MLS Off-Season Weeky (02.09.2020): Important Players & Unimportant Results

Also warms the heart. My Sunday is planned.

As I look at the results rolling in during this preseason, I’m reminded of the entirely goddamn awful names some American soccer teams have chosen of their own free will: “The Tampa Bay Rowdies”? “San Diego” (fucking) “Loyal”? “Austin Bold”? (seriously, Austin? I expect so much more of you…). Fire your marketing teams…

Back to the grind, the big news from this past week of preseason came with a guarantee that a regular season will follow: Major League Soccer and the MLS Players’ Association agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement…was it Thursday? (And does that matter?) Given how little controversy surrounds it, I don’t have much to say about the particulars of who got what outta the deal (but, for those who want the details). I figured the CBA would get done the day the league and the MLSPA extended negotiations to February 7th, so I guess the most surprising thing about the whole thing in my mind is how much regular people care about how much professional soccer players get paid. Personally, all I need to know is, 1) that the players aren’t getting screwed over, and 2) we've got five seasons before we have to sweat this shit again (that said, the thing with the players getting a cut of a new TV deal is pretty nifty).

So, that’s that. The rest of this post will do the usual: check in with both the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, followed by a whip-around of results from the past week. Before continuing, I have an editorial note: personal obligations will keep me from posting a weekly next weekend; in the best of all possible world, however, I’ll have preseason games to write about – two for FC Cincinnati (Wednesday and Sunday) and one for Portland (Sunday), so…can I haz streams, plz jesus? I don't think I've got another week of pretending to know anything about (e.g.,) Pablo Piatti, Mattheus Rossetto, or Jeizon Ramirez, because I don’t. We’ll see how everyone fits in or fails to as the results pile up…

Moving on, I wanted to fold one of those peak Off-Season Hot-Take Specials that MLSSoccer.com churns out in between seasons into my discussions of Cincinnati and Portland. In his latest column, Matt Doyle answered the question of which player is most important to each team in MLS. I’ll start both sections by taking issue with his answers (or not), while also checking in on what happened with both teams over the past week.

FC Cincinnati 3-0 Indy Eleven: Fat and Happy in the Lap of Luxury

Loving cradling our collective asses...is it good for you?

FC Cincinnati rotated its squad - more than a little, too - and they still comfortably outplayed visiting Indy Eleven, 3-1. Hey…I lead with the score. (And here’s The Match Center for all the numbers and videos you’re going to get on this game.)

The machinery didn’t run without friction, some portions of it more manifest than others - e.g., Indy made Cincy ‘keeper Evan Newton stretch for a couple shots, and, when Pa Konate came off the field at 53’, nothing about that substitution made me scratch my head - but it never felt like Indy’s game to win. And that makes the numbers from the match curious reading - especially the figures for attack and distribution. A couple testaments to the gap between the game I thought I saw and those numbers lurk on my twitter feed (@JeffBull5), but, who is to say what is real in paranoid times? Who’s to say that some miscreant statistician within the secret sanctums of the USL FO didn’t replace the actual numbers from this game in an attempt to hide FC Cincinnati’s true greatness? No, I can’t prove it, but you can’t not prove it either. (CITIZENS: Keep your eye on the Orange and Blue’s record, watch for skullduggery! Eternal vigilance!!)

(Speaking of conspiracies, did that Cincinnati’s Matt Bahner get away with a goal-line handball early in the second half? And what to make of the Zapruder-esque quality on those replays? Wait...can someone make a basement disappear with the push of a button?)

Whatever the numbers say, Cincy created better openings, some of them boulevard-wide - e.g., when the wonderful work down Indy’s right by Michael Lahoud and Jimmy McLaughlin so mesmerized the defense that they gave Fanendo Adi a public-park’s worth of free acreage. McLaughlin would strike again later, and with a ball over the top to a surging Danni Konig that I didn’t credit enough when I watched it live. Then again, for all the good work by McLaughlin and Konig, the latter couldn’t have finished that chance without a blundering assist by Indy’s ‘keeper, Owain Fon Williams, and two of his defenders. Indy’s defense would cough up yet another mistake when Carlyle Mitchell pinged a (good) Russell Cicerone cross into his own team’s side netting…hell, maybe there is no need for a conspiracy to explain this result.

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.

Atlanta United 2 1-5 FC Cincinnati: The Etiquette of Mercy

Only picture Stalin.

To continue from the title, this became a real issue when FC Cincinnati took a 4-0 lead over Atlanta United Muppet Babies. Atlanta United 2. No disrespect. It just popped into my head.

Anyway, Cincinnati took a 4-0 lead over The Stripes (see, FC Cincy? a quick, catchy nickname) at the 55th minute and, that crystalized the scenario: Atlanta 2, The Prophecy (last one). OK, for real.

When Cincinnati took a 4-0 lead over Atlanta 2, two realities were clear: Atlanta 2 would never stop making just egregious mistakes in defense - the stuff of nightmares - and, if Cincinnati kept playing with the same intensity, the game would end with a score high enough to break wills, maybe even cause some of those young scamps to consider going back to school for a highly-fungible philosophy degree. Cincinnati had already killed the game, basically, but with 35 minutes left on the clock. And all those people watching.

So, what to do? How do you sell that to the fans? Since they can’t throw in the towel to end a game (think of the power of that as a motivational tool for a coach!), can professional soccer teams land on a kind of soccer/pro-wrestling hybrid that lets the right team walk out with the win, while still keeping the fans entertained?

A comeback is out of the question, obviously, and what team can’t benefit from working another muscle out there - say, playing “live-fire keep-away” (aka, keeping possession in a competitive game) to kill a game without the game even knowing it (ninja) - something FC Cincy started doing around the 76th minute (and, full disclosure, I started fast-forwarding the archived feed from that point forward). This game could only end with a scenario that played out once in my own backyard, only with Cincinnati as the cat, and Atlanta 2 as the bird she was too stupid to kill. (That brings me back to the mascot issue: FC Cincy didn’t think of biting the whole “Bearcat” thing? Just for another nickname?) So, no universe existed in which this game is competitive and, how does a team play 35 minutes of back-foot soccer without bleeding even a couple unmerited goal-differential-eating goals?

Short answer: the Orange and Blue (see? too long) managed the game by absorbing pressure when they had to and, whenever Atlanta 2 started pressing against the unspoken rules of live-fire keep-away, Cincinnati would send players forward. And, after a period when that détente seemed to get a little fuzzy for Atlanta 2, Cincinnati turned the…post-fatal screw and raised the score to its final 5-1 score line (for highlights, box scores, and more, see the match center!).

Look, the game was comically unclose. Atlanta 2 held possession with, honestly, remarkable poise and, sometimes, elegance for a team that, by the looks of them, are two years into legal drinking on average (per the Match Center, which has all the stats and video I can offer). They have some sincerely talented players out there: Jon Gallagher, Jack Metcalf, George Bello, and, personal favorite, Laurent Kissiedou. After a lot of thought - and he’s hard to place - I wound up equating him to Eddie Gaven. Regardless, Kissiedou had the entire, “make-shit-happen” minute somewhere in the early 60s, and that was genuinely impressive, even if it only threatened to reverse the tides. Also, Devon Sandoval could have dropped the ball to Kissiedou, instead of spinning and taking that shot around the 32nd minute – though, in Sandoval’s defense, that turn nearly came off (and credit to Spencer Richey for stuffing it). They’re not a terrible team, Atlanta United 2…and Shawn Nicklaw fired an absolute cruise missile to give them their lone goal.

But, Jesus Christ, if they don’t give more assists to the opposition than all the opposition’s midfielders combined? Like a change machine you only need to whistle at, I tell you…