to say about 2020, I don’t. I expect hella turnover (as indicated by all the “Thank You __________” posts I see on the FC Cincinnati news page), and, between all the expected personnel turnover and a new coach (Ron Jans, whose current lease on (coaching life) expires December 2020), predictions can’t be anything but a mug’s game. Moving on…

I’ll close out with big-picture talking points, I'll name my personal team MVP…and, yeah, I think that’s about it, but I want to start by drafting a narrative for the 2019 season based on the notes I banged out through the season. And, golly, did production drop off at the end. And, frankly, so did my interest. As they say in France, allons y!

FC Cincinnati 0-2 New England Revolution: I Blame Cruz for Everything and Nothing

I only wrote this, because I think he can handle it...

[Ed. - I understand that my chosen situation is unique, and I don’t expect MLS’s schedulers to anticipate that some random guy from Portland, Oregon will choose FC Cincinnati as his second default club…but I will still blame them every time their scheduling forces me to post late]

It sucks to lose at home – twice as much when you’ve done it so often – but FC Cincinnati put up a…fight Sunday night and, as I see it, that's all a reasonable fan can ask for at this point. And, to be clear, that statement assumes that FC Cincinnati doesn’t have the roster - or, to stretch in a rather desperate direction, the correct alignment of that roster - to make the playoffs, never mind win the league. And, until further notice, that’s the operational assumption of this site.

Before I get into the weeds, the New England Revolution wouldn’t have broken into a sweat beating FC Cincinnati 2-0 at home if it wasn’t so goddamn hot and humid on Sunday (hi, from Portland!). Cincinnati played well enough to end roughly even on numbers – which surprises me more than it should, given my belief that Cincy ended all right – but they didn’t create more than a couple convincing openings and, much as happened against DC United, they never looked like winning the game. It was possible to keep one’s hopes up until the Revs’ second goal at the 55th minute (and, golly what a howler); the odds on getting a draw spiked in that moment and the whole thing played out under a cloud.

It’s a fairly straightforward dynamic, sadly: like any inexperienced group of people, FC Cincinnati lacks the reps to transform mechanics into rhythm. More reps certainly won’t hurt them, but, that will always careen headlong into the buzz-saw of lacking the personnel for as long as that pertains. And, as a thought exercise, I’m going to channel all of that into the body of one player – and I do this no animus toward the player in question - and call this “The Allan Cruz Problem.” First, and to be clear, Allan Cruz is not the problem. The problem is that he’s being asked to do things he’s not up for doing: Cruz doesn’t have the instincts and/or skill-set for the attacking third, or he doesn’t have enough of them: he doesn’t risk passes that force the defense to make decisions and he doesn’t make his own decisions quickly enough.

FC Cincinnati 1-4 DC United: A Problem with Casting

The importance of the casting call can't be stressed enough. Look at these schlubs.

The only positive you can take out of the….sincerely fucking awful penalty call Bartolomeo Toledo called on behalf of FC Cincinnati is the fact that Emmanuel Ledesma had the poise to put it away. With a stutter-step, which I thought wasn’t legal. And, again, on a total bullshit call.

That that it mattered. Lucas Rodriguez scored the last go-ahead goal of the night just five minutes later. The game ended 1-4 against FC Cincinnati, but the game started getting away from them as early as 10 minutes in. Sure, Kendall Waston pinged a free header off the crossbar – think that was somewhere in or around the 20s – but, for the first time in a while, the game looked very much like a USL team (that’d be Cincy) playing against an MLS team. The same DC United handing out points at home and conjuring malaise in soccer form over its past 10 games (and they’re still 2-2-6 over their past 10 with last night’s win) looked like the better team on both sides of the ball: they played out of trouble more effectively, won their defensive battles (box score be damned), moved the ball more effectively and to better places.

I caught the final 10 minutes of the game in real-time - aka, after hope got lost and fell into a car-compactor then in use – and it seemed to play out under a gentleman’s truce. It was worth circling back to see how they arrived at that moment, because it gave an answer to the question of how much stock Cincinnati fans should place in their last two wins. The short answer is, not a lot. Last night made those look still more like bad days for the Houston Dynamo and the Chicago Fire than good days for Cincinnati.

What really stood out last night – particularly in the second half, especially – was how thoroughly the wheels came off. Right before DC scored its second and final go-ahead goal, I wrote the word “GAPPY” in my notes, and just like that – as in, all caps. Cincinnati wasn’t getting any pressure on the ball, and for a while at that point, while leaving space all over the field. Nearly every player on the field, but especially in midfield, Cincinnati players assumed the proverbial position (not a proverb) and appeared, for lack of a better word, confused as to what would happen next. Call it a fresh twist on ball-watching; it wasn’t the usual case of losing marks, but…I don’t know, sincere curiosity as to what would happen next? Once DC got hold of the game, they only let go of it when sporting decency called them off.

Chicago Fire 1-2 FC Cincinnati: What Schweinsteiger Said

He knows...

Anyone unable to appreciate the full narrative satisfaction of Fanendo Adi giving FC Cincinnati the moment both he and the team needed very, very badly does not deserve spectator sports. I mean, you could write a movie about Adi’s season and end it on the moment where he sat cross-legged on the ground in clearly grateful prayer. Even I, who's agnostic on my more pious days, felt all of that. Something else to note here: that's Adi’s best attacking play; running onto a pass and hitting the ball first time toward (or, god forbid, on) goal. That’s how he scored his best goals with the Portland Timbers. Use it.

Happily, that rare positive act was enough to carry Cincinnati to a 2-1 road win over a disconnected and aimless Chicago Fire team. It took an unlikely, lucky goal to gain an early advantage (Fabian Herbers…dude) and Nico Gaitan struggling from the penalty spot to allow the game to play out as it did to let the result hold up, but it did. As noted by the guys in Chicago’s broadcast booth, the Fire did the balance of whatever “doing” happened in the second half – i.e., they dominated possession and “piled on the shots” – but it’s not often that the gap between shots (20) and shots on goal (7) tells the story of a game so well. For every opening Chicago created, they somehow squandered two of them (absurdity deliberate; I know math), whether by Aleksandar Katai wandering the world over to tee up a shot (when he might have done better to lift his head and look around) or by attacking runs that took the runner out of the play. (C. J. Sapong deserves exemption from that statement; he was one of the few Fire attackers to use his runs to create space for the players around him.)

As sometimes happens when I watch FC Cincy games, I found myself watching Chicago more than I watched them – especially in the second half. Not to take anything away from Cincinnati, because they succeeded in their primary task of staying organized and forcing Chicago to break them down. More often than not, this took the form of watching Chicago under-achieve.

At some point during the game, the suspended Bastian Schweinsteiger stepped into the broadcast both where Chicago’s commenters talked to him about the first half of Chicago’s season. When the conversation turned to the things that might have held them back this year, Schweinsteiger named some demons that plagued Chicago in this loss: not all eleven players showing up (only Francisco Calvo, Dax McCarty and Gaitan stood out as clear positives, kind of the point); issues with communication/coordination (the serial mistiming of passes to runs; by the end of the game, both McCarty and Gaitan resorted to angrily gesturing at teammates to fulfill their most basic functions) and a lack of intention and purpose among the attacking players (which most often manifested in “wings-‘n’ prayers” flails from range from far too many Chicago players). One could make a decent case that Cincinnati didn’t win this game, so much as Chicago lost it. Chicago’s 5-2-4 home record shows they do this (literally) more often than not - again, math: 6 not-fully successful home results > 5 fully-successful results – and, when you’re not winning on the road ever, you need three points at home to get anywhere.

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Louisville City FC: Holy Shit, a Win! (And the Scrabbling Path Forward!)

Suspense is contextual.

I will be brief, I will be brief, I will be brief. [Eh, you be the judge.]

I have two big, related takeaways from FC Cincinnati finally gaining a clear positive during its 2019 season with a 2-1 win (in extra time!) over Louisville City at scenic Nippert Stadium in the over-revered, yet under-valued U.S. Open Cup. First, Louisville’s press disrupted everything Cincinnati so much thought of doing for most of regulation time. Sub-first, I do wonder whether they ran themselves legless – not that I blame them either, given how close that came to being the path to success.

Second, and most crucially, how much did knowing how to manage Louisville help FC Cincy? My personal theory: an uncomfortable amount.

By pressing the way they did – and successfully - Louisville played an underdog’s hand in this game, but Cincinnati holds a clear edge in talent. Making that count took playing around Louisville’s press – something it took Cincinnati the first five minutes of the game to break even once, but it took most of regulation to finally tilt the field in its favor and, this is key, irrevocably.

Once Louisville gave up the (glorious) second goal (Team Kekuta!), and after so much exertion, I couldn’t see them coming back into the game. The underdogs had to take their foot off the gas eventually and, once they did, Cincinnati put the game in a…well, stunningly poorly executed choke-hold. Fuck me, if I didn’t feel like I was yelling “finish him” for a whole goddamn hour.

I’m happy for the win, particularly the spirit of it. Anyone watching the huddle after Fanendo Adi scored his first goal of 2019 (srsly, that can’t be right) should feel heartened by Forrest Lasso’s cross-talk with Adi over the celebrating mob. I have no idea what Lasso said, but everyone looked bought in and that’s how you build a team – aka, Step 1 to Success in team sports.

To go the other way with a thought that feels complicated: the first 70 minutes felt like Cincy bending without breaking while getting muscled all over by Louisville. That dredged up something I’ve noticed from FC Cincy during its long, dark winter-but-it’s-summer in MLS. FC Cincinnati has one hell of a time getting on the front foot in any game. Against a team capable of dominating them, the switch never flips and that's one theory on their string of regular season losses; when playing a Louisville team doing the soccer equivalent of throwing itself onto a hand-grenade to victory, it takes, as it happens, about 78 minutes. The larger point, and I’m going to emphasize this: Cicinnati does not have a reliable way to assert itself in games.

New York City FC 5-2 FC Cincinnati: Are You Better Off Today Than You Were Five Games Ago?

He lost his first run, you know. 1976.

And here we area again at where to begin.

One easy place would be when New York City FC’s Maxi Moralez finished their collective long walk into FC Cincinnati’s goal, aka, the moment that became the fifth…sharply humiliating goal in a 5-2 curb-stomping win by the home team. The final score-line pulled off the rare trick of flattering the visitors – e.g., the team who lost by three goals after "scoring" two. Funny thing about those two goals…and that first one, that’s what I like to call “a real striker’s own-goal.” Such technique...

“One Team Can Play. The Other…”

“At Least Wake Their Asses Up”

“They Were Practicing”

Each of those came to me as potential titles for the memorial service you’re about to read. I chose to throw a call-back to The Gipper to peg this specific result to the end of the Alan Koch era. The argument I’m leading to isn’t whether Koch would have done better tonight – because, probably not, see the first discarded title above. What I’m challenging is the top-line premise/logic of Koch’s firing: the idea that he was the problem. That’s not the same as arguing that the team needed a better coach – I’m still of the opinion they did – but of whether better play, or at least morale, would follow from Koch’s firing. Did it have to happen not now, but right now, as it did between the (again) road loss to San Jose Earthquakes (that’s a leading parenthetical) and the admittedly smooth home win over the Montreal Impact?

First, and full disclosure: I cannot speak to morale. I am neither on nor around the team. Moving on…

Colorado Rapids 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Putting Together a Puzzle with a Hammer

The hammer is the puzzle...whoa....

Was it nice to dream that FC Cincinnati could rescue a draw after Kekuta Manneh’s split-second equalizer, even for the minute it took for Nicolas Mezquida to slip a go-ahead goal under Spencer Richey’s arm-pit? Or was that more like someone pointing over your shoulder and yelling “Oh my God, that is the best thing I’ve ever seen!” before kicking you in the balls when you turned to look?

The Colorado Rapids would go on to score one more sloppy goal on the way to a 3-1 win over FC Cincy in the Rockies. With that, a bad streak gets one game longer and Cincinnati fans’ collective nausea at the impotency of its attack rises a little higher up the throat. It’s easy to take a walk with despair, given that fact pattern, but let me see if I can’t scrape a couple positives out of Interim Head Coach Bowl (aka, yesterday’s game…Yohan Damet and Conor Casey…right?).

Cincinnati held a solid edge in possession – damn close to 60/40 – and they impressed both me and Marcelo Balboa (who couldn’t stop talking up Cincinnati’s bravery for playing out of the back) with their composure playing between the defense and midfield…it’s just what happens when they get closer to goal. A moment early in the first half encapsulates FC Cincy’s biggest weakness. They got the ball around the Rapids’ left around the 13th minute and had the chance to play a ball into the area with the Rapids scrambling; sadly, all of Cincinnati’s players ran to more or less the same spot – at or about the penalty spot – and a lot of crowding and tripping over dicks ensued. Not surprisingly, that didn't make the highlights. In fact, the runs Colorado’s players made on their first goal late in the half provides an extremely useful contrast – e.g., see how Kei Kamara’s near-post run cleared space for Andre Shinyashiki’s shot? That’s what happens when you put players who understand that role in that role. Getting the final ball right is every bit as much about runs as it is about the quality of the passes that feed them.

To draw the obvious contrast, I see two “pure” attacking players for Cincy in yesterday’s starting XI: Fanendo Adi (who…I’ll get to it) and Roland Lamah. After that…is Allan Cruz an attacking player? Is Frankie Amaya? I’m on, I don’t think so and wait for it(?), respectively, but how does that flaccid attack play against reasonable expectations of the roster FC Cincinnati built? To (finally) go back to the positives, one of them lurks in the penumbra of the last two paragraphs: FC Cincinnati has decent pieces on the parts of the field where they have the right personnel in the right position. They looked fine knocking the ball around and out of the back, even when Colorado pressed them a little, precisely because the players they had in those roles are where they should be and know what they’re doing in those roles/ places. To flip the argument, it’s the lack of proper personnel where they need them that hurts them.

FC Cincinnati 0-2 New York Red Bulls: Counting the Hands on Deck (on One Hand)

(The woman at the back senses what you're all thinking...)

I plan to start and end on the same talking point – i.e., questions personnel. First, what can a team do when its heretofore most reliable player makes a catastrophic mistake? FC Cincinnati’s shot at three points went out the door when Kaku found the ball that Mathieu Deplagne lost between his legs (dude. look down.) and slotted it past Spencer Richey. That wasn’t the only decisive moment yesterday – think what might have been had Luis Robles got a little less hand to Fanendo Adi’s header – but it came late enough in the game, and with things rolling fast enough downhill, for Cincinnati to rescue Deplagne’s error. Again, that’s one of your more reliable players…

‘Twas an ugly game, one that ultimately ended in a 2-0 loss for FC Cincinnati. The New York Red Bulls scored a second goal (1 + 1 = 2!), but that was just a little dunking that made the game read a little more lopsided than it should have. The Red Bulls were visibly the better, more talented team but that translated more to moving the ball forward than chance creation. Cincinnati created more shots – e.g., Adi had (and failed) a one-on-one test of his own – and that made this a game that could have ended either way…but you’ll have to move to an alternate universe if you want a happy ending…you think Alan Koch still coaches in that universe? (Nah…)

There isn’t a lot to analyze after that. New York tends to turn games ugly, and that bogged down large chunks of the game in a series of close-quarter wrestling matches over the ball. It wasn’t a permanent neutral, but neither team passed well (or often, for that matter) – which is to say, the Red Bulls have nothing to gloat about (and this performance makes me want to dial back talk of escape velocity for them; New York is grinding out wins, not designing them). They put two shots on goal and both of them went in, end of story. Before that point, they wandered aimlessly in the attacking wastes and survived the odd scare from Cincinnati…hold on…

I want to pause to bitch about the utility of the shots/shots on goal stat. At some point in the second half – a moment The Mothership didn’t think to add to the highlight reel – Adi and Roland Lamah combined on a solo raid that ended with Lamah getting the ball inside the Red Bulls’ penalty area. New York shut down his first look, but Lamah spun out of it and got free for a shot. He missed, obviously, and the ball rolled wide of the whole damn net. Still, that was, 1) a good chance, and 2) one of the worst looks for New York’s defense all night. And yet, according to the numbers, one of Cincy’s best chances shows up as one of its six shots off target, more fuck up than opportunity, and that's backwards.

San Jose Earthquakes 1-0 FC Cincinnati: A Hopeless Hat Looking for a Hook

Not always productive...

Several key numbers express what happened in FC Cincinnati’s 0-1 loss to the San Jose Earthquakes last night. Among them?

When Major League Soccer’s tech/video stooges condense games, they typically find 20 minutes’ worth of worthwhile footage. The condensed game for San Jose v. Cincinnati ran under 15 minutes.

The ‘Quakes’ Cristian Espinoza got sent off for a (soft) second yellow card (on his part; make it worth the time, son) at the 51st minute. That left FC Cincinnati 40 minutes’ with a man up.

FC Cincinnati put three shots on goal, two of ‘em after Espinoza’s sending off (and both by Fatai Alashe, I believe), so maybe the solution for Cincinnati involves somehow arranging to always play a man up? I’m just saying, have they tried it? Just asking questions over here, people.

For all concerned, it felt like neither progress nor regression, but, by ball that’s holy, ‘twas hideous. My short read goes something like this: when Espinoza left the field, the game went from one team having some capacity to make something happen out there (San Jose) to two teams flailing hopefully forward till the final whistle put fans and observers alike out of their shared misery. To clear up any potential confusion and/or inaccuracies, the ‘Quakes didn’t dictate the match by putting under pressure on or shots up against Cincinnati; they did, however, dominate possession for as long as they had 11 players on the field, and to an extent that made it impossible for the Orange and Blue to do anything with the ball, precisely because they never had the ball.

All it took for the ‘Quakes to collect these three fragile points was Nick Lima’s set-piece precision strike at the 22nd minute. Jackson Yueill’s two “shots” give a fair taste of San Jose’s attacking puissance (Kitten-Level, Unlocked!), and that says something about converting possession into chances or maybe less pathetic shots. All the same, I’ve seen Earthquakes teams look effective and smart with the ball, but I’ve never seen one look that comfortable playing eternal keep-away. It took a lot of movement to make it work – enough to make me wonder whether they’d fade – and it did work, and maybe that's Matias Almeyda's system in action. From the second Cincinnati lost control or turned over the ball, San Jose would take hold and shuttle it around for a few, often as if they had no particular destination in mind (much like drivers in Hillsboro, Oregon, who I hate with the heat of 1,000 suns.)

Philadelphia Union 2-0 FC Cincinnati: Line-Breaking Passes Break Teams

At last! I have whipped a metaphor to stiffness!

If you’re looking for good news, FC Cincinnati lost 0-2 to the Philadelphia Union Wednesday night, and the result didn’t really flatter anyone. Going the other way, if you’re going to call a lot of what FC Cincy put up "shots," you are the patron saint of generosity. Too many of them looked about as threatening as Darren Mattocks’ 29th minute attempt. It was fairly early in the game when “PHI really good at blocking shots” went into my notes, and that didn’t really change till late in the game. I’ll get to that later, but the big takeaway for this game is that Philly deserved the win. Now, the details…

FC Cincinnati fans had all of – what? – five minutes to ask whether it would have mattered or not had Kacper “Sh-Bilko” Przybylko was offside on the go-head goal (wha…? 7 minutes? No shit?). I don’t know how psychic recovery time works, for a variety of reasons, but I hope no one treats the question of whether “Sh-Bilko” (yes, I’ll stop; it just helps me remember the pronunciation) was offside on the Union’s opening goal as the whole damn problem tonight, because it mattered to the same rough extent that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand “caused” World War I – i.e., it was merely the first act in a particularly painful drama (only scaled to 1 versus, oh, 30,000,000 or so, not counting the Spanish Flu, as in, and the "1" is spectator sports suffering, which isn't actual suffering).

FC Cincinnati had a low-block as dense as plywood, one that alternated from suffocation (4-1-4-1) to outright strangulation (5-4-1; rare sightings on that one). The Philadelphia Union had more talent in every position, familiarity, tactical understanding, etc. etc. etc. It took them an entire half, plus a halftime of (presumably) planning and/or screaming to figure out how to breakdown that low-block, but they did it. And once the tide turned, low-tide didn’t return until late in the game, when Cincy substitute, Fatai Alashe, lined up the most unobstructed shot of the game for Cincinnati. They came too late, obviously, but I want to linger on that idea of unobstructed shots, because it’s a biggie.

From what I saw, Cincinnati’s low-block only kicked in when it’s press failed – and that press discombobulated the holy shit out of Philly for the first 45 minutes of the game. Throw the possession stats all the way out the door, because a lot of Philly’s involved pushing the ball across the backline until something actually easy opened up. The Union alternated between isolating players on farthest fringes of the low-block, or trying to play a ball over the top to Fafa Picault, or to Kacper Przybylko. None of that worked: FC Cincy kept Philly’s players too far away from one another to do any damage, and that threatened to spell a decidedly uninspiring phrasing of “success,” but I also think most FC Cincy fans would have eaten 20 crickets in exchange for a draw tonight. If that doesn’t make sense, I’m arguing that just about any draw would have worked for me tonight – and I’m guessing that applies to most fans of FC Cincinnati.

FC Cincinnati 0-3 Columbus Crew SC: A Collection of Negative Metaphors

Fucking adorable, but it still has to change...

In my youth soccer days, I had a coach who turned his back on us after getting fed up with how the team practiced. He insisted we continue, only without him watching. It didn’t bother me (seemed for the best, really; he was unhappy, we were unhappy, etc.), but my teammates cracked within minutes and started begging him to watch again. That was the goal, of course, and he gave everyone reminders on “goals and attitudes,” etc. I don’t recall if we did any better, but that was never the point of the exercise.

I don’t know why that story came to me, but watching FC Cincinnati get destroyed by Columbus Crew SC by an ultimately merciful 3-0 final score allowed me to sympathize a little with my old coach.

I’ve been waiting to see how FC Cincinnati stacked up against Major League Soccer competition since June 10, 2018 – that was the first time I saw them play (and, for the record, they beat North Carolina in that one). Between my commute and some questionable choices on the video streaming side by and among FC Cincy, the Chicago Fire and the good people who run the Carolina Challenge Cup, I missed the live, and only, video stream of Cincinnati’s draw against Chicago. Watching them play the Charleston Battery…I dunno, it felt less like something any of us needed to know than a lazy farewell fuck with an old flame. (Also, I’d already watched them play Charleston last year as well). Given all the above, and unless I blacked out them playing an MLS team in last year’s U.S. Open Cup, yesterday’s game against Columbus really did count as my first time seeing FC Cincinnati against MLS opposition and…yeah, where to begin?

Saying a team got “played off the park” is one of soccer’s most familiar clichés, but FC Cincinnati did something more disturbing in Charleston yesterday: they didn’t to show up. They looked every bit as unready for primetime as the “jerseys” in which they played. By the end of getting spun dizzy by Columbus, I’m guessing some of them appreciated that little taste of anonymity. A few of them might have appreciated a bag to wear over their heads. Beat on both sides of the ball, they didn’t defend well and attacked with the force of three kittens, that’s the kind of shit you see in the FA Cup when the Premier League teams come in to face the amateurs. Worse, Roland Lamah, the only guy to produce a highlight reel moment (and he managed two…ish) let his final highlight take the form of a two-footed tackle from behind and a deserved sending off…

…to turn to another cliché, yes, sometimes a team needs that spark and that's probably what Lamah was after. Sparks are funny, though, inspiration in one scenario, and step one to a dumpster conflagration in another.

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.

FC Cincinnati 4-3 Toronto FC II: I'm Going to Miss Kenney Walker

No,  it's "Corben." "C-O-R-B-E-N,"

Are your favorite goals individual or team? I ask because FC Cincinnati scored one of each - the former by Fanendo Adi, the latter by Corben Bone - on their way to resuscitating a 4-3 win at home against an eternally gasping Toronto FC II. I’m Team Bone because I feel like team goals are more replicable than solo flights, they make teams feel more like, y’know, a team, and there’s just…something about pulling a defense apart by running and passing. (For me, that’s soccer at its best.) Don’t get me wrong: Adi’s goal was a whole lotta something, one of those moments where a player puts it on himself to make something happen. (You can find that, and reference for everything that comes below at The Match Center.)

The downside: FC Cincy needed both of those goals, and more, to beat a team that has lost twenty one (21) times in this 2018 season. On the plus side, FC Cincy has players capable of turning a game all on his lonesome. Birthday Boy Bone (googled that; results above) would score the winner in this one, but it really is remarkable that Cincinnati would need as many as four goals to beat a team as bad as TFC II, aka, the only team already out of the United Soccer League’s playoffs. (Actually, now that I’m looking, they’ve now been joined by the Richmond Kickers, Seattle Sounders FC 2, Tulsa Roughnecks FC, and Rio Grande Valley FC, though, mysteriously, not Las Vegas Lights FC, who are factually beneath Rio Grande in the standings, but who also have a game in hand, but doesn’t that still look like inoperable cancer for Las Vegas Lights FC? Why dick around with the whole “mathematically eliminated” charade. This is when, people, not if. That patient is dead. Moving on…because life is for the living…)

The other remarkable thing about tonight’s (narrow) win: Cincinnati hasn’t allowed three goals against any team going back to June 27 – when they allowed three goals to the same TFC II team. It was a step in an unfamiliar direction for FC Cincy’s defense, because, whether they’ve paired Forrest Lasso and Dekel Keinan or Lasso and Patrick Barrett, the team’s central defensive pairing generally gets along like steak and chianti, controlled, classy, just hugging every taste bud, etc. There is, however, sub-plot to that, an asterisk hanging at the end: TFC II’s Tsubasa Endoh scored each goal in his hat trick from several yards beyond the lands where central defenders roam; even his third, closer goal came from a place where you’d want a midfielder to shut him down, not a defender.

FC Cincinnati 3-0 Charleston Battery: Wire to Wire, and Beyond

It's greased lightning!

It’s rare to see a 2-0 win as dominant as the one FC Cincinnati dropped on the visiting Charleston Battery (and, yes, I realize the game actually ended 3-0 - and FC Cincy deserved all of that third goal - but it goes against a premise, so…ssshhhh, bear with me). The orange and blue (that’s FC Cincy, who needs a snappier nickname) controlled every aspect of the game, but without looking likely to run up the score. They thoroughly contained the Battery, sometimes in their own half for soccer’s equivalent of eternity, and, with one exception (Ataulla Guerra pinging a bomb off Spencer Richey’s crossbar), Cincinnati’s defenders never gave the visitors more than a glimpse of daylight (e.g., Forrest Lasso rotating/sliding to snuff Patrick Okonwko’s and/or Charleston's best second-half chance).

Both teams came in boasting unbeaten streaks that I can’t stop visualizing as cars rumbling up for an evening of street racing (see The Fast & the Furious, Grease, and maybe Rebel Without a Cause; haven’t seen that one): 15 for Cincinnati and 11 for Charleston. The home team ended the visitor’s streak with confidence-eating finality. The Battery kept their shape by and large, and I think I’d find that distressing - i.e., falling 3-0 when you didn’t shit the proverbial bed (that’s probably not a proverb). Think failing a test when you actually prepared for the thing.

Box scores don’t always put the details in proper relief, but I’d hold up two, maybe two and a half stats (in the match center, where you’ll find highlights too) that capture what decided this game: FC Cincy’s 2-of-3 advantage in duels and their huge advantage in shooting accuracy (75% to 16.7%) - and the latter goes back to another number, e.g., the slim margin in the total number of shots. Those numbers underline two things: 1) how well the Battery held its shape for nearly the full 90*, and 2) how little that mattered, thanks to how well Cincinnati threw around its weight.

* The few honest breakdowns Charleston did suffer produced the result - more specifically, the final score. The third goal - of which, yes, it did happen - concluded the only period of pressure that saw the Battery tremble on the verge of cracking. That came late - around the 85th, and lasted till the final whistle - when Fanendo Adi and Justin Hoyte put at least three clean shots on goal, and Nazmi Albadawi played the dangerous ball that led to Skylar Thomas’ soul-bruising stoppage time own-goal. The other goal came in first-half stoppage time when Albadawi chased down a loose trap by a Charleston player (who, incidentally, had just intercepted a Cincinnati pass), and then combined with Emory Welshman, and Corben Bone, who would finish off Albadawi’s assist, to score.

FC Cincinnati 1-0 Penn FC: Fanendo Adi's Rosetta Stone Qualities

It can also be a soft, cushioned lie.

I want to start with a question: if you’d never seen people play soccer before, how would you know that, say, Bayern Munich, or glory-days Barcelona FC were good-to-great teams? On one hand, sure, if you watched 90 minutes of a game and just followed the reaction of the crowd (even on the simplest level of hearing the elation that follows a goal), you’d understand those teams to be better than their opposition…

…but if you don’t know the quality of the opposition, all you could really say is, “that team in the blue and red vertical stripes sure looked better yesterday! Do you like your blorpduckle with a splooge of kepetzal? (That’s me doing alien cuisine, the point is I’m an alien observing a soccer…never mind.)

For as long as I’ve followed FC Cincinnati this season - and period that started with the June 9th road win against North Carolina FC, and includes everything up to tonight’s surprisingly (probably?) tight 1-0 home win over Penn FC, but not last week’s draw against Nashville FC (busy) and the friendly, because fuck friendlies, if you can prevent a player from skiing, they shouldn’t play exhibitions by the same logic, but I digress. (Also, for the curious, here’s my origin story as relates to FC Cincinnati, aka, I come by this semi-honestly.)

Over that period of time, FC Cincinnati has generally looked the better team on the field in those games (for the record, this is now my 8th game, and I’ll work on the sidebar. someday), and today was no exception. Another general trend: FC Cincy seems to take 15-20 minutes to come into a game, and today was no exception. The chances piled up in the end, until Emanuel Ledesma - always the man most likely to - ricocheted a free-kick off the back of the Lucky Mkosana (i.e., the ironically-named dreadlocked dude who posed a moderate active threat for Penn FC tonight), and into the goal. And that wasn’t even Ledesman’s best chance, because that came in the 54th minute when he made space for himself and pounded a powerful lefty off the post. Still, Ledesma scored the winner, as he has for much of Cincy’s 2018. They’ve got players like that all over the roster too, attacking players contributing steadily, whether it’s Danni Konig, Nazmi Albadawi, or even Corben Bone.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Houston Dynamo: A Win, a Loss, an Uneasy Sensation

Drafty...

“Timbers fans will never forget the complex emotional rush as he took the Providence Park field as a Timber one last time.”

That’s from The Mothership’s recap and, personally, nothing about the emotional rush was “complex.” I watched the Portland Timbers’ stressful (please, God, not another draw) 2-1 win over the Houston Dynamo with only a couple people, and we toasted Adi at least three times last night. Timbers fans had the fun of watching Adi grow into its first genuinely reliable forward of the Major League Soccer era, and that means Adi will leave a little history behind when he goes. Did I tear up when he scored the game winner? No, shut up…that was…hold on, look over there! (I’ll loop back to this.)

The recap also featured this statement:

“Blanco was in contention for [Man of the Match], given his opening goal and the work he did in breaking down Houston's defense all match. But then Adi stepped on the field, seized the narrative, and made his last one count.”

Nah, it was Blanco, not least because that (frenetic) game-winner doesn’t happen if he doesn’t rescue the ball from (pretty sure it was) Alfredo Machado’s sliding tackle. After a whole damn night of seeing Portland shove the ball forward with the blunt cluelessness of a toddler straining to shove the square-shaped object into the star-shaped hole, that moment of composure really stood out. I’ll skip the over-long back-story for what pops into my head every time I see a team force the ball forward like that* [ed. see note, at the bottom], but, even when you play into the teeth of a team’s defense, you still want to hit around the actual goddamn teeth. The Timbers kicked at one tooth after another more most of last night, and it very nearly cost them two points. And a serious dent to team/fan morale. So, God bless you, Mr. Blanco, and you too, Mr. Adi.

It takes a goal with that much narrative and poetry to it stuff (hold on, 80-12, yeah) 68 minutes of teeth-grating frustration into the place where I keep my repressed memories (e.g., that short hitch in the KGB). Between Houston’s (too-soon!) equalizer and the game-winner, an almost tangible gloom hung over the table where I sat, watching and stewing as Dynamo players seemed to read every pass Portland played into midfield. I’m looking at the box score now and I’m calling it what it is - a damned filthy propaganda. Unless the league has re-defined the word “pass’ to include cases where the player controls it for less than one second, the Timbers never completed 83% of its passes last night, and I think they got the numbers backwards on the duels too. (Maybe they used a random number generator? A rooster pecking corn?)