FC Cincinnati 0-2 Colorado Rapids: The Painful, Present Limits of Moral Victories

You know the sound it's making...

After FC Cincinnati’s 0-2 home loss to the Colorado Rapids, I have two competing thoughts in my head:

1) Cincinnati fans are expecting a lot of progress from basically zero in a little time; and
2) can you fucking blame them at this point?

I want to start all this by centering one very important thought: the Rapids are a good team and they’ve started strong to boot. Their players have their roles and they know them well, they’re good at nearly every position and, since Robin Fraser took over, they’ve become damned good at finding the next pass and the one after that. For further perspective: Colorado has the fourth best record in the whole damn league - and with a game or two in hand against every team above them. There’s no shame in losing to a team like that. With Cincinnati dancing on the edge of another missed ceiling, hell, yeah, the circumstances suck - I mean, they suck - and yet there’s nothing to do but play the next game.

That should not, however, dissuade any FC Cincy fans from letting loose their blazing frustration with a team that has spent two and…think that’s one-fifth seasons failing to gett it together. I saw little moral victories all over the place for Cincinnati yesterday - e.g., an early pass from Luciano Acosta to slip Brenner behind, which was as good as anything I’ve seen in open play all season; the way Cincinnati knocked the Rapids off their rhythm between the two goals; Alvaro Barreal turning in one of his most threatening performances so far, quite literally, etc. - and yet…and yet, the second half of the phrase “moral victory” fades with every game that doesn’t end in actual victory. They don't count in the standings, for one. I didn’t fully digest how many quality shots Cincinnati fired at William Yarbrough’s goal until I reviewed the tape (22 shots, for the record, with 7 forcing a save). It’s hard as hell to see a silver lining, especially with yet another three points thrown away.

The deeper question is when you’ll know they’ve turned things around, both collectively and a way that sticks. And that’s a far slippier question to answer.

FC Cincinnati 0-1 New England Revolution: Inching Toward Competitive?

There was ample room for improvement, and yet...

If a game can feel busy and uneventful at the same time, I think I just watched it. All kinds of things happened - not least FC Cincinnati and the New England Revolution combined for nearly 40 shots, some of them quite good - but both ‘keepers spent most of the game looking unbeatable and both teams a step or two away from that defining moment when it all comes together and the crowd goes wild. Maybe it’s apt that the only goal came off a sleeper of a set-piece that didn’t feel any more dangerous than the rest of them.

That came in the 70th minute, when Cincy’s Ken Vermeer could only paw Adam Buksa’s header into the side netting (more later). With that, the Revs won a deceptively close game 1-0, leaving the universe feeling right and better at the same time.

My biggest takeaway is pretty straightforward: FC Cincinnati played a team that most people can see winning a trophy this season without squinting too hard and looked more or less competitive throughout. They got on the wrong side of dominated more often than any Cincy fan would like to see - an impression the xG numbers back up - but they also made more and better shots than they have all season, they had a shift of dominance of their own (about the 20th to the 25th minute), and after the Revs ended the first half strong, the defense adjusted and improved: if memory serves, New England ended the first half with 21 shots or thereabouts; they ended the game with just 26. (Related: if you watch the MLS in 15 highlights, the first half takes up at least 10 minutes of the run time.)

Now, to pick through the details…

Cincinnati seems to like the 5-3-2/3-5-2 they’ve used for the last couple games, even if they still struggle with getting the former to flip to the latter (that’s to say, neither Joe Gyau nor Ronald Matarrita impacted the game that much). They set a tone of “ain’t backin’ down” - see Caleb Stanko’s heavy lunge at Arnor Traustason and the fairly visible shove Jurgen Locadia used to throw off Henry Kessler to set up his first (pretty damn solid) shot - and I think that set a bar that referee David Gantar struggled to interpret consistently toward the end (and with no small part of that hovering in Kessler’s general vicinity). I can excuse all that on the grounds that it was the right tone to set - especially when playing in a new home Cincinnati both wants and needs to make into a fortress.

Club du Foot Montreal 1-2 FC Cincinnati: (Long-Suffering) Heroes & Off-Switches

It doesn't matter that the bar is low; it's that you clear it.

“…but what I want to see from #FCCincy this weekend is win-or-die-trying commitment. Low bar.”

That was the last sentence of the preview thread I posted Friday afternoon for FC Cincinnati’s stunning, victorious 2-1 visit to Montreal-sur-la Gulf. I have two thoughts:

1) FC Cincy responded, with one player in particular clearing the bar; and
2) the bar wasn’t all that low in the end.

Those thoughts expand on and compliment one another: Club du Foot Montreal had Cincinnati at one form of their mercy or another for, oh, the middle 50 minutes of this game - i.e., from the 20th minute to about the 70th. It was never outright dominance - Cincy’s 5-3-2 saw to that - but the Orange & Blue played a big part of this game on the wrong side of a submission hold. Key players for Montreal got on the sharp end of their attack moves - Romell Quioto, Victor Wanyama and Djordje Mihailovic stood out; having Quioto basically post-up at the top of the area over the last 20 minutes of the first half caused all kinds of trouble - building pressure to, yes, a breaking point.

After 40 minutes of giving away very little, Cincinnati lost track of who had who on their left and Montreal got one of their bread-and-butter breakaways behind a fullback (Ronald Matarrita in this case). (I think) Zachary Brault-Guillard raced down Montreal’s right with no defenders within 10 yards of him while Quioto ran just as buck-ass nude right up the middle. Brault-Guillard squared and…we all know how that ended, a catastrophic breakdown that miraculously didn’t end in catastrophe. Given the imbalance in play to that point, it didn’t look like an omen…

Montreal did score eventually and, again, the cascade of mistakes that allowed that goal should sober up any Cincy fans getting a contact high from this win - so sit through them all, like its penance. The broadcast booth talked about Rudy Camacho’s “great pass” to Mihailovic, but he only had to walk into the space Luciano Acosta opened in the 5-3-2 when he stepped forward to become the third Cincinnati player staring at Camacho. Mihailovic a wide-open lane toward goal from beginning to end, first, because no one was near him, and then again when Geoff Cameron let him free to run onto the square pass. Cincinnati made at least one more mistake that should have been fatal - I think it was Allan Cruz who straight-up passed the ball to Quioto inside Cincinnati’s penalty area - but Cameron cleaned up that fuck up, while Gustavo Vallecilla combined with ‘keeper Kenneth Vermeer to snuff out yet another occasion when Quioto got loose in the area. The point is, even in a conservative formation, Cincinnati could easily have given up three goals. Something about there but for the grace of CF Montreal…

FC Cincinnati 2-3 Inter Miami CF: The One Pressing Question

Everything else I wrote...but also this.

What do you make of FC Cincinnati losing its most complete game of 2021 at a great, big all they threw for themselves (and it considerable expense)? Sub-question: how does the argument that they lost to what sure as hell looks like a bad team to me make you feel?

Now the real question: can FC Cincy get better with the roster they have?

I’m not going to spend much time on what happened when - here goes (or just watch): Inter Miami CF scored early on (no way!) a succession of defensive errors by Cincinnati’s defense (Joe Gyau) and midfield (Calvin Harris); a little momentum followed in the other direction…and then Miami scored again, and on a worse breakdown; a great big mix of running and nothing happened from there, very specific complaints came down from the broadcast booth, etc., then Ronald Mataritta found Alvaro Barreal behind Miami’s defense (their turn!), putting Cincinnati one goal closer to a comeback; some smartly-channeled aggression followed that didn’t look like it’d go anywhere then Nick Hagglund powered home an equalizer from a corner kick, the crowd went wild, the Fox network got some excitement for the TV, and so on…then, one minute later, Hagglund misplays a pass out of the back and Gonzalo Higuain finishes a counter he started, game over at 3-2 to Miami - because the specifics don’t really matter here. Or, more accurately, some long-term realities swallow up those specifics and return the conversation to one immovable question: can FC Cincy get better with the roster they have?

If your answer is no, my best advice is to step watching Cincinnati for another year, but probably two. Nah, make it three years. Probably safer.

Personally, I think they have the pieces for a decent functioning team in the current roster. There’s no question Cincinnati has some dead wood on the payroll, but I think I see some pieces that I’d stick with for a while and build around to best of your ability.

That said, pardon me while I address the dead body on the floor and the relevant co-morbidities. Miami looked like crap in their mid-week loss to Montreal (Full disclosure: I only watched the condensed game) and they looked…well, a lot like crap against Cincy today. Three or four sharp movements in the first half aside - which lead to the first goal, but not the second - they didn’t look much better moving the ball than the home team, their tackling kinda sucked (related, I am powerfully underwhelmed by Gregore), and nothing I saw today, very much including Cincinnati’s comeback, would lead me to echo talk of “a strong response” to Montreal loss that came from the broadcast booth. Nothing makes me doubt my….let’s call it contingently assured belief that Cincinnati finally has a functioning roster than my fairly clear sense that Miami can best be described as Cincinnati, but with more coherent talent.

FC Cincinnati 2020 Rambling Retrospective (on Foundations)

Ignore your eyes. This glass is fucking empty.

I’ve been struggling with what to think about FC Cincinnati’s 2020 season since it ended, never mind what to write about it. I had a fair sense of its high point - I’d call it the playoff-round loss to the Portland Timbers during the MLS Is Back Tournament in Orlando (covered in my patented over-written style here) - but the rest of the season felt like passing a gall stone (literally) bound and determined to not exit. Hope died both early and reasonably.

For as long as that was all I had to say about Cincy’s 2020, I couldn’t see the point in writing anything, because piling on. As most people know, it was a (briefly-) former FC Cincinnati player - Derrick Etienne, Jr. - who scored a tidy second goal in MLS Cup 2020. That one (unlikely) moment put something that had been visible all night in eye-catching italics: Etienne looked active and useful up to that point; he played defense, his passes connected, his runs had purpose, and he made at least a couple solid attacking decisions/actions and against Seattle’s demonstrably sturdy defense (as backed up by the numbers). He looked connected to the team and the game-plan, in other words. The same player looked lost or useless more often than not when he wore Orange and Blue, but one player having a good game could be anything - a fluke, for one- but that started the ball rolling. Slowly, obviously…

Someone asked me the other day, both out of the blue and when I had time to spare it some thought (toilet), whether I still follow the U.S. Men’s National Team. The answer started with “some” (for the record, I caught all of one game, parts of another, and I tracked the other two (the late blowouts) but that’s it) and ended on a jaded take on the next generation. Moreover, the odd highlight aside, I almost never see the up-‘n’-comers in Europe. A longer version: I see the individual talent and the teams they’re starting for, but how much do those clearly better teams raise those players’ games and vice versa? In other words, when all the weight of making the game-plan work falls on all those same individual talents, will they be World Cup-competitive, never mind World-Cup worthy? The rest of the thought ends with, I’ve seen the results for 2020, and this is nothing like the first time I’ve seen a bright future projected for the U.S. Men’s National Team based on objectively non-representative results - i.e., I’m giving more weight to the draw against Wales than I’ll ever give to a U.S. team kicking the shit out of El Salvador or a post-Golden Panama, c’mon, people, the 90s were fucking ages ago.

The idea that started with Etienne playing a big role in a final ended with a question: how much do FC Cincinnati’s seemingly defining struggles follow more from problems with the people/circumstances guiding the team than they come from the playing personnel? The players aren’t blameless by any means, but there’s something unusually dazed and confused about FC Cincy every time they take the field. I’ve followed a number of teams in a number of leagues since the 1990s, from the shittiest leagues they’d put on TV (the A-League!) to Europe’s finest leagues to the World Cup, and I’ve never followed a team that looks so…uncomfortable in every side of the game - and I watched the late-90s New England Revolution as if God was watching and cared as much.

Atlanta United FC 2-0 FC Cincinnati: Scrap It for Parts (and even that's hard)

Yessir, it's been that kind of year.

I hadn’t planned on writing about this game, but I had an hour to kill between games yesterday, so what the hell? Also, I’m barely writing about FC Cincinnati’s 0-2 road loss to Atlanta United FC so much as I’m writing about the season as a whole and state of things generally. Which makes sense because what was last night’s game but a 90-minute microcosm of the season and state of things as a whole?

Cincinnati went down one goal early - and under the weight of…was that just three attacking players for Atlanta? - something that’s proved fatal nearly every time it’s happened. That’s just what happens for any team that’s scored just five goals in sixteen games. That’s right: Cincinnati’s attack hasn’t even arrived at a point where I can start to use actual numbers when I write about them - e.g., it’s “five” instead of “5,” or, God forbid, “16” or, dare I orgasm mid-preamble by typing “30”?

Atlanta scored again, Cincinnati never did, the end. Point to anything in the box score - e.g., the Orange and Blue’s lopsided edge in possession and passing accuracy, their stockpile of passes, the fact they held the edge in every available attacking category - and I’ll point to the scoreboard. Cincinnati’s attackers gave Brad Guzan a little work to do, but, to get all existential about it, I can’t remember the last time I tuned into an FC Cincinnati game without expecting unbelievable, unrelenting tragedy. It’s not whether they’ll fail, but how long we’ll have to wait for it to become the familiar, sickening combination of both obvious and final. Atlanta did all concerned a solid by scoring their second by the 26th minute (and tough night for Kendall Waston). Anyone clear on why Jaap Stam swapped out Nick Hagglund, when central defense was working better than most things?

The only question left open for me in 2020 - that’s to say, yes, I think that FC Cincinnati 2020’s team will go down as the shittiest attacking team in MLS history (they have to score four goals to avoid that fate) - is which players the team holds onto going forward. I’ll tick through tonight’s starters and subs below - and, to be clear, this is an entirely ruthless and mercenary exercise, done without regard to how much turnover any given team can withstand, or even the realities of any player’s existing and legally binding contract, e.g., if Cincinnati’s contractually-bound to keep that player around, it is what it is. With that, here’s who I’d keep and who’d I’d cut bait on listed in the order they appear in the box score (don’t read into the order, basically):

FC Cincinnati 0-1 Sporting Kansas City: Here's to 2021 and 20 New Players, JFC

Left at Nippert Stadium yesterday.

The best thing I can about FC Cincinnati’s 0-1 home loss last night against Sporting Kansas City was that they at least made the Western Conference’s best look average. Don’t know about you, but I was hoping they’d take one last happy memory from Nippert Stadium…then again, they’d go against FC Cincy’s history in Major League Soccer, as it has been written…

…don’t worry, this won’t take much of your time. Certainly less than 90 agonizing minutes.

Say they managed to draw the game - or, given at least two clear-cut chances, say Siem de Jong tucked away his penalty kick (nope!), or Brandon Vazquez finished his late, elegant turn with something effective (nope!), say, God forbid (because it seems he has), FC Cincy put away both chances and won the game. Say they make the Fucked Up 2020 Playoffs (and that the beef jerky maker of your dreams sponsored it): do you really think this FC Cincinnati…mess would get even one step beyond the first round? Or, to come at it from a future hypothetical, what would FC Cincinnati have to do to erase the profound, even off-putting frustration of their second season in MLS?

The short answer, and a disturbingly real one: why bother? Looking back at FC Cincinnati’s 2020 is an exercise in counting wasted hours.

Bluntly, literally every attacking player Cincinnati signed going into the 2020 season failed to pan out. Last night, I saw a couple positive reads on Jurgen Locadia switching to play wide left and, sure, he found more room out there and he posted a competent shot on goal, but what might have been isn’t what happened; the fact remains that Locadia hasn’t returned on investment any better than Fanendo Adi, and at greater effort and expense. It’s not just that he scored just one goal in 13 starts (15 games played), but that the ball gets caught in the spokes more often than he kicks it out and in anything like a useful direction.

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?

Columbus Crew SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: A Light State of Disbelief

“It seems like once they give up a goal…”

I didn’t catch the name of Columbus Crew SC’s color commentator, but 1) she’s pretty good at her job, and 2) she summed up the state of play for FC Cincinnati’s 2020 in those few words. A season defined in less than a sentence.

Cincy is a limited team, without question. The only real question is whether they can be better with the current roster. I’d like to think so, but that’s without having any stirring ideas for rearranging the players in a way that makes them a more dangerous team and in a way that doesn’t leave the back-line for dead. With all that noted, I don’t like how Jaap Stam lined them up against Columbus yesterday - which, despite how MLS’s site mapped that for the prior game against Columbus, looked like the same thing to me. It looks…cluttered, I guess, in terms of going forward. I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. First, some notes on the game/0-3 loss for FC Cincy.

Did Cincinnati ever really look like scoring to you? Was there a moment you thought, “they’re getting closer,” or did the whole thing look like an exercise in holding on for dear life from the starting whistle till the final one? I mean, set aside the fact they didn’t put even one shot on goal (also, really?), obviously.

The way I saw it, it was possible to see the outlines of a goal-less draw, maybe even dream about a 1-0 Cincinnati win until somewhere around the 30th minute. From that point forward, and as happens when a better team plays a weaker on, Columbus started finding seams to spaces ever closer to Cincinnati’s goal. Having Darlington Nagbe around, doing his free-radical thing of unbalancing the defensive and collecting one foul after another in Zone 14, probably did as much as anything to force the slow unraveling, but Pedro Santos, Youness Mokhtar and, later, Luis Diaz joined in the “fun” of tormenting Cincy’s defense. The wheels came all the way off when Gyasi Zardes came on in the 62nd minute and couldn’t stop beating Cincinnati defenders to the ball. Had aliens watched that game, they would have applauded the amount and variety of probing.

FC Cincinnati 0-0 DC United: Progress and Measuring Height Against a Moving Wall

Now picture it non-linear.

Because I know FC Cincinnati fans have picked apart this game since Friday night, let’s call this a preview for tomorrow night…if without any real nnotes on Chicago Fire FC, who I haven’t watched at all since they shat out that shocker against the Seattle Sounders back during MLS Got Back. And it will be brief. Promise.

All in all, the game lacked in goals, intensity…shots on goal…just lacked really, and ended appropriately goal-less. Worse, this current DC United team is already a bugger to handicap against - and then Cincy played to type on both sides of the equation. Cincinnati didn’t score, but Frederic Brillant, Steve Birnbaum and Bill Hamid put up one hell of a wall for DC week in and out, so that doesn’t give you much. Cincinnati looked easy-breezy in defense and didn’t give DC more than a couple scraps (often with a well-arranged wall between the shooter and the goal to boot), but DC hasn’t generated either reliable or voluminous offense for a couple seasons, and now you have less with which to work. What we had here was a game that played out to expectations and moved no needles.

I think that’ll be a familiar sensation for both these teams for as long as this wonky bastard of a 2020 season limps along to…shit, where will it go? Simple sons-o’-bitches that they are, at least zombies know where they’re going - e.g., toward brains - but the Major League Soccer’s 2020 doesn’t have even that kind of direction. If anything, and for what it’s worth, I’d rather be a Cincinnati fan right now than a DC fan. While both teams labor under a work-in-progress incoherence, Cincinnati continues to integrate and arrange new, upgraded players - they even have someone shiny, new, and, ideally, specifically useful coming into the team - while, from a barely-interested distance, it looks like DC’s still waiting for Edson Flores to come good…or even start regularly.

On that, I worried a little that Flores or Federico Higuian would come in and take over the game, but, odd quality passes here or there (see below), I didn’t see any takers for that whole business of taking over the game.

That’s all I have for general commentary - it’ll specifics from here on out - but, to answer the big question, was this a good result for either team? Was it awful, though, from Cincy’s end (I can’t answer for DC)? Can the answer be no, while also acknowledging vital improvement. So long as one accepts the premise that Cincinnati’s defense left a gasping offense for dead in 2019, any and all clean sheets necessarily count as an upgrade…even if there is a finite, if-as-yet-undefined period after which goal-less draws stop counting as necessary progress and slouch to just plain old stagnation. And that’s the point of the departure for the detail work. In no particular order…

Portland Timbers 1 (4) -1 (2) FC Cincinnati: Training Wheels & Breaking the Brick Shit-House

Thomas Jefferson's, apparently...

Sorry for the delay. I poured my sorrows quite the sea to swim in last night…

I have this tactic I use when thumb wrestling, one that has no purpose beyond annoying my thumb’s opposition. With my fingers still laced with the other person’s, I extend my palm to where they can’t reach my thumb. Because there is no draw to play for a thumb wrestling, it isn’t anything but a joke…I think you see where this is going…

It took a penalty shoot-out to make the pain go away last night. But for the second worst decision in Steve Clark’s…very rich career, one of the least satisfying tactical battles in sporting history would have ended in regulation. What happened? Maybe Clark was bored as the rest of us? Whatever caused him to hoist himself onto the high-wire of making that clumsy, stupid touch instead of doing the right and simple thing may never be fully known. Regardless, that moment of sheer idiocy and resulting, well-justified penalty kick (scored by Jurgen Locadia) very nearly undid 67 minutes of the soul-sucking work of looking for a way into the brick shit-house FC Cincinnati built in front of its goal, a choice that was every bit as annoying, and ultimately pointless, as my go-to thumb-wrestling technique. The Timbers finally slipped around the back (and, Lo, what a mighty fortress it was) when Sebastian Blanco found a backdoor behind the defense, one left open when a pair of their defenders strayed too high on their right. Cincy’s central defenders scrambled to snuff Blanco and Jaroslaw Niezgoda slipped into the pocket (yes, that guy; not Diego Valeri; still correcting a bad tweet) to two-time a goal into Cincy’s net. With that, echoes of “FC Cincinnati, come out to play-ay” rang over the stadium. And they responded in their way: first came the massive assist that, had the Timbers not won the, apparently, divinely-ordained penalty shoot-out, would surely would go in the history books as Clark’s Cock-Up ™.

I suppose I shouldn't over-sell Cincinnati's attacking feebleness, because they had enough moments for the upset, up to and including scoring what looked like the OG go-ahead goal, only to see that called back for offside (good call, too). They damn-near bagged a winner when Clark (who, swear to God, gets all up in his own head) bumbled a late attempt (no video, dammit; I don't get to choose these things); Locadia also skied what should have been . Valeri came just as close either before or after (after, says the highlights round-up), and that takes us back to being playthings of the gods

Thankfully, and honestly for all concerned outside the greater Cincinnati media market, general operating assumptions reasserted themselves during the penalty kicks: Portland swept them, and Clark even found a little redemption when he stopped Locadia’s shot; Kendall Waston sealed the deal by leaning waaayyyy back and skying his shot, frankly, way over the crossbar.

Atlanta United FC 2-1 FC Cincinnati: A Different Feeling in My Stomach

Explaining a nonsense phrase below...

I’m going to use Atlanta United FC’s second goal as exemplary evidence that they are a better team than FC Cincinnati. The latter’s defense earned every shot you want to take at its shape, but Emerson Hyndman, 1) spotted the space, 2) Ezequiel Barco found it, and with a well-weighted pass and, more than the first two points, 3) Hyndman’s touch took him around the defender and opened Spencer Richey’s all the way up. A professional player 10 yards from goal with the ‘keeper on or near his line ends badly nine times outta ten, and that’s how one team breaks down another team, or vice versa, and whatever that means.

As people paying careful attention already know, Atlanta beat FC Cincy last night by a final score of 2-1. Cincinnati pulled one back with a slicing shot from Yuya Kubo ("golazo"? srsly, MLSSoccer.com; are expectations so low?), and they had a couple chances besides – good ones, too – but Atlanta already had one crack in Cincy’s defense in the bank before the second one happened, and that left the Orange and Blue playing out of a hole for the second week running…

…and yet, I feel good. Bah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

For anyone watching at home, no, you didn’t imagine it: Cincinnati put up a fair number of shots last night, and more than Atlanta. In fact, Cincy nearly doubled Atlanta’s necked shots total (i.e., just shots not shots on goal; eight for Atlanta v 14 for Cincinnati), but two key thoughts follow from that:

1) Did Cincinnati ever appear entirely in control of last night’s match?

2) The box score from Atlanta’s season-opening win over Nashville SC looks much the same, and the result looks exactly the same.

The question is, what you draw from all that?

New York Red Bulls 3-2 FC Cincinnati: The Battle They Won & A Special Little Miracle

Deck still works. (That's taking the positives, baby!)

I’d argue that result makes the bigger, poorer statement on the state of the New York Red Bulls than it makes about FC Cincinnati. More to the point, New York absolutely needed that late, unlikely goal from Daniel Royer to win the game 3-2 and to stay one small step ahead of opening day embarrassment. Cincinnati held a fairly clear, universal edge over the game’s last 30 minutes – and, most encouraging for them, new, spendy kid Jurgen Locadia provided a focal point for forward traffic once he took the field.

As for the bad news, the Red Bulls scrambled the bejesus out of Cincy’s defensive shape throughout the first half. Their passing and movement made the Orange and Blue’s defensive midfield, in particular, about as useful to the overall effort as me sitting on my sofa quietly whispering, “dear gods, what is happening over there?” For as long as they had the energy to pull it off, New York worked their usual, preferred formula of forcing turnovers and immediately finding good, often novel ways of getting vertical toward the opposition goal.

There’s a cautionary tale for both teams in that: as much as Cincinnati’s defensive posture improved (i.e., defenders started tracking the movement and anticipating the next pass), nearly every Red Bulls’ player’s legs had given out before the game’s end. Scuffed touches saw them looking down to make sure they took the ball with them on dribbles and under-hit/wayward passes made it easier for Cincy’s defenders to pick off the strays than it had been during a first half of smart, sure touches.

They might not have won the game, but Cincinnati won the fitness battle…though it’s also worth wondering whether the Red Bulls run their collective legs off whilst building their cushion in the first half. To reduce that to an analogy, did Cincinnati push the Red Bulls to the edge, or a lactic acid burn take the Red Bulls out of the way?

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.

MLS Off-Season Weekly (02.02.2020): Fuck It, But File It

MLS, 2019-2020. Hell, Yes.

With preseason finally in full swing, I’ve decided to switch focus to those results instead of dry-humping meaning out of which teams get what players – except, that is, when new arrivals land in Portland, Oregon or Cincinnati, Ohio. That doesn’t mean I didn’t see Oswaldo Alanis joining the San Jose Earthquakes, or that I missed Luis Amarilla landing in Minnesota, and I definitely noticed Joao Paulo signing with the Seattle Sounders (bastards!): it just means, um, I don’t really have anything to add beyond linking the name of someone I don’t know to a team that I do and, because all the teams listed above play in the Western Conference, I hope that each of those players bring a soccer-performance equivalent of the plague into those respective locker rooms, by which I mean I don’t want anyone to die actually, but only metaphorically, and in a way that only hurts each individual player for as long as they are on those teams, and with good fortune and earnings thereafter, amen, etc. (There. That should satisfy legal...)

That said, the one player move from the past week that stuck with me was Real Salt Lake shipping Jefferson Savarino to Brazil. I mean, it was only a week ago that RSL’s staff talked about having the team to compete for the title and I assumed at the time (and I don’t think unreasonably) that part of that plan included Savarino, who has been a good and useful player for RSL for the past year or so, if not their most dangerous player. I get that teams sell players, I do, but this still feels like a weird one…and yet it all feels very grown-up and first-world soccer at the same time. This assumes, of course, that RSL has someone lined up to fill the gaping “danger-hole” in their starting XI. And why wouldn’t they? I mean, have you seen this off-season? It’s like a drunken sailor party at Mardi Gras out there...it’s enough to make the CBA negotiations feel like they’re happening in another league, but they’re not. Wild, right?

And, best thing of all, both the Timbers and FC Cincy got invites to the party. With that, let’s turn to a results ‘n’ transfers check in on my two favorite teams. Think I’ll start with…yeah, gonna do Portland.

Results ‘n’ Transfers, Timbers Time
The Timbers have played exactly one game so far, a 2-1 win over Costa Rica’s Saprissa down in (the other) San Jose. People have rightly celebrated Diego Valeri’s early free kick, but the real story is in the…nah, I can’t fake this one. The line-ups for both halves feel like the coaches came with that line-up by picking names out of hat. It worked just fine – hey! - but I’m also guessing that all involved played with professional pride and courtesy and saw that no one got hurt besides Bill Tuiloma…OK, so that’s two months from February 1st till he comes back, and that’s April 1st. Got it.

The big news this week was the arrival of two (2) attacking players for Portland in Jaroslaw Niezgoda (a player Timbers fans have expected to receive for…was it weeks or a month?) and Felipe Mora, who came as something of a surprise, at least to me. Both players come with impressive resumes, which means I’m excited to see them both, but without expectations they’ll save us from either sin or an early off-season. Between their arrival and having it on well-connected word (right?) that Cristhian Paredes will return, and that means the Timbers go into 2020 with an already-solid team, and now with at least four new, potential upgrades. It’s the “upgrade over what” question that starts a journey.

Based on very loose readings of what he does, I think I have some sense of what Niezgoda does on the field; based on still looser reading, I have no damn idea at all what Mora does: I’ll catch up on both when they play, like everyone else, but the immediate question is what those players’ arrival(s?) mean to Jeremy Ebobisse. The base-line thinking holds that Ebobisse starts either at forward or as a winger. Without knowing what Mora does (and I’m willing to wait), I don’t know that he’ll impact Ebobisse directly, but I’m guessing that Niezgoda will freeze him out of forward, at least until failure kicks in. Between Valeri, Sebastian Blanco, Yimmi...hell, maybe even Marvin Loria and Andy Polo, Ebobisse has a shit-ton of players to get through before he starts on the wing. So...

That’s frustrating, honestly. Ebobisse feels like too strong an asset to burn, but I’d also allow that he’s an odd duck as a player, a better soccer player than he is a forward, better at combination play in the attacking third than he is at scoring. I think he’d kill as a second forward on a team built to accommodate that role, but it also becomes a question of addition and subtraction that gets messy real quick. Just as a thought exercise, try to build a tenable Portland Timbers line-up that has both Niezgoda and Ebobisse starting. I think it’s possible, especially if you’re willing to deploy either Valeri or Ebobisse strategically, but getting the balance right will take more thought than I’ve put into it so far. Also, I don’t think anyone in the organization is really thinking that way – by which I mean, I expect to see (possibly) too much of Valeri and Blanco this season, and that’ll surely squeeze out Ebo - then again, based on the line-ups against Saprissa, who knows?

Letting Ebobisse linger on the bench seems unfair, I guess, and perhaps unwise, but, if there’s wisdom in having competition across the roster, the Timbers have definitely set up something of a cage-match in the attacking positions…maybe I’m just anxious because I don’t know how they’ll settle it?

Results ‘n’ Transfers, FC Cincinnati
I think it’s been reliably confirmed that Cincy has successfully signed Jurgen Locadia – even if the question of “success” remains up for grabs. Absent some kind of personal knowledge about him among Gerard Nijkamp and Ron Jans, Locadia has the kind of resume that blows up most often – e.g., falling in and out of the line-up, going out on loan, etc., and consistently – so that’s the red flag. To put a more positive spin on it, maybe he’s a good player who wasn’t quite as good as the players in front of him – loans aren’t always a sign of failure – and a player like that probably clears FC Cincinnati’s and/or MLS’s threshold, so I guess it’s back to wait and see…with that thing about exploding resumes as an asterisk, of course.

We’ll see what happens when Locadia comes, if Locadia comes, but FC Cincinnati now has two (somewhat) context-rich results behind them: 1) their 3-0 triumph over Phoenix Rising (but not fast enough, amirite?!), and 2) their 0-4 wake-up call about this not being the USL anymore MFs (and I know how totally 2019 that is, but the point stands), from a cocked-and-loaded Sporting Kansas City team. The results, as you’re fully aware, mean nothing; more to the point, had you asked me what I’d expect to happen in both games, I would have guessed both results, just with smaller margins. To name some points of interest from both games:

W over Phoenix: Rey Ortiz getting two assists is nice, so is seeing Andrew Gutman, Tommy McCabe and Joseph-Claude Gyau knocking in the three goals, you want your bit players scoring often as they can, etc. They made do in some ways – i.e., I wouldn’t field that starting XI often or confidently – and that’s the second piece of intrigue: FC Cincy’s second half XI strikes me as a likelier regular XI than the team Jans sent out in the first half.

L way under SKC: Cincy flipped the script in this one for me, in that this first-half starting line-up feels more like what I expect them to try in 2020, at least early on. And SKC shredded it. Daniel Salloi scored a goal, fer crissakes (srsly, check his 2018 versus his 2019). Based on both teams' rosters and recent histories, I’d expect the same thing to happen if Cincinnati played SKC at any point during 2020. One team upgraded on a solid/comically-underachieving foundation (that's SKC and, just to note it, Alan Pulido did not play), while another added some potentially useful pieces to the worst team in the league last season (uh, Cincy). If you expected better from this game, pay more attention to how often you’re disappointed and ask yourself why that is.

All the same, I do sincerely believe this is the beginning of a better year for Cincinnati. I’m confident I’ve mentioned this before, but I like Jans as a coach, and I think the team found and eliminated the fat quicker than we might appreciate. I didn’t agree with every move – e.g., Emmanuel Ledesma and Victor Ulloa are the ones I question (going the other way, Powell, no, Adi, no, Mattocks, no…say, there’s a lot of former Timbers in there) – but I do feel like they’re grasping toward a better, smarter foundation for 2020, and that they’ve found the hand-holds. We’ll see, of course, starting March 1, and every week thereafter from here till…it’s like goddamn Halloween before the season ends, right?

Anyway, Cincinnati will be better this year than last. How much better, and how that fits into all the teams they compete against? That’s the big, scary question, isn’t it?

More Results
I wanted to close with notes on some noteworthy results (no typo), because that’s where the rubber hits the road. FC Dallas signed Denilson way back when, and you shouldn’t know who that is…the point is signings don’t matter till they pay off on the field, even the big ones, and that’s why I fixate on results, even the dumb ones.

DC United 1-3 Montreal Impact
I found this notable for the goal scorers – e.g., new kid Romell Quioto and the returned Ballou Tabla. Montreal has weapons. It’s also a mess, but also that.

Columbus Crew SC 1-1 Vancouver Whitecaps
1) Vancouver’s starting line-up looks plausible (between the defensive mid side, and the attacking three); 2) Artur with Darlington Nagbe seems like a really strong midfield pairing, but we’ll see.

Atlanta United FC 4-0 Philadelphia Union
I want to say that Philly threw out some lambs, but I recognize enough of those names to wonder. The bigger news is that Pity Martinez’s name keeps showing up on the score sheet this preseason.

Los Angeles FC 3-1 New York City FC
Mostly because it feels ominous.

DC United 1-3 New York Red Bulls
Noticing a pattern for DC, but they did have some key players missing for this one. Also, look at those line-ups and tell me the Red Bulls won’t at least be tough.

FC Dallas 1-4 Vancouver Whitecaps
As if on cue, the ‘Caps drill a middle-top-tier Western Conference team. But, no, I’m not reading anything into this…yet.

Chicago Fire 0-4 Philadelphia Union
Chicago’s second half line-up is a who’s who of where did they come from? For Philly, it’s so far better than Chicago, but worse than Atlanta. Which is doable. To a point.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that skips a fair number of results, most of them against USL teams or foreign teams. I don’t discount those games at all, I just don’t know quite how to translate them to anything meaningful – for instance, I can’t read Atlanta drawing IF Elsborg 1-1 the same way I can look at Vancouver beating up Dallas on neutral ground. A 4-1 result going in Vancouver’s favor raises an abundance of questions, and from multiple angles…

…but it’s also the preseason, so fuck it (but file it).