Tampa Bay Rowdies 1-2 FC Cincinnati: Stolen Goods, aka, We Interrupt This Coronation

It's still a gift.

It takes a game where the gap between good things for FC Cincinnati extended for over 90 minutes to return one’s focus to present concerns. Those two things were, 1) the penalty kick that FC Cincy drew in the first minute and scored in the second, and 2) the team’s first coherent approach to goal around the 94th minute. And maybe the “one” in the first sentence refers only to me, but Cincinnati bumbling, terrible outing didn’t deserved one point, never mind all three. And yet through the good graces and terrible eyesight of referee Kevin Broadley*, they left Florida with a 2-1 win over the Tampa Bay Rowdies…

…maybe those heavy rains were the Soccer Gods’ tears at the injustice of it all?

Careful readers might have noticed the two-stop time-line above skipped over Cincinnati’s second goal. I excluded it on the grounds that it was some bullshit. Ref Broadley had been unusually solicitous about the health and welfare of FC Cincy players throughout the game - he fell easily for flops by Fanendo Adi, Patrick Barrett and Emanuel Ledesma - but I can’t begin to imagine how the word “foul” came to him when replacement left back Pa Konate went down late in Tampa Bay’s penalty area. Konate lost track of the ball, ran into Pape Diakate’s feet and fell down. When Ref Broadley blew the whistle for the foul, at least two Rowdies hit the turf in unbelieving despair, as if struck low in the Biblical sense?

Can you blame them? The Rowdies had Cincinnati pinned against its (fortunately) sturdy back four for nearly the entire game. You can see all the bad calls for Cincy and all Tampa Bay’s boned shots through the Match Center (looking so at Georgi Hristov, in the event they don't show him missing two he shouldn’t have), as well as (the notably itinerant) Kwadwo Poku’s lone goal for Tampa. Short as they are, the highlights can’t possibly show each of Tampa’s steady succession of forays toward Cincinnati’s goal, and how hard players like Poku and Junior Flemmings pushed to break that steady line; Flemmings, in particular, gave Cincy’s left back, Blake Smith, more trouble than any other player I’ve seen this season. When I saw Cincinnati’s midfielders, it was Michael Lahoud and Fatai Alashe shuttling a ball to nowhere terribly useful more often than not, and from inside their defensive third. Stats don’t always work in soccer (though I am coming around on this), but sometimes they translate a game fairly well - e.g., by the time Smith got sent off for Cincinnati (62nd minute), Tampa Bay had 25 shots, with 5 on goal, to Cincy’s 4 shots, with 1 on goal.

FC Cincinnati 2-0 Tampa Bay Rowdies: A Dream Date with Corben Bone

Most things improve with practice...

The entire experience of watching FC Cincinnati take down the Tampa Bay Rowdies at Nippert Stadium would have felt less like sitting through my kid’s Christmas concert had I watched it last night instead of just an hour or two after watching the World Cup final, but I digress…

After a first half filled with the soccer equivalent of kids’ attention drifting, forgotten words and flat notes, FC Cincy took charge in the second half, and almost immediately. Cincinnati’s Corben Bone made a great case for game MVP (wait for it), throughout the second, but he started early with a pin-point cross to Emanuel Ledesma’s mysteriously elusive run. He nodded home that goal in the middle of 10+ minutes of steady pressure and increasing chaos in the Rowdies' defense. While it didn’t spin totally out of control, Tampa’s defense never recovered. In more ways than one, the Tampa Bay Rowdies played the kid who just stands there for the length of the concert, silently picking his nose while he stares at his parents. That’s with respect to Junior Flemmings, who did his damnedest to make the hosts earn it.

FC Cincinnati wouldn’t get its insurance goal until very, very near the end - that came in the 84th minute, when Emery Welshman dished a smooth pass to Danni Konig one thin minute after Welshman stepped onto the field - but Bone should have bought the policy 30 minutes earlier when he made himself a sitter that he bounced off the crossbar. And, as always, anyone who’s interested can see all the above in the highlights (or see it again), as well as picking through the United Soccer League’s random-access dog-pile of statistics at the Match Center for this game. Still, the story for this game was pretty simple: Cincinnati won it 2-0, and the only real question in play was whether or not they would score. Tampa battled hard, but also clumsily - by which I mean I’m calling bullshit on their (alleged) 66.2% passing accuracy, or questioning the methodology at the very least.

After that, there’s not much to say about this game, beyond cautioning anyone with even the slightest interest of doing so against watching that first half. After writing “10 minutes of dead air” around the 13th minute, I decided against writing “see above” at 10 minute intervals; the chuckleheads in the broadcast booth backed that up around the 35th minute when they noted that neither team had managed as many as five consecutive passes. FC Cincy got rolling, thank god, while Tampa Bay…well, see the kid picking his nose above, then add periodically smacking the heads of the children around him.