FC Cincinnati v Red Bull New York Preview: Keeping the Bulls at Bay

Their logo compels them.

It’s been respectable for FC Cincinnati lately, good even, and they’ve battled multiple Eastern giants to one point per. It looks another week of the same thing on the menu, but, fuck it, it’s 2022, so let ‘er rip and dream big. First, some relevant facts:

Red Bull New York
Record/Basics: 9-5-5, 32 points, 3-2-4 home; 6-3-1 away; 29 gf, 20 ga, +9 goal differential
Last 10: TTTLWLWLWW (1-3-1 on the road, including all three road losses of 2022; hmmm...)
Oppo: v POR, @ PHI, v CHI, @ MIA, v DC, @ CLT, v TOR, @ LAFC, v ATL, @ SKC

What We Know About Them
Taking inspiration from the corporate logo on their shirts, the Red Bulls chase every pass, ball and player like blood-doped demons. Oh, and their forwards – mostly Patrick Klimala and Tom Barlow – have been crap this season (just 7 goals and 3 assists between them). Still, they’re difficult to play against and just as hard to beat and their road form, though worse lately (see above, maybe celebrate a little), ranks near the top of the league.

When it comes to goals for/allowed, they’re on the right side of average (24.7) in both categories; going the other way, they scored nearly half their goals in just four games - 4-1 @ TOR, 3-0 @ ORL, 3-3 v CHI, 4-1 v DCU. Game-to-game, then, they don’t score a lot (that’s good!), but, with that defense(/defensive scheme), they don’t need to (awww); then again, they’d given up two goals in every road game prior to their last, a 1-0 road-win over a serially hapless Sporting Kansas City team. About that...

Notes on Recent Form
Big picture, they’ve won four of their last six – a pretty compelling feat regardless of team/venue/form. It’s that specific context that makes their offensive production borderline embarrassing: they posted shitter-level xG in three of their past five games (0.7 or less), and topped out at 1.4 at home against Toronto. That said, that 0.7 xG fails to capture the way they seemed to flick a switch at the start of the 2nd half at SKC and find great looks (four for sure, maybe five) until Aaron Long nodded home off a corner. They went down a man for the final 20+ minutes of that game (due to stoppage time) and, a couple chances aside (one of them cleared off the line), they made SKC piss ‘em them all way with a combination of rabid-hyper-puppy harrassment and shithousery (Klimala, in particular, who found his special purpose).

FC Cincinnati 1-0 Orlando City SC: Yes, They Were Dazed, but Hear Me Out...

Arguably, the true margin of victory.

Due to a series of random accidents, I sat through FC Cincinnati’s 1-0 home win over Orlando City SC a day late. Absent a total media blackout going in – which, in light of recent events and anger re, I didn’t even attempt – you can’t help but see the game through the lens of whatever information fell in your lap. It was mostly jokes about Cincinnati owning Orlando – e.g., aka Wikipedia page shenanigans – dazed musing over whether Cincy should perhaps look for a taller target for the 2022 season.

After dipping into the highlights, I clicked over the game stats, which showed an efficient game for Cincy – i.e., a high percentage of their 14 shots on goal – and a stunning 0.3 xG for Orlando. All I could think was, “how the hell was Nick Hagglund more dangerous than the entire Orlando roster?” Again, that's Nick Hagglund.

You know the “but” is coming, but I am not going to shit on this win. I can’t think of one stretch of the game that gave Cincy cause to fret, never mind worry. Orlando had a little more of the ball, but Cincinnati did twice as much with their time; movement off the ball and movement around it tended toward clean and high-percentage, player had little trouble playing out of pressure or playing forward. Cincy’s defensive posture was sharp ‘n’ solid, they played high, but not reckless, closed quickly and did an impressive job of keeping Orlando in front of them...

...but (there it is) Orlando helped a lot with all that. Patient to the point of being idle, too quick to play the ball backward, indecisive in movement and trying to do too much with too few: all that gave Cincinnati’s defense time to organize over and a consistent advantage in the numbers. I saw both of Orlando’s shots on goal and only one gave Roman Celentano a time to shine; their arguable best shot came in a play called back for offside, but Celentano got even that. And that’s how a team ends on an xG of 0.3.

That kept Orlando from winning the game...or doing much of anything, but the general malaise the defense mirrored back to its offense, with like for like clarity (not since Narcissus has a reflection been so fair and true), and that caused them to lose it. Tweets about “that Brenner goal” (or something to that effect) freckled my time-line and those got me dreaming of possibilities...instead I got a tap-in from the rough location of where the generally steady Pedro Gallase’s lap would have been. The kid needed to break his duck, obviously, but wouldn’t it have been nice to see that broken duck come from something Brenner did, as opposed to drifting half-asleep to the right place?

Toronto FC 1-2 FC Cincinnati: I Have Seen Your Product And I'd Like to Purchase It

A visual of the game plan.

When Toronto FC started catching up to FC Cincinnati’s mildly auspicious start, I’ll confess to it: yes, I started to doubt the program again. Watching them pass through Cincy one line at a time over and over made them look likelier to take charge and, as the minutes passed, put increasing pressure of Cincinnati’s…let’s call it non-ideal center back pairing of Ian Murphy and Nick Hagglund.

And then, like a script from one of those Hollywood movies, a good one like Rudy, Hagglund and Murphy combined to put FC Cincinnati up 1-0 just before the ref’s whistle called the end of the first half.

With that in mind, you start to re-think what you watched in the second half: the palpable disappointment from Toronto’s broadcast booth gets louder - “they got to play faster,” they said, “they’re not moving Cincinnati’s defenders around enough” - and, little by little (only in the opposite direction), it dawns on you that Cincy just managed the first half of a road game, and well enough that Toronto’s attack - which had averaged 2.6 goals per game in the five games prior (said average got a bump last weekend, fwiw) - rarely got close enough to apply pressure on Murphy and Hagglund. (And then you wake up the next morning to watch the highlights, because you’re not sure if you forgot something, and that confirms the above - e.g., that Toronto only fired a couple of shots from range in that first half). And then the second half started…

Toronto’s sloppiness hurt them throughout the first half; every ball that slipped behind a smart run slowed them down and allowed Cincinnati time to get that usefully spongy defense stacked right. The problem started at their back-line, particularly in the person of Carlos Salcedo…and have I mentioned that Toronto’s Chris Mavinga limped off in the middle of the first half, because that might be relevant. At any rate and early in the second half, one of Salcedo’s stray passes rolled over the touch-line in Toronto’s defensive third. It didn’t seem like a big deal, even after Cincinnati’s Alvas Powell set up for a long throw because and, you know, how often do those work? Then, lo and behold (and who’d they pay to make it happen?), Powell’s throw-in looped over the heads of two, three Toronto defenders and falls straight to the foot of Luciano Acosta. One second and two touches later, the ball bulged the side of Alex Bono’s net. 2-0 Cincinnati.

Houston Dynamo FC 1-1 FC Cincinnati: ...Better...

The road to success means figuring this out.

Overall
A game that started rife with opportunity (via fuck-ups), gave way to about 20 minutes’ worth of Houston Dynamo command and (less) control (more later), which then devolved into what I’m going to call a fan’s second half - which, here, means a fair amount of nothing with rare and late bursts of hopeful interest.

Or, shorter, FC Cincinnati choked out the Dynamo for a 1-1 road draw. They also never really looked the lesser team, which brings me to:

A Brief Note on the Dynamo
The one dominant thought: they’re sloppy. Even during their period of dominance, Houston stopped their own attacks as often as Cincinnati defenders did (…Geoff Cameron excepted; great game) by way of a combination of forced and/or mis-hit passes; if you're wondering how Cincy edged the home team in xG, that's my answer. They play to force mistakes for a reason, basically, and that means maintaining a certain pitch and ferocity of upfield tackling. Because Cincy was able to play out of that pressure fairly reliably, Houston’s game-plan fell apart. They’re spinning their wheels generally at this point, Cincinnati was just the latest obstacle they couldn’t get over. And am I alone in thinking Tyler Pasher looks like a young Bill Burr?

5 Thoughts on FC Cincy
1) They Did Their One Job
A personal or collective lack of composure was the one thing Cincinnati’s defenders couldn’t afford and, until Nick Hagglund’s weird late fuck-up, the worst mistakes made by the back four + ‘keeper Kenneth Vermeer came with the odd errant pass and Gustavo Vallecilla waltzing out of pressure only to shank his clearance out of bounds. The defenders found the midfielders fairly easily, then the midfielders found the seams to break the pressure. This allowed them to absorb Houston’s pressure until the home team all but gave up. Related thereto…

MLS Weakly, 02 27 2021: Camp Opens, Cups Get Hideous & Getting Nervous about the Math

A statement on World Cup 2022

Let’s get the downer out of the way first. Both U.S. National Teams (that is Men and Women) announced their schedules for 2021 ($ site), and probably did a bunch of other shit I don’t really care about. (Related: does U.S. Soccer run the U.S. Open Cup; asking due to that tournament’s long, continuing strides toward irrelevance: I mean…who blessed this mess?) I rarely tune in for USWNT games, but that’s from lack of context, but it’s getting damned hard to get excited about USMNT games due to the sharp stench wafting over from Qatar.

Look, I understand that FIFA is crooked as 20 broken penises, but reports of 6,500 deaths associated with the construction of stadiums in a country that, frankly, should never have been awarded a World Cup pushes them several miles past vanilla corruption and into open criminality. I can’t, in good conscience watch an event built on top of so many dead, which will make 2022 the first World Cup I’ve ever skipped and the first I've missed any part of since 1982. If I commit to that (frailty being a thing), is there any point to watching World Cup qualifying when it starts later this year?

Despite everything above, I’ll likely tune in for friendlies, Nations Cup and this summer’s Gold Cup, and that entails some falling from the moral high ground because I assume FIFA gets a cut of all of that. I acknowledge the several rationalizations needed to make that leap - the way the body (qualifying tournaments) support the head (the World Cup Finals) chief among them - but I’d still love to see the Qatar tournament fall flat on its hideous face and sincerely hope it comes to pass. I’ll keep telling myself that failure of the marquee event would give FIFA the darkest possible black eye.

FIFA will always be corrupt, near as I can tell, so the only real moral choice is to stop watching international soccer altogether. I can’t see doing that. At any rate, I’m stepping away for a shower and 2,000 Hail Mary’s, and then I’ll move on the Major League Soccer.

And…we’re back. The 2021 MLS season has finally, officially started with a handful of teams reporting to camp. I’ll do the usual thing, i.e., talk about the two teams I follow (FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers) and then wrap up with some league-wide notes. And so, to start with the team that has…

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Columbus Crew SC: A Faint Glimmering From Hell?

One of you ordered the salmon pate, right?

FC Cincinnati has shown fans a couple looks over this short, weird 2020, but joylessly organized on defense and a combination of clueless and inept in the attack has remained the go-to since they surprised a couple teams (the New York Red Bulls, mostly) back in the Orlando bubble.

At least that’s where I left off with them about a month ago after that win over (again) the Red Bulls. I’d kept tabs while I was checked out, even took a longer look at a couple results. The results didn’t look great - they’d gone 0-4-1 over that time - even if all the results mostly made sense (e.g., losing 0-4 away to New York City FC and 0-3 on the road to the Philadelphia Union, both of which still hold double-digit leads over Cincy, even in a low-points season). Frustration mounted among the fan-base, or at least the corner of it I see on twitter, often to the point where thinking ahead to the 2021 season felt better than living through 2020…and I realize, as I typed those words, what a very low bar that is. So, so pervasively, consumingly low….

When I finally decided to tune back in for last night’s game against Columbus Crew SC, in a match-up I still can’t bring myself to call “Hell Is Real” (I mean, if just one of the teams has taken up full-time residence in hell, aren’t they just hosting at that point?), someone on the twitters pointed out that FC Cincy’s supporters’ groups had packed up all the banners and tifos with an eye to sending the team a message. I don’t know whether or not the players received it, but I had one hell of a laugh when a player alluding to it in an post-game interview. (Something like, “yeah, I noticed that. I heard they were trying to tell us something.” Ach, priceless…)

In fewer words, I’d missed more games than I’d noticed (FC Cincy went to Minnesota? huh), while getting the clear, steady message that not much of meaning had changed. As such, I tuned in last night bracing for more of the same. FC Cincinnati delivered something else. A 2-1 home win, for starters, but also more coherence on the attacking side than I’d seen since…well, let’s call it a while, because that could be 2019 on the phone for all I know. (Wait! You’re not gonna believe this, but it’s a guy telling me I won a prize! All I have to do is give him my bank account and routing numbers! Yaayyyyyy!)

New York Red Bulls 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Shall We Dance Again?

RBNY tomorrow, RBNY forever!

For what it’s worth, refreshing my memory by watching the MLS-in-15 cast a brighter light on FC Cincinnati’s grinding 1-0 road win over the New York Red Bulls. If nothing else, it made the whole thing come off as less of a grind - at least on Cincy’s end of things. Oh, and the goal that won it was an absolute delight: Haris Medunjanin floated an olimpico over Red Bulls’ ‘keeper David Jensen’s head, who was dead to rights even before he bumbled backward a defender who’s name doesn’t really matter. Better still, seeing all those Cincy players come up to Medunjanin during the after-game handshakes with dazed and happy looks on their faces might count as my personal highlight of their 2020 season so far. If there were other, better ones, blame it on recency bias.

My strongest overall reaction to the game is pretty simple: wow, do the Red Bulls suck. I accept that’s a strange thing to say, what with them two whole points over FC Cincy in the Eastern Conference standings, but my eyes aren’t lying to me either. New York managed just two shots on goal last Saturday, one of them a pathetic slow-roller that Cincy ‘keeper saw coming from a mile away and had to wait on its arrival. They flailed a couple shots from range - Brian White probably had the best one of those at just half a dozen feet over the crossbar - but, overall, the Red Bulls strained for openings and didn’t look like they’d ever score.

That adds up a little better when you check the standings (already one game stale) and see that New York has scored just one more goal than Cincinnati during the 2020 season - and, so long as you accept that Cincy’s attack sucks (it does, but…) certain obvious things follow from. Every time I’ve watched the Red Bulls over the past couple seasons, I see a team that doesn’t do anything particularly well. And that’s a hell of a fall off for a team that won the Supporters’ Shield three times during the 2010s. While I’m still able to place most of the players in their starting XI, New York’s overall vibe is an anonymous collection of guys role-playing their assigned positions. Again, Cincinnati hasn’t been good, but New York hasn’t been much better: just 1-4-1 over their last six games.

Just one more thing about the Red Bulls: FC Cincy seems to have their number. They hold the edge in the series between the teams for 2020, two wins to New York’s one and, now, a 5-3 advantage in goals scored. A related fun(?) fact: Cincinnati has scored just three goals against teams that aren’t the Red Bulls this fucked-up season for a frankly wretched 0.33 goals for average against all other comers (well, four goals if you add the one they bagged against the Portland Timbers in the MLS Is Back tournament). I mean…what do you do with this information except ask for more games against New York?

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.

MLS Off-Season Weekly: Looming, Gaping Holes, A Smart Move (with Caveats), and, Crap, The CBA!

"What do we want? More charter flights! When do we want them? More often!"

If you thought a holiday weekend would slow down the news in the Extended Major League Soccer Universe, you have no goddamn idea how media works. The news is thick and dank, so let’s dig in – starting with one of the two teams I follow (followed by the other one, then a bunch of league-wide news/perspective/angry-uncle ramblings):

Portland Timbers: Stumbling Toward the Next Plan A
Absent any updates on the Valeri Situation, my attention wandered to other parts of the Timbers’ roster – and it turns out I wasn’t alone in that:

“The truth is Chara's probably not high-scoring enough to suit Portland's needs, but it's hard to figure what their budget will be after what happened with Brian Fernandez. There are also rumors that they're leaning in the direction of getting another center forward anyway, and pushing Jeremy Ebobisse out to the wing once again.”

Personally, I’ve had Chara on my mind lately, but in a wholly different way – i.e., less about his alleged limitations (which Timbers fans have internalized by now) than his clear and absolute gifts, and what that means both in terms of managing his minutes over the next season or two and to the impending post-Chara future. So, no, he doesn’t score often (when he does, he times it for maximal effect - like his tackles), but I’ve never seen a player with his capacity for covering ground and knack for ferreting the ball off players’ feet; I’m not sure he can be replaced like-for-like (the same goes for Valeri, with some twists, as I’ll get into below). And that’s why I brought up managing minutes in 2020 and, like, one year beyond, just as much as I pointed toward the post-Chara future. Assuming he comes back, Cristhian Paredes doesn’t play the same game as Chara, or at least not to the same effect, and neither does anyone who has partnered with him so far (and if Paredes doesn’t come back, the same will apply to whomever replaces him). As such, when Chara’s not out there – whether resting for a game or two, or in the Chara-less future - the players around the area Chara vacates will need to adjust in terms of positioning, and adjust expectations as to how and how much of the ground behind or in front of them (as applicable) gets covered. That doesn’t have to be bad, but it will be, without question, different. Next question – and I ask out non-rhetorically (because I don’t know the answer) - how much does it throw players to make those kinds of shifts from one game to the next. Moreover, is what I’m describing even a meaningful issue? I think it is, obviously, but what do I know? Anyway, just fretting about the inevitable…

Philadelphia Union 1-3 Portland Timbers: Situation...Just Normal

We got a good thing going...

I just watched the condensed version of the Portland Timbers depressing (for some) 3-1 win over the Philadelphia Union (yeah, it’s those guys I’m talking about). I wanted to tour the details one more time, even as I don’t think anyone can bend, shape and squeeze them into any kind of revelatory permanence. By that I mean, this one’s all about the narrative, because the details don’t look to have changed all that much.

To quickly review those details, however, Darlington Nagbe scored, and that’s always nice; Fanendo Adi scored again (still nice, but less surprising), to become the Portland Timbers all-time leading scorer (just give him the damn ball, guys); after that, Diego Valeri did something lethally important, Jake Gleeson made (I think) a couple confident saves, and that’s good (even if I can only recall the one), I had a blast watching Adi battle Oguchi Onyewu, was it just me or did David Guzman finally look a little sloppy out there (and, holy shit, wouldn’t that be a big deal?), Philadelphia has some good pieces, sure, but they’re not fitting into the same puzzle yet, and, when it gets right down to it, isn’t that the difference between Portland and Philly right now? That sense of, to pick up another metaphor, of the dancers knowing their steps?

That’s where it ends: a better team beat one that’s still struggling (pulling for ya, Philly; I’m totally on part of your side), but isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? For all its silver linings, both old and new, yesterday….shit, Saturday’s (two days out, now) win doesn’t mean anything besides three arguably unexpected points for the Timbers. With the emphasis on “arguably,” because Philly has been grasping after nothing all season long. I’ll get to that in exactly two paragraphs, but, first, I’ve got to wrap up this larger thought on the Timbers.