MLS Weakly, 02 13 2021: Negotiations and Aspirations

I am, and always will be, open-minded.

I won’t post a Weakly next week, so praise the soccer gods for giving me so much material to work with this week.

First and foremost and, as assumed last week, there will be a 2021 Major League Soccer season. The regular season won’t start until April 17 (leaving me to wonder what the hell I’ll talk about every week for two months…which perhaps points to the wisdom of not posting stuff when there’s nothing to talk about), but it looks like (most) teams will report to training as of March 1, 2021.

The very next thought: will there be, like, an actual preseason - i.e., the annual ritual of MLS teams thrashing the kids from the nearest college and USL teams? More to the point, will MLS fans get to see one of my most cherished of preseason rituals, those little February (or March) mini-tournaments in Arizona, Florida and, in recent years, Portland, OR? If not, however will they get to see their team’s players from the deepest depths of the bench and/or that year’s draft picks before they go back under or to their team’s USL affiliate for the rest of the year? How else will fans see the players who will absolutely not feature in any part of the upcoming campaign? I know I want to know...

As much as I love the things (I like like them), hosting and arranging preseason games feels like one hell of a risk under the (fast COVID) circumstances. I mean, why risk players getting The Bad Bug before points are on the line - especially if it risks losing points later (but they’ll reschedule games…right?)? Going the other way, why not get ahead on managing game-day settings before the real thing? My guess is, most teams will play and, gods willing, live-stream at least two preseason games in 2021. Even if hitting the ground running isn’t in the cards, why not hit it at a solid trot?

Even if preseason doesn’t happen, fans of four* teams - Atlanta United FC, the Philadelphia Union, Columbus Crew SC, and my Portland Timbers - and general MLS enthusiasts have the treat of hot CONACAF Champions’ League action to look forward to starting on or around the first Tuesday in April. (* If Toronto FC can beat…whatever the hell Forge FC is, MLS will send five teams to the CCL, but, c’mon, who doesn’t want to line up behind Team Forge?) Because I’ve got nothing else for Portland, I’ll do the little CCL handicapping I can in the Timbers section below. Before that, though, I wanted to spend a little time dissecting the agreement/truce that made the 2021 MLS season possible. Yessir, time to talk about…

FC Cincinnati 2020 Rambling Retrospective (on Foundations)

Ignore your eyes. This glass is fucking empty.

I’ve been struggling with what to think about FC Cincinnati’s 2020 season since it ended, never mind what to write about it. I had a fair sense of its high point - I’d call it the playoff-round loss to the Portland Timbers during the MLS Is Back Tournament in Orlando (covered in my patented over-written style here) - but the rest of the season felt like passing a gall stone (literally) bound and determined to not exit. Hope died both early and reasonably.

For as long as that was all I had to say about Cincy’s 2020, I couldn’t see the point in writing anything, because piling on. As most people know, it was a (briefly-) former FC Cincinnati player - Derrick Etienne, Jr. - who scored a tidy second goal in MLS Cup 2020. That one (unlikely) moment put something that had been visible all night in eye-catching italics: Etienne looked active and useful up to that point; he played defense, his passes connected, his runs had purpose, and he made at least a couple solid attacking decisions/actions and against Seattle’s demonstrably sturdy defense (as backed up by the numbers). He looked connected to the team and the game-plan, in other words. The same player looked lost or useless more often than not when he wore Orange and Blue, but one player having a good game could be anything - a fluke, for one- but that started the ball rolling. Slowly, obviously…

Someone asked me the other day, both out of the blue and when I had time to spare it some thought (toilet), whether I still follow the U.S. Men’s National Team. The answer started with “some” (for the record, I caught all of one game, parts of another, and I tracked the other two (the late blowouts) but that’s it) and ended on a jaded take on the next generation. Moreover, the odd highlight aside, I almost never see the up-‘n’-comers in Europe. A longer version: I see the individual talent and the teams they’re starting for, but how much do those clearly better teams raise those players’ games and vice versa? In other words, when all the weight of making the game-plan work falls on all those same individual talents, will they be World Cup-competitive, never mind World-Cup worthy? The rest of the thought ends with, I’ve seen the results for 2020, and this is nothing like the first time I’ve seen a bright future projected for the U.S. Men’s National Team based on objectively non-representative results - i.e., I’m giving more weight to the draw against Wales than I’ll ever give to a U.S. team kicking the shit out of El Salvador or a post-Golden Panama, c’mon, people, the 90s were fucking ages ago.

The idea that started with Etienne playing a big role in a final ended with a question: how much do FC Cincinnati’s seemingly defining struggles follow more from problems with the people/circumstances guiding the team than they come from the playing personnel? The players aren’t blameless by any means, but there’s something unusually dazed and confused about FC Cincy every time they take the field. I’ve followed a number of teams in a number of leagues since the 1990s, from the shittiest leagues they’d put on TV (the A-League!) to Europe’s finest leagues to the World Cup, and I’ve never followed a team that looks so…uncomfortable in every side of the game - and I watched the late-90s New England Revolution as if God was watching and cared as much.

FC Cincinnati 0-0 Chicago Fire FC: 25% Game, 75% State of the Union

I'm guessing it wasn't as obnoxious, but who knows?

With FC Cincinnati posting another scoreless draw, I decided to do a little spelunking into what something like that looks like on the numbers side. Over the past five games - and this counts Wednesday night’s double-donuts result hosting Chicago - Cincy posted a total of 43 shots, with just 13 on frame. They hit their highwater mark against the Portland Timbers down in Orlando - twelve shots, five on goal - and their lowest against Columbus Crew SC, when they fired five shots, two of them on goal. Watching all those minutes has been...meds?

My much-abused memory tells me they attacked better than usual against Chicago last Wednesday night, forcing three big saves out of the Fire’s Robert “Mrs.” Shuttleworth, with Jurgen Locadia’s standing out as the nearest miss of the bunch. (There’s no select highlight for the shot Siem de Jong wailed over the crossbar, but I count that as Cincinnati’s most tactically-replicable chance created in the run of play.) According to the box score, they managed eight shots in all against Chicago, with three on frame, numbers that put them just under their five-game average for shots (8.6) and just over their five-game average for shots on goal (2.6).

While it’s no state secret that Cincinnati doesn’t create much for offense, those numbers are some combination of manifest and ever-so-slightly-fucking depressing. Off-season renovations to the roster made some kind of learning curve inevitable, but those numbers leave an obvious question hanging in the air: how does this get better?

To continue on a high note, I was delighted to see Cincy come and get after the visitors from Chicago - that goes double given the maddeningly passive approach they took when they visited Chicago (since I checked, they posted eight shots, just one on goal in that one). And, maybe had Maikel van de Werff nodded home Haris Medunjanin’s beautiful set piece (see above for link, first one; also, what the hell were the Fire defenders thinking on that one?), that would have forced Chicago to open up a little bit more…on the evidence above, however, I don’t have much faith that they would…

…also of note, Cincinnati has scored just one goal over the past five games and that was back in Orlando…which I miss in this weird way I can’t quite explain…maybe the “bubble energy” better matched the ambient, brittle weirdness of 2020, but who knows?

FC Cincinnati 0-0 Columbus Crew SC: MVPs and DPs...and Deserts

What is on the dark side of the dune?

Without polling data to support it, I’d imagine that what most FC Cincinnati fans want to see out of their time right now is signs of improvement and/or life. As I’ll argue below, those are related by distinct concepts.

First, has FC Cincy improved? Yes, without question. The team ended its inaugural 2019 Major League Soccer campaign eating bowls full of shit on both sides of the ball and, so far in this 2020, they’ve cut down on the number of bowls they’re downing by…oh, ‘round about 1/3. Mos of the improvement has come on the defensive side of the ball, even if the raw numbers torture the answer a little. FC Cincy has allowed 12 goals (this link will go stale Wednesday) over eight games so far during this exceedingly janky season. To compare that against their peers, the league-wide average is 9.9 goals allowed; Eastern Conference has allowed 8.9, while Western Conference teams as a whole have let 11.1 goals slip by on average. On the one hand, yes, Cincinnati is over the average no matter where you look. On the other, they let in seven of those 12 goals during just two games - the manual colon extraction against this same Columbus Crew SC down in Orlando, and…sometime last week, and inexplicably, against Chicago Fire FC. Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t count anywhere except in the analysis, but that means Cincy allowed just 5 goals over their other six games, for an 0.83 goals against average. Very good, in other words, and Bill & Ted levels of excellence so close after 2019’s “our goal is your goal” policy (can anyone translate that into Spanish? Think it’ll read better).

Fortunately(?), yesterday’s 0-0 draw versus Columbus followed that larger pattern. Better yet, keeping the Crew off the board left Cincy a permanent opening for taking either the lead, the game or both - something they had three verygoodchances to do (plus at least one more, if you count Joe Gyau’s follow-up under “very”). Better even than that, the defensive scheme Jaap Stam deployed got deeper and deeper inside each Columbus player’s head as the game (literally) wore on. The Crew didn’t have a chance I can recall outside a (decent) flurry early in the second half (a highlight). Their attacks broke down earlier as well as forced passes gave way to wayward ones and ideas on how to get from Point A and into Cincy’s goal dried up.

Atlanta United FC 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Frankie Learns to Ride a Bike

Frankie Amaya, just a couple weeks ago...

With the second yellow/sending off of Atlanta United FC’s Jake Mulraney, a game that started as a salvage operation for FC Cincinnati evolved into something else. And I’m not even going to attempt to describe what that is because a dog-pile of weirdness surrounds FC Cincy’s 1-0 win over Atlanta this morning. Where to begin…

If you’re a parent, especially of a very young kid, you’ve had that moment where you can’t talk your kid into something you know they’re gonna love – think, say, riding a bike. To carry the analogy one step further, think of Mulraney’s sending off as training wheels. To set the scene: there you are, your kid is propped up on a bike that’s basically arranged to not fall down. All your son or daughter needs to do is pedal.

The question that lingers about this game for me was the extent to which Cincinnati’s still-brand-new head coach, Jaap Stam, encouraged his charges to starting pushing the pedals. Prior to Mulraney’s secondyellow, Cincinnati clearly lined up and played with avoiding a loss as the highest priority…which made sense after the searing blow-out against Columbus Crew SC a few days back. It’s after the red card where the questions came in. I didn’t expect them to fly forward the second Victor Rivas (the ref) flashed the red – as made plain today, Cincinnati has only vague theories about how to get to goal at this point – but as, it grew increasingly obvious that Atlanta shares the same weakness, I expected a little more urgency out of the Orange and Blue.

The one player to consistently provide it was Joe Gyau, who figured out early, and then again later, that he could play around whoever Atlanta played at left back. In fact, the duel between Gyau and Atlanta’s Edgar Castillo (subbed on to replace the absent Mulraney) provided the only fireworks worth watching in what otherwise played out as one dull, aimless fucking game. Cincy bunkered from the start, but the whole thing devolved into wayward crosses over dueling sets of low-blocks and general flailing.

In an attempt to conjure up a frame for the game, Taylor Twellman and Jon Champion floated the question of how large/long this win will linger in Cincinnati fans’ shared history. Speaking solely for myself, I’ll strive mightily to forget it after this post goes up. I don’t intend that to take anything away from the man of the hour, Frankie Amaya, who scored an absolutely cracking first professional goal; that the team made it stay up (assist by Atlanta) will leave him with a memory he’ll carry around for life. I’m not even going to fart around with my usual theories of replicability (i.e., did Cincy find a reliable route to goal) on the grounds that, when a player hits the ball that beautifully, it is good and right to take off your hat and say, “well done, son!”

FC Cincinnati 0-4 Columbus Crew SC: The Art of Massage

Sometimes you use it to break your opponent...

I can tell you the exact moment my spirit broke – and it came well after Columbus Crew SC’s two goals in stupid-quick succession in the first half. That…long, long moment came immediately before Columbus scored its third goal on the night in the form of a three-to-four-minute span of baby-seal-in-a-pod-of-orcas collective helplessness from FC Cincinnati as they strained…horrifically to pass the ball out of their defensive third without giving in to despair and/or the hapless long ball. This game ended the second Columbus understood they could give Cincinnati the collective vapors with a little aggressive man-marking in Cincy’s defensive third. It also ended 4-0 in Columbus’ favor.

In the bigger picture, with literally everything in the starting line-ups breathily hinting toward a Columbus win, what reason did anyone have beyond COVID-layoff-and-a-prayer to think that Cincinnati would win this game? Columbus hardly shined in 2019 (no playoffs, 10th in the East), but they had a better foundation on which to build and they added better-pedigreed pieces – e.g., Lucas Zelarayan, who, incidentally, came more than a little good last night. More than anything else, Columbus added pieces between 2019 and 20 to make a midfield that looks coherent. Artur with Darlington Nagbe behind Youness Mohktar, Zelarayan and Luis Diaz made sense on paper – and even more sense when you saw it work in practice, e.g., a 5-7 minute of terror by Diaz in Cincy’s left channel. The point is, Columbus has a well-constructed midfield scheme, a system where every player makes some sense where you see them, even if only conceptually.

Going the other way, every theory I saw on the midfield that FC Cincinnati threw (up) onto the field tonight just did not make sense. The 4-1-4-1 line-up MLS’s site shows for the line-up wasn’t miles off, but the scheme that worked…at least for as long as it did – and that’s 15 minutes, maybe 20 – looked more like a 4-3-3, and I say that admitting I had a hell of a time finding Haris Medunjanin out there. That said, even if you allow for a line-up that had Frankie Amaya, Siem de Jong and Medunjanin playing behind Yuya Kubo, Kekuta Manneh, and Adrien Regattin, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Call me crazy, but it’s like Cincinnati built a bad roster at some point and still haven’t recovered from that original sin…

To touch on Columbus one more time, while there’s some dispute as to whether it took 10 or 20 minutes, most observers seems to agree that both teams spent some time feeling the other out. After Zelarayan broke the spell by curling a free kick into Przemyslaw Tyton’s net, the story of this game was Columbus finding Cincy’s like a psychic masseuse and exploiting every breakdown. They pinned Cincinnati from that point forward, whether by holding possession and passing around and (way too often) through them, or through a man-marking high-press that visibly panicked a Cincy team that’s learning a new system, a new coach, and navigating a pandemic. Nagbe and Artur look like a league-elite deep midfield and, with Zelarayan, Diaz and Mohktar showing flashes of what they can do and players like Pedro Santos and Fanendo Adi waiting in the wings, Columbus’ ceiling keeps pushing up. That said, Vito Wormgoor, new addition for 2020 and heavy-metal icon (obviously), limped off in the first half and he seemed important to Columbus’ plans for 2020. Cincinnati couldn’t test that (can we rewrite the rules to that a team can get points for reaching the midfield stripe?), but who’s to say that Atlanta United FC and the New York Red Bulls won’t, because my guess is they will...

As for FC Cincinnati…Jesus Christ…

MLS Off-Season Weekly (01.10.2020): Of Rivalries, Rebuilds, and Those Damn Joneses

A future, not the future.

And…we’re back after another week of shenanigans, and a day early, personal shit, etc. The spotlight shined most brightly on the 2020 MLS Superdraft, which feels low-rent AF so far as shenanigans go (or does it? more later), but the work of keeping up with the Joneses, as those other Joneses try to skip away, continued apace, and, lo, the silly season stayed silly.

As opposed to talking Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati in separate sections today, similar (near) coincidental signings made sense of combining them into one discussion for this week’s edition. So I did…

(Almost) Dueling Forwards (Wrap It Up, Gavin!)
Pens keep scribbling on paper across Major League Soccer as teams rush to get players signed ahead of the onrushing 2020 regular season. As I continue to watch for gaps in the traffic in front of FC Cincinnati and looking forward and back around Portland, the dashboard lights keep flashing “DANGER, DANGER!” for both. To give one example for each team, whatever relief I’d hoped to see out of Leandro Gonzalez Pirez leaving Atlanta for Liga MX went “poof” on seeing they signed Fernando Meza from Necaxa to replace him (Liga MX taketh, Liga MX giveth). Portland, meanwhile, should be anxiously clocking rumors of “mutual interest” between the Los Angeles Galaxy and Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez – especially given what the Galaxy have already done to retool ahead of 2020.

The menacing signings keep piling up all over, whether it’s the Philadelphia Union re-siging Jamiro Monteiro, DC United signing a young Estonian phenom, or Sporting Kansas City’s insatiable thirst to drown its 2019 sorrows with still more attacking talent. Again, every team that shoves ahead of either Cincinnati or Portland pushes each of them further into The Wilds of Shame, aka, the lost lands beyond invitations to MLS’s still welcoming post-season dance. So…what are Portland and Cincy doing to keep up with their respective Joneses?

To start with the cheapest of parallels, both teams (mostly) went out and paid for a striker/forward, and, honestly, I’ve never understood the difference of cared to. Earlier this week, FC Cincinnati signed Japanese forward Yuya Kubo. He last played in Belgium (KAA Gent, a club that, I assume, tracks the standard, floating Belgian level?), and he’s dicked around in minor-league Europe (no offense) for a bit, always able to find a job, but one does get the impression of a ceiling. A guy named Brad Gough posted further details on Cincy Soccertalk (thanks!), and I’ll second-guess his detail work after I’ve watched Kubo for a few games, but one phrase stood out, and that’s “depressed asset.” I’m not knocking that, I like reclamation projects, and so on, but proof will meet pudding, and we’ll talk about the delight or mess when it comes.

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.

Minnesota United FC 7-1 FC Cincinnati: Knocked on Their Heels, Then Their Asses

Moving on to Ulloa, I'm not sold...

When it comes to choosing between the defining moments of FC Cincinnati’s disastrous, season-worst performance in a season presently collecting them like a wildly indiscriminate philatelist, I have a wide selection from which to choose. Was it when Justin Hoyte slammed the ground in frustration after Emmanuel Ledesma’s “defending” on Cincinnati’s right let Minnesota United FC’s Chase Gasper run into a pasture with time to write a novel about what he would do next? Was it Frankie Amaya standing six feet away from…honestly, does it matter? Anyway, Amaya stood, calling/gesturing for the ball and with no apparent sense of what he’d do with it, he just wanted the ball. Or was it that one time when, with Minnesota ceding ground and FC Cincy plainly bereft of ideas and/or willingness to move, that (probably) Ledesma dished the ball sideways for Victor Ulloa to strike hopelessly toward goal from (at least) 25 yards out?

Describing everything that went wrong in this game would take as long as picking one card from a 52-card deck that someone fanned in front of you and discussing each card at length after flipping it over. Hell, even the one clear bright spot Cincinnati can claim from the afternoon – Ledesma’s goal – probably shouldn’t have gone in. The fact that the “Amaya Moment” described above happened immediately before that goal just underlines how unlikely that goal really was.

By my personal account, Cincinnati enjoyed a decent stretch of soccer, one that lasted from around the 30th minute of their home loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy through the first 20 minutes of this game. They passed the ball fairly well over that period and several players seemed to have some idea as to how to make things happen on the field. Hell, there was even a moment tonight when Rashawn Dally looked like he had some ideas. That was his last one, sadly, and Cincinnati ceded the game onepainfulfuck up at a time until it ended in a crushing [rubbing my eyes] 1-7 loss for FC Cincinnati.

There is literally nothing to analyze about this game (and yet...). Anything Minnesota did right must necessarily be measured against Cincinnati’s sheer, gutted awfulness. Cincy simply didn’t have players with the quality of, to name some examples, Ike Opara, Osvaldo Alonso, or Darwin Quintero. They might make up the first and last with the return of Kendall Waston and (bigger maybe) Roland Lamah, but nothing I’ve seen makes a plausible case that FC Cincy is the equal of Minnesota – a middling Western Conference team at best, btw – even with all present and accounted for. Worse, the game swallowed up Amaya, the one young player on Cincinnati’s roster with any kind of upside. Without dipping too deeply into naked, “what-about-the-children” panic, how will a season or two of effective helplessness shape the kid’s self-belief?

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 2-1 Montreal Impact: Happiness Versus Excitement

Best goddamn scene in the entire DC Extended Universe. (I'll fight you.)

Those not watching on the TV might not have picked up on this, but FC Cincinnati came into today’s (far too early) game with a shot at a record looming. Their long scoreless streak had landed them at the foot of Top 5 (or so) for the longest stretch without a goal. When Allan Cruz scored (very) early, he reset Cincy’s timer on that. Cincinnati even scored a second time at the 62nd minute to make sure the sneaky little shit of a clock didn’t get any ideas. You gotta watch ‘em, man, time’s non-linear, etc.

In the first game of the post-Alan-Koch era, FC Cincinnati wound up beating the Montreal Impact at home by a final score of 2-1. (Is anyone else picturing Koch in some bar in Kentucky getting slowly, yet absolutely shit-faced and telling anyone who will listen that he got fucked over, or do those kinds of trips only happen in my head?) I’m not inclined to read much into that, personally, but I did approve on one thing Cincinnati tried this morning, the decision/dedication to pass the ball out of the back. It got them in a little trouble during the game’s earliest moments, but, once they broke through L’Impact’s weirdly uneven high press (more on that later), it worked pretty well for them. For what it’s worth, I read that choice as an attempt to get the team connected and into a rhythm from which they could dictate the rhythm of the game. More to the point, I think that’s something you can credit to Yoann Damet…there’s also the decision to start (the…experienced) Justin Hoyte at centerback over Nick Hagglund, and that’s another decision with a reasonable rate of return.

I also think people will get into trouble if they treat this result as finding a new leaf, never mind turning one over (is anyone doing that? paging a strawman). It’s just one game, for starters, plus there’s also a couple “paper advantages” to consider – i.e., Cincinnati returned home after playing four of its last five games at home, and they were playing a Montreal team traveling on short rest. The way the game played out stacked Cincinnati’s advantages even higher. I noted the press earlier, but it’s accurate to call it half-hearted, and it gave way to a full retreat into a defensive shell too readily. On the individual level, Montreal’s players didn’t stick into their tackles until around the 55-60 mark and the passing – Jesus Christ, the passing – Cincinnati organized the defense thick and well, but, time and again, Montreal took care of forcing their own errors, and pretty much from every position. (Just note it, I tweeted during the game that I’d be shocked if Montreal went over 80% on passing accuracy; they just cleared that low bar with a B- (81%); that said, Cincy’s 83% accuracy doesn’t give them much room for gloating).

And I haven't even mentioned that Montreal had what I would have counted as a goal called back for offside. I am looser than most on the offside rule (seriously, don't even bother arguing with me), and had Montreal scored at that point, it would have constituted an act of minor violence against the run of play at a minimum.

MLS Tourist Guide, Calendar Week 2: "Super"Draft, Signings and Sayonara

My relationship to MLS, a visual.

Another week, another round-up, in which I put my hand on MLS like I’m guarding the bucket. (Is it March 2^nd yet? For the love of GOD, can somebody please kick something?)

I’ll start with the big events, then talk about the U.S. Men’s National Team (FC Cincinnati’s fault for picking Frankie Amaya; I’ll explain), then my two favorite children (Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers), and I’ll wrap up with whatever team-specific activities interested me over the week just past.

MLS CaveatedDraft 2019

The week’s marquee event was the MLS Superdraft, and I won’t be the kind to put on airs and pretend I didn’t peek at the results through the first round, because I did. I will, however, say the same thing I say every Superdraft: it’s a veritable "who’s that" of American soccer (and it's “who will never be” for too many of those players). The few details I know come from the Mothership (MLS’s main site), which handed out for grades for each team’s draft. On that, what does an “A+” at an event most cognoscenti dismiss do for a team, really? On one level, this is ping pong at The Olympics, only the Chinese don’t always win.

All the same, it’s the first event of the annual MLS calendar and I love it, and I’ll go for the eyes of the first person to cast aspersions at it. (Who knows? Maybe the vestigial panic about the league going under never left?) From what I read, this year’s edition had moments of real beauty (even if I can’t find them), like FC Cincy’s Logan Gdula’s choking back tears as he took his first step toward his dream (wishing you many more steps, kid, and why not start early!). Getting excited about a player whose 2019 ceiling projects to starting for your MLS team’s USL team doesn’t come easy, but it’s not a terrible system. Call it a good way for your late-bloomers to reach the other side of puberty – your Davy Arnauds and Chris Wondolowskis – players who want it bad enough to figure out a way to get there. They can be better captains than players sometimes, but it takes a village, yeah?