FC Cincinnati 0-0 DC United: There Are No Highlights...

Three inches is generous, kind even.

Well, wasn’t that as pleasant as a team-building “event” at the office? It took an absolutely mind-boggling amount of men doing things in uniforms for nothing to happen. Worse, the few things that did happen - e.g., a timely, deserved red card to DC United’s Moses Nyeman, aka, the same guy who scored the sharpest, yet offside, goal all day - didn’t change a damn thing.

If you’ve ever asked the question, what would happen if FC Cincinnati had a man-advantage at home with 38 minutes to go, you got your answer tonight. Nothing, a fucking pair of useless eggs, a 0-0 home draw against half a DC United team. Lorde, gimme patience. I guessed the right final score - without knowing the many, many players DC had missing (e.g., Paul Arriola, Brendan Hines-Ike, Russell Canouse, etc.) - but that only makes it all worse (see Thought No. 1). I know what Cincinnati is/can and cannot do, and I only had a loose sense of DC as a high energy, low-accuracy team: so long as Cincinnati matched their energy, it’d be on the hosts to score. I see the xG, and, based on what I watched, that’s generous…and I don’t think I’d feel any differently had Cincinnati finally scored.

If Cincinnati had better chances than Joe Gyau’s (of whom and others, see Thought No. 2) header off Ronald Matarrita’s cross and that Nick Hagglund header early, quality yet hopeful header, they don’t register (hold that thought; forgot this one); related, Brandon Vasquez’s late (equally hopeful) lunge represented a better percentage opportunity, but it was no less desperate and unlucky. Ye gods, where to begin when you don’t even want to start?

Cincinnati wrestled both DC and themselves for chances and came up empty. Going the other way, the only chances they allowed DC came via offside plays and Julian Gressel trying to make the most of free-kicks on the cheap and direct. But, again, this was just half a DC United team, and I’d call Gressel and Kevin Paredes (who I’d kill to have on any roster I watched) the two best, most effective and interesting players on the field tonight. DC made the better chances, even if they had to push against legality to make them happen.

That’s my summary of the game and, no, that’s not good.

Nashville SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: Problems Versus Solutions

Because no one wants to look at piles of shit.

Is there anything more to say than FC Cincinnati got beat comprehensively by a better team? Even with some surprises in the numbers - e.g., Cincinnati nearly tied Nashville SC for total shots (…when?) - but the real-time action and the balance of the numbers (0.3 xG for Cincy) all bear out the final verdict: an easy-breezy 3-0 win for Nashville.

The game started (very) poorly, and with a soft goal, and the only “but for” Cincinnati fans can point to is that time Brenner spun a Nashville defender near the center stripe and ran in alone on Joe Willis…only to see Taylor Washington take it off his toes at the decisive moment. Cincy was just one goal down at that point, so who knows what might have been? Back in the real-world, and outside that, I counted one good attacking move for Cincinnati - Brenner combining with Edgar Castillo and Luciano Acosta somewhere around the 50th minute - but that was the most they troubled Nashville’s defense, aka, certainly more than Joe Gyau’s spazzing raid up the middle or Haris Medunjanin’s free-kick from deep-left in Nashville’s defensive third.

The craziest numbers I see are possession/number of passes, the only area where one can argue Cincinnati ran up the numbers. Literally nothing came of that because Cincinnati struggled mightily to play through what I’d call “in-fill” by Nashville, a spin on the concept of pressing. The basics of the tactic (and it’s something I see against the Portland Timbers a fair amount) seek to clog the passing lanes inside your opponent’s half; it gets pressure to the ball, but without chasing it all over, and it mostly works by getting in the way. For all…wow, 653 passes made (again….when?), Cincinnati couldn’t get much of anywhere, at least not up the field. Nashville reined in the line sometime in the 2nd half, but that only translated to Cincinnati dicking around with the ball in a different part of the field.

To wrap up Nashville, I’ll start by thanking C. J. Sapong for backing up my prediction that he’d factor into the result - though I can’t say I saw a two goal, three assist game when I typed that into twitter….golly, last Wednesday. All in all, this was a pretty straightforward case of a team having a couple more piles of its shit together going against one with their piles a little more scattered and disconnected; Nashville hasn’t lost in seven games for a reason and they’re playing even against some of the best in the Eastern Conference (e.g., a 1-0 home win over the Philadelphia Union and a goal-less road draw at Columbus Crew SC). FC Cincinnati, meanwhile, is not.

Club de Foot Montreal 5-4 FC Cincinnati: ................You Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me

Another weakness: terrible box office numbers...

When I saw who Club de Foot Montreal had avaiable in defense, I had a sense they’d struggle at the back. When I saw who FC Cincinnati started in defense, the stench of trouble wafted into my nostrils.

Even with all those tells, I don’t believe a single human being who thinks and exists could have called the final 5-4(!) win for Montreal. “Hows” gave way to “whys” gave way to “what the fucks”: there’s almost no point in asking what went wrong when it’s that close to everything. Montreal gave up goals through sleepwalking nonchalance - if with an assist from Cincy’s press - but Cincinnati gave out both shots and goals like candy. For as many times as one could argue Cincinnati got robbed on this or that play - and I count three - Montreal found a shot and missed it by inches as many times. About those three times:

1) yes, play should have been stopped on Montreal’s first goal because the ref impeded Joe Gyau;

2) Montreal’s dude (think it was Victor Wanyama) fell into Yuya Kubo and that could have easily been called; and

3) it probably would have helped Kenneth Vermeer’s case that Mason Toye took a dive had he not got a cut on his forehead that clearly signaled some form of contact…and he came out too hot.

I’ll get to five thoughts on FC Cincinnati - and I’m gonna squeeze all the happiness I can out of them - but to start with Montreal.

They play soccer the same way one wears an ill-fitting sweater in general, but Montreal surprised me yesterday. The midfield spine (Wanyama and Emanuel Maciel) labored more than I thought it would against Cincy’s, but the defense…I mean, sure, Cincinnati pressed but their play was casual to the point of outright nudity back there - e.g, this should never happen anywhere outside pee-wee soccer. Going the other way, Montreal clearly have some decent pieces - new kid Joaquin Torres looks like one to watch (or Cincy’s bumbles made him so) - but, after watching them for a second full 90 minutes in 2021, my main question is....that [gestures toward Montreal] fourth in the Eastern Conference again? I get that I’m seeing them at their worst - maybe orange and blue hits them the same way the color yellow hits the Green Lantern? - but they’ve looked just as ragged every time I’ve taken 15 minutes to watch them. I’m not expecting them to stay fourth, basically.

Orlando City SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: Training Wheels Forever

Sometimes it takes a while...

I watched as much of FC Cincinnati’s latest loss as felt worthwhile - a little more than I should have, honestly, and, yes, “latest loss” is the phrasing I’m going with. Orlando City SC only beat them 3-0 in the end, a final score that felt like mercy after Cincy went down by two goals inside the first 20 minutes.

I’m not going to spend much time to picking through the entrails of this one, and on the grounds that, 1) the beast is well-dead and there’s not much mystery as to the cause of death, and 2) I don’t think it has much to tell Cincinnati fans about the future that they don’t already know. I do, however, have one thought to impart to a justifiable restless fan-base: what about this match up would make you expect anything but the result that happened? To put that another way, why would you expect a team that has most of its shit together - that’s Orlando - give away anything at home to a team that has yet to figure out even some of its shit?

Look, Orlando is a well-coached team with good players - e.g., Nani (who had time to thoroughly embarrass Yuya Kubo when scoring Orlando’s second goal), Mauricio Pereyra, Chris Mueller, Junior Urso, Pedro Gallese, Ruan, and, mind, that list is incomplete - that is both strong at home (heard some stat about one loss at home in their last 11 from the broadcast booth) and damned hard to score against (one goal allowed in three games this season and, again, I heard something about less than 1.0 goals per game allowed during the Oscar Pareja era). There’s nothing wrong with feeling (constant, borderline existential) disappointment with a result, or even rage, but there is something very unhealthy about, to torture an example, expecting to get a unicorn pony for Christmas when absolutely nothing in your prior experience points to ever getting one. Basically, keep a little perspective as you watch Cincinnati struggle out of the quicksand.

Given all the above, yeah, the game probably was over by the 35th second, when a clumsy back-pass by Nick Hagglund teed up the game-winner for Orlando’s Tesho Akindele. Cincinnati tried to settle down after and recover, naturally, but anyone who saw this game saw what I saw - a lot of tentative passes forward chased backwards by a middling Orlando press, a lot of kicking the ball around Cincinnati’s back-line, a lot of errant passes upfield, a number of desperate dribbles, and far too many instances of Orlando catching a Cincinnati player in possession (Kubo, often as not) and rushing a counter toward Pzremyslaw Tyton’s goal…and why the hell doesn’t MLSSoccer.com show saves as a stat anymore?

FC Cincinnati 1-2 DC United: Fall Down, Go Boom

I laugh every time. And I have children.

There is almost nothing to say about FC Cincinnati that doesn’t acknowledge a damning reality about the team - i.e., that they’re more or less doomd the second they go behind a goal. After that, every other thing you want to state or argue about them is academic.

As such, no, it didn’t help when their young stand-in goalkeeper, Bobby Edwards, screwed all the way up on a thoroughly innocuous DC United set-piece by misreading the flight of the ball and then “recovering” by trying too damn hard to prevent a corner kick. He effectively corralled the ball for DC’s Donovan Pines, instead, who collected the ball and poked it home. To get a real-time sense of how unexpected all that was, track Andrew Gutman’s movement and attention during that play. He clearly assumed it was over after glancing at Edwards’ attempt to keep in the ball; little did he know, Edwards would fall down and Cincinnati’s goal would go “boom.”

Now one year, plus one fucked-up year into their existence - what’s that, like a year and five-fourths or some shit? - FC Cincinnati still has no reliable approach to goal, neither a functioning attacking mechanism (e.g., get behind and play crosses) nor any one player or combination of attacking players to play through to get things moving. It’s just guys running around hoping the next pass finds an open player with a good sight of goal - preferably a better one than Joe Gyau’s shot through a thicket of players at or around the 25th minute.

More to the point, the earlier to opposition goes up, the more time FC Cincy spends chasing the game and/or opening themselves up on the counter. This played out in almost insulting effect in Cincinnati’s 1-2 home loss yesterday. As the good lord tormented Job, so the soccer fates gleefully gifted the theretofore struggling Brandon Vazquez with the gift of a bobble by DC’s stand-in ‘keeper, the experienced Chris Seitz. That tied the game on paper, but another, more meaningful dynamic had taken hold on the field: DC kept breaking through in midfield and pushing even-numbered counters against Cincinnati’s back-pedaling defense. On one occasion before Cincy equalized, a cross to the far side found a wide-open (I think) Erik Sorga, who skied his shot over a (basically) open net with a first-time strike.

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!”