FC Cincinnati 2-1 Houston Dynamo FC: Notes on the First Engagement

Bygone era, my friend.

First, where the hell was the beer boot? You can’t get that level of (admittedly, highly-specific) juice on the internet and then fail to feature it? Was it Cincy’s fault for failing to sell them like the hot cakes they are? Was it AppleTV for missing an opportunity to find one? (That said, the camera team kept flashing to a kid eating dipping dots as if he'd discovered love for the first time...in a Disney channel kind of way...wait.)

I’ll start with the good news: FC Cincinnati won its home opener against Houston Dynamo FC by a 2-1 scoreline. Was that line fat enough? Not for my liking, but not every trip to the park can be a stroll, at least not this early in the season.

A couple Cincinnati players looked regular-season-ready – going with Roman Celentano and Obinna Nwobodo as the big, bright stand-outs (and what a time for the latter to break his duck?) – and, outside them (and a couple others), the overall performance rated somewhere between respectable, decent, and good. I’ll flag a couple soft spots later, but I really like two players as human stand-ins for the kind of night Cincinnati had.

Alvaro Barreal is the big one for me – and you can cut his effigy any number of ways. For instance, you can say (and/or theorize) that after seeing its more famous names get blocked out of the game, Cincy made adjustments to open a wide lane for Barreal on the left. To his credit, Barreal took swashbuckling advantage of that space – here, I’m thinking of the pass he picked up in the first half that sent what was left of Houston’s defense into a fire-drill – and, despite being positioned high left to the point Cincy defaulted to a back four (as opposed to the back five shown in Pravda’s line-up) for large stretches, the man made a man-of-the-match’s share worth of defensive interventions...

...and yet, that one time, when Nelson Quinones torched him so bad up Houston’s left that Barreal took a yellow, if just to save his dignity? If that broad concept wasn’t Cincinnati’s performance in a nutshell, I ask you what was?

And do I see Yerson Mosquera standing as another candidate? I have what I feel like accurate recollections of him single-handedly cutting off Houston’s attacking lanes with turf-eating recovery runs on three separate occasions. He didn’t give up much in the air, not that I saw anyway, and most of his actions fell somewhere between “no comment” and “oh, that’s good...”

FC Cincinnati 2022 Season Review/Preview: Competence's Unexpected Dilemmas

The view from 2019-2021. Fucker looks massive.

I decided to park on a review of FC Cincinnati’s 2022 season for a variety of reasons – the choice to check out in mid-July among them (it’s possible my middle name, “Anders,” is Norwegian for “erratic”) – but not really knowing how to read their season-ending 0-1 loss to the now-MLS-Cup-bound Philadelphia Union played its part as well. In so many words, I understood Cincy had defied virtually every observer’s expectations, but couldn’t really place them in a league-wide context.

Seeing both Philadelphia and Los Angeles FC kick great lumps out of the opposition in their respective semifinals – though, just to note it, LAFC played a more one-way game – went some distance to filling in that blank. FC Cincinnati didn’t just have their best-ever season, they had a very good one. To lift a line out of Matt Doyle’s year-end review:

“’Everything from June 18 to Decision Day is the highlight’ also has an argument, as over that 20-game stretch, Cincy lost just twice. That’s the best of anybody in MLS.”

The bitter little boy who lives inside my head compels me to point out that 10 of those games ended as draws, a point Doyle concedes sotto voce when he notes that “Cincy dropped more points from leading positions this year than anyone but the Revs” (and is it just me or did five teams drop the most points from leading positions? I’ve read that stat somewhere for at least three teams). That bitter little boy missed a deeper truth that I thought I’d written at some point this season, but, because I can’t find it, here it is again: those ten draws meant that Cincinnati went toe-to-toe against all kinds of teams, six of them future playoff teams (including New York City FC), and gave away very little. Call that a long of saying that all those dropped points didn’t matter after Decision Day: what mattered was that Cincy showed they stood just as high as (literally) half the teams in Major League Soccer. And, when you’ve got that, getting into the playoffs amounts to having a chance in every game going forward. As Red Bull New York learned in the hardest of ways.

All that’s better than laudable. It’s beautiful, especially given the dark slapstick that came before. From there, the question becomes how to get better in 2023.

Philadelphia Union v FC Cincinnati Preview: Go Forward, Move Ahead, etc.

Scoring against Philly, a visual.

As anyone who finds this preview already knows, FC Cincinnati breaks back into the regular season swing with a trip to Chester,PA/the Philadelphia Union. A tall order, certainly, but the odds of Cincy pinching a point have improved in recent weeks. Let’s start with some facts:

Philadelphia Union
Record/Basics: 6-1-7, 3-0-4 home; 19 gf, 10 ga, +9 goal differential
Last 10: WWWLTTTTWT (4-1-5; 2-0-3 home)
Oppo: @ NYC, v CLT, v CLB, @ TOR, v MTL, @ LAFC, v RBNY, v MIA, @ POR, @ NE

What We Know About Them
They don’t lose, especially at home, but they also stopped beating everyone but the (fucking) Portland Timbers (in fucking Portland) after Match Day 7. Because the Union played two tricky games...and Portland on the road, picking out their latest trends gets tricky. That said, I think they possess when they have to (e.g., at home), but generally don’t give a shit about possession “the concept” and exploit in-game dynamics. Philly has fallen off the pace on goals scored of late, even if the opposition explains it away - those last five are tougher than leather - but they are also flaming-rings-of-hell-hard to score against. People have kicked them for the bender of ties they’re on, but, again, see the opposition and make your own call on what to call that share of the points. Related, and unless I miss my guess, your average Philly fan sees home against FC Cincinnati as a must-win.

Notes on Recent Form
First and foremost, not giving up the Snuggles-soft goals the way the Timbers did will carry Cincy halfway to one point. In the results worth noting, they showed well at LAFC despite giving up two soft goals and, had they not got in their own hustling way, they would have taken all three points at home against the Red Bulls; one more soft goal, two more points wafted into the night air like a silent, unclaimed fart. The Union coughed up an eye-catching number of good looks to New England, but it also looked like it didn’t take more than showing a little interest for the Union to get back into the game. Finally, I was too bored to look into the goal-less home-draw at Miami, but the headline doesn’t scream “league elite,” now does it?

FC Cincinnati 2-3 New England Revolution: High from the Highest Tree-EEEE!

A little nod for all you Roger Miller fans.

“…put all that together, and it seems like the main thing Cincinnati will need to do on Saturday is keep up.”

So close, and yet so far. Hurts a little, honestly, but the sting of FC Cincinnati’s 2-3 home loss to the New England Revolution beats the holy hell out of the unholy hell of what past seasons have felt like - e.g., feeling one blow after another from a fetal position. I hate to do this, but, this one sentence from the (admittedly choppy) game thread on this game (I was cooking over the first 50 minutes), feels relevant to the discussion:

“Does #FCCincy go for broke at this point? Can they go for broke? And isn’t it nice to say that?”

To tie those two thoughts together, Cincy largely did keep up and with a visibly talented (yet still wobbly) New England team. Sure, the Revs won, but I’d put money on Tommy McNamara missing that shot nine times out of ten and not getting it at all more often still. Cincinnati’s defense dropped too deep, no question, and maybe they had run their legs out, but the Revs game-winner - all three of their goals, really - weren’t unlike rolling three straight, clean sevens in craps (and the lazy shits at MLS HQ didn't do pull-out highlights for this one, so the full four-minute reel is the only point of reference). Only they made each goal happen and credit to them. As loud as their Achilles heel screams (de-fense, de-fense), New England still moves the ball as well as any team in the league, Wilfrid Kaptoum and McNamara did well enough that they didn’t miss Matt Polster, Brandon Bye played a ridiculously effective game, etc. etc. etc.

But push a fair chunk of the credit to FC Cincy in this game for coming back into it twice - and they climbed the psychological equivalent of a mountain to do it. The broadcast booth called Sebastian Lletget’s opening goal against the run of play, but I’d call that valuing possession over effective use of it; New England had the better of the game to that point and they pulled Cincy like well-simmered pork on the goal. Good as Lletget’s movement was on that, Brandon Vazquez matched it on Cincy’s first equalizer, drifting back-post then, crucially, taking a step back allowed the other players to drift across his run and gave him a wee run-up to the ball to boot.

Chicago Fire FC 1-2 FC Cincinnati: We Come from the Windy City, Bearing Gifts

Chicago, shortly after equalizing.

This post won’t take long and it turns on a single question:

If someone just gives you something, did you really earn it?

Both FC Cincinnati goals came from mistakes by Chicago Fire FC - in a spin on something familiar to the sport, one of them indirect, the other direct as it gets - and those gave them their margin of victory. You can argue - as I would - that, when it came to shots fired, Cincy made up in quality what Chicago offered in quantity. And that concept carries over into the game as a whole - e.g., Cincinnati didn’t move the ball nearly as much, but did it more effectively than the home team.

Still, the timing of the second, indirect gift in Cincinnati’s 2-1 road win over Chicago bears noting. After 65-plus of running and kicking like it was the point of the game, the Fire started to apply real pressure toward the end of the game. And, almost immediately after I mocked their slurry of half-effectual corner kicks on my in-game twitter thread, Chicago tied the game at 1-1 with a glancing headed goal by Jhon Duran on a run to the near-post. For all that amounted to trying the same thing over and over until it works, it finally paid off (or just did) and the broadcast booth started talking about how much a comeback win could help get Chicago’s season back on track.

And then every neutral’s favorite goalkeeper, Gabriel Slonina, mishandled a back-pass and cut off that conversation mid-sentence. Credit to Cincy’s Luciano Acosta for making it count - and that’s after giving real, nerve-addling indications that he wouldn’t (see the "indirect" mistake above) - but after a long, blindfolded walk to nowhere, Chicago had at long last ripped off the blindfold and started walking in a good and useful direction. And then the boy-‘keeper who has the world raving commits the inevitable rookie error. And Cincy wins, Cincy wins.

Once you put all the above together, I don’t know how to get a read out of this game beyond, yep, good enough. A couple Cincinnati players stood out - e.g., Nick Hagglund won an eye-catching number of aerial duels at the heart of the defense and you love to see Junior Moreno clogging the channels inside the 18, as he did more than once - and the Orange and Blue made the result stand up collectively and with a lot of attacking options off the table (with the baseline value of those options - e.g., Brenner, Isaac Atanga, Calvin Harris - left an open question). In the broadest of terms, Cincinnati did its job as a team and cashed the checks Chicago left unsigned in their mailbox.

FC Cincinnati 2-0 Toronto FC: Caveats on the Edge of Expectation

You can't talk around some things.

I can no other but start with the caveats…don’t worry, I’m not gonna bitch about how FC Cincinnati should have won this by more than two goals…

…but they should have…

…I mean, just the two chances for Brenner alone. And, yeah, I have to break a rule I only laid down last weekend, because we have to talk about Brenner. Just not quite yet. Because caveats.

Toronto rolled into town down starting center backs (Chris Mavinga and Carlos Salcedo, even if the latter didn’t cover himself in glory last Saturday), and without club mascot, Jonathan Osorio. Just five of the players who started Toronto’s eye-catching, and yet possibly deceiving loss to New York City FC way back on April 24 started tonight. You could say they had their stars - e.g., Jesus Jimenez, Alejandro Pozuelo and Michael Bradley - but both experience and name recognition falls off a cliff from there.

And then the bottom fell of what already started as non-ideal for Toronto. First, Brandon Vazquez broke their (why?) high line and sliced a cross from right to left for Calvin Harris to slot home. Like, at most, two minutes later, Osorio’s stand-in, Ralph Priso-Mbongue, lunged at Obinna Nwodobo’s leg, cleats about knee level, and off he goes. So, that’s Toronto down a man and a goal inside the first five minutes. Toronto battled on gamely from that, even punched close to level on a couple stats (but the xG speaks volumes), but I’m guessing they asked themselves why bother at that point.

All that’s to say, last night’s game ended 2-0 to Cincy on the scoreboard, but it might have ended before Toronto even caught the plane. I mean, Cincinnati scored again, a penalty kick, but...eh. There’s not much game to analyze, so I’m just going to pass on a some notes and get ready for the next one. Of which…

I Would Have Liked a Tougher Game
To be clear, I am delighted to see Cincinnati in 6th place (sixth!), and on 13 points(!; just seven points shy of 2021’s total! can you believe that shit!?), but a more whole opponent and fewer gifts would have sent them to Minnesota in a sharper frame of mind. Arguably. Call it free-floating anxiety about complacency, but Minnesota will be tougher, and in both directions, success is forged in iron, etc.

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.

FC Cincinnati 3-1 Inter Miami FC: Shit, I Underwrote My Theme...

Junior Moreno, artist's rendering.

Here I’ve been posting twitter threads that double as game summaries since the pandemic started (at least) and I never thought to just link to the fucking things. In fairness, that’s more color commentary than summary - and the notes come at what I consider appropriate intervals (i.e., I’m very much a one-dude-in-the-broadcast-booth man) - but it flags every goal, notes some broader trends and even mentions the shirtless dude in the crowd with the great state of Ohio tattooed on the skin above his beating heart.

Now, to flesh that out a little…or a lot.

FC Cincinnati started the game as well as Inter Miami CF started it badly. They stopped everything headed toward their goal before it breached their defensive third - if with a massive assist from a globally sloppy Miami team - and piled on pressure with sharp passes and a selection of first touches and shake-‘n’-shimmies that kept the ball rolling toward Miami’s goal. Whether on coach’s orders or from a bout of the jitters, the visitors let Cincy play, only really trying to pressure the ball when it rolled into their defensive third. With the home team more or less camped inside Miami’s half, that proved disastrous: Cincinnati generally only had to go as far back as the impressively effective Yuya Kubo (who added a wrinkle with a shot on goal!) and Cincy’s new stealth-fighter No. 6, Junior Moreno, who would then feed it either to Luciano Acosta, one of the forwards (Brandon Vazquez or Dominique Badji), or Alvas Powell high on the right, or Ronald Matarrita high on the left.

Given how mightily Miami struggles to score - they’ve scored just two goals over four(!?) games, with one coming from the spot (today) - Cincy effectively won the game over the first 25 minutes. Their first goal featured a lot some of the good, good things I noted above - e.g., Badji showing to receive the ball, but instead turning and letting the ball run toward goal, poking it to Acosta, who found a wide-open (this is a theme) Vazquez running up Cincy’s right. With the fullback playing to contain, Vazquez pulled up, stepped inside and scanned for the third pass, who happened to be Matarrita, who passed home the goal from the far post. Miami’s shape was a disaster, both d-mids had stepped to Badji, leaving Acosta free to run with space in front of him and Vazquez all alone.

Cincy’s second goal followed the other half of the script noted above. After making a pinned-in Miami chase around the right for a couple passes, the ball went back to Kubo, who cycled the ball to Tyler Blackett (yeah, yeah, the ball went further back), who found - again, a wide-open Matarrita, who was able to pick out Vazquez as cleanly as the latter had done for the former just six minutes earlier. In short, a low-scoring Inter Miami found themselves down 0-2 by letting too much happen around them. They showed too much respect to one of MLS’s historically bad sides.