FC Cincinnati 0-0 Chicago Fire: What Should Have Been (And Are You Thankful?)

The only through-line.

Well, FC Cincinnati fans, that was the kind of game this team was built to deliver, a safety-first grind that put a wall of defenders between the opposition and your goal. It was effective to a point – Cincy got the slow-death 0-0 draw, didn’t it? – and it was entertaining to a lower point. It lacked for moments, clearly – see the abbreviated list of “highlights” – but it provided little gasps of drama here (e.g., the five-minute flurry by the Chicago Fire after the 60th minute) and there (the last 10 minutes), and either team could have taken it…

…it fits the 2019 season for both teams that neither of them did. Still, if I had to hand out a trophy, it would go to FC Cincinnati, who had the lower bar of achievement to leap over. At this point, Cincy can only tie the single-season record for losses. Can I get a "what what?" or “huzzah” or something?! (What is the sound of enthusiastic Ohioans?)

There’s not a lot to unpack, fortunately, because I’ve got a maddening match to watch in just over an hour (go, Portland!), so I will keep this really brief. The Fire remains three points behind the New England Revolution, the only team in the Eastern Conference they have any chance of leaping over – and the Revs have a game in hand. With allowances for miracles, I’d call their chances doomed in every sense but the mathematical. Cincinnati, of course, has nothing better to do than to pick up as many scraps of their dignity as possible before the season ends. Their only real loss on the afternoon came when Kendall Waston picked a suspension in the next game for that bullshit yellow card on Nemanja Nikolic. Waston’s elbow grazed Nikolic’s chin at most, and Cincinnati still has avoiding the single-season record for goals allowed to play for.

To wrap up Chicago, they looked the better team throughout, but barely. Their best attacks came mostly from early crosses (so many crosses, and when the crossed to Cincy’s defense once it condensed, forget about it), and Maikel van der Werff and Matthieu Deplagne cleaned up the worst of those. Przemyslaw Frankowski and Nico Gaitan did their best to keep them going, but it was pretty damn headless, or Cincinnati’s defenders made it so. If I had to pass on anything from Chicago’s performance to pass down to the youth, I’d go with Bastian Schweinsteiger playing out of pressure; so composed, even elegant, that everything around him looked a little Keystone Cops. The biggest shocks included how far Aleksandar Katai has regressed and the fact that Chicago can’t field anyone better than Brandt Bronico. More than anything else, the Fire needed a player to put his laces through the ball. They never found him, or he never found the ball. Moving on...

FC Dallas 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Getting Dragged by History

Like that, but a painful reality and not a well-staged stunt.

Yesterday evening, FC Cincinnati took three unwelcome strides toward raising the bar for goals allowed in a single season, plus another one toward the single-season record number of losses. With six games left on their 2019 schedule, they’re just eight goals allowed shy of one record and, comfortingly(?), five losses away from the record for losses. What’s left to say after that one besides, do your best to stay out of the record books, Cincy. Fail less often or more gently?

After playing FC Dallas to a relatively even first half – they finished with six shots each, even if Dallas held a 3-1 edge on shots on goal – the game fell apart one piece at a time to ultimately end in a 3-1 win for Dallas. First came two goals three minutes apart – the first a turnover that caught Greg Garza too far upfield thinking Cincy would keep the ball, the second an early cross to a wide-open Zdenek Ondrasek outside Justin Hoyte – then came Kekuta Manneh’s moment of dumbassery and subsequent ejection. Whatever thin hope lingered from Emmanuel Ledesma’s 64th-minute penalty kick (and it was a good call and a rare coherent attack for Cincy) evaporated in the split-second when Manneh shoved his hand into Bryan Acosta’s face, off the ball, and almost certainly provoked, but, when you suck as thoroughly as Cincinnati does, a cool head is just about all you have left.

Before anyone assumes they had a chance, Cincy added just one shot/shot on goal to their first half total – even with a full allotment of players on the field for 30 minutes of the second half. There are no positives left, only the hope of avoiding record-breaking negatives. COYFCC, etc.

Is it worth mulling over what might have been when it clearly didn’t happen? Did a scenario ever exist when a healthy, more sober/tuned-in Fanendo Adi lead a basically competent FC Cincinnati attack? Could having Greg Garza for the entire season would have added a goal or two, or kept four or five goals out? What if Fatai Alashe remained healthy all season? A question hangs over every position and the only answer is, none of it happened.

Orlando City SC 5-1 FC Cincinnati: On Showing Up to Work Drunk

Just gimme till noon (or Colorado). I'll rally....

Shit got dark in a hurry in that one, didn’t it? FC Cincinnati managed to play Orlando City SC even in a first half that offended at least three of the senses (but which three?); the low quality aside, that’s 45 minutes’ worth of earning a point on the road. There’s no denying that Darren Mattocks pulled Cincinnati’s one bright moment from some as yet uncharted hole of his ass, but the teams went into the locker rooms tied a 1-1.

It took less than a third as much time for Orlando to rack up three more goals, only one of them not built at least partially from garbage, and they game arguably ended with that, the Lions’ third goal. The hits (to the groin) kept coming, sadly, and FC Cincinnati walked out Orlando City Stadium with the biggest loss in its short MLS history. I’m not sure how a team goes about exorcising such a low-rent demon – e.g., would beating Orlando by the same spread in Nippert Stadium do it, or will it take getting beat just as badly by a better team? (do witch doctors charge hourly?) – but, when FC Cincy fans swap horror stories, I expect this one will come up now and again. Or until the mists of time swallow it and eclipse its memory…

On a personal level, I need to acknowledge the few blind-spots I had coming into the game. While I would not have known that a family emergency would take Roland Lamah back to the Ivory Coast (and I join everyone in hoping that ends well), I definitely slept more than I should have on injuries to Allan Cruz, Leonardo Bertone, and Fatai Alashe. Bad as that was (especially, Bertone, a player I rate in line up), it should have been clear that someone connected to FC Cincy had done something unholy when Greg Garza pulled up gimpy at the fifth (fucking) minute; two of those things happening is bad luck, but all three is clearly a curse, and I can only hope that a rigorous investigation and eventual spiritual purging will follow, because things simply cannot go on like this without some unacceptable number of seals breaking.

So, no, the “dodgy-sausage” line-up didn’t help, but even that leads to my first question about what really happened out there – and bear with me a little as I talk this out. As happened last weekend in Cincinnati against Montreal, Orlando looked just fucking awful out there. To pick on just one guy, Sebastian Mendez looked borderline incompetent every time he touched the ball; Cristian Higuita, a player I’ve seen dominate games, coughed up the ball over and over again. With these two games as a sample, I’m left wondering to what extent Cincinnati makes teams bad. If that’s what’s happening, that’s a good thing, if only in a practical sense (aesthetically, on the other hand, it is death). Honestly, the two teams involved (e.g., Orlando and Montreal (who drew New England in Montreal yesterday) muddle the sample by way of being terrible, but if teams keep looking awful against Cincinnati, that would be something at least. Thus endeth the silver lining.