FC Dallas 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Getting Dragged by History

Like that, but a painful reality and not a well-staged stunt.

Yesterday evening, FC Cincinnati took three unwelcome strides toward raising the bar for goals allowed in a single season, plus another one toward the single-season record number of losses. With six games left on their 2019 schedule, they’re just eight goals allowed shy of one record and, comfortingly(?), five losses away from the record for losses. What’s left to say after that one besides, do your best to stay out of the record books, Cincy. Fail less often or more gently?

After playing FC Dallas to a relatively even first half – they finished with six shots each, even if Dallas held a 3-1 edge on shots on goal – the game fell apart one piece at a time to ultimately end in a 3-1 win for Dallas. First came two goals three minutes apart – the first a turnover that caught Greg Garza too far upfield thinking Cincy would keep the ball, the second an early cross to a wide-open Zdenek Ondrasek outside Justin Hoyte – then came Kekuta Manneh’s moment of dumbassery and subsequent ejection. Whatever thin hope lingered from Emmanuel Ledesma’s 64th-minute penalty kick (and it was a good call and a rare coherent attack for Cincy) evaporated in the split-second when Manneh shoved his hand into Bryan Acosta’s face, off the ball, and almost certainly provoked, but, when you suck as thoroughly as Cincinnati does, a cool head is just about all you have left.

Before anyone assumes they had a chance, Cincy added just one shot/shot on goal to their first half total – even with a full allotment of players on the field for 30 minutes of the second half. There are no positives left, only the hope of avoiding record-breaking negatives. COYFCC, etc.

Is it worth mulling over what might have been when it clearly didn’t happen? Did a scenario ever exist when a healthy, more sober/tuned-in Fanendo Adi lead a basically competent FC Cincinnati attack? Could having Greg Garza for the entire season would have added a goal or two, or kept four or five goals out? What if Fatai Alashe remained healthy all season? A question hangs over every position and the only answer is, none of it happened.

Chicago Fire 1-2 FC Cincinnati: What Schweinsteiger Said

He knows...

Anyone unable to appreciate the full narrative satisfaction of Fanendo Adi giving FC Cincinnati the moment both he and the team needed very, very badly does not deserve spectator sports. I mean, you could write a movie about Adi’s season and end it on the moment where he sat cross-legged on the ground in clearly grateful prayer. Even I, who's agnostic on my more pious days, felt all of that. Something else to note here: that's Adi’s best attacking play; running onto a pass and hitting the ball first time toward (or, god forbid, on) goal. That’s how he scored his best goals with the Portland Timbers. Use it.

Happily, that rare positive act was enough to carry Cincinnati to a 2-1 road win over a disconnected and aimless Chicago Fire team. It took an unlikely, lucky goal to gain an early advantage (Fabian Herbers…dude) and Nico Gaitan struggling from the penalty spot to allow the game to play out as it did to let the result hold up, but it did. As noted by the guys in Chicago’s broadcast booth, the Fire did the balance of whatever “doing” happened in the second half – i.e., they dominated possession and “piled on the shots” – but it’s not often that the gap between shots (20) and shots on goal (7) tells the story of a game so well. For every opening Chicago created, they somehow squandered two of them (absurdity deliberate; I know math), whether by Aleksandar Katai wandering the world over to tee up a shot (when he might have done better to lift his head and look around) or by attacking runs that took the runner out of the play. (C. J. Sapong deserves exemption from that statement; he was one of the few Fire attackers to use his runs to create space for the players around him.)

As sometimes happens when I watch FC Cincy games, I found myself watching Chicago more than I watched them – especially in the second half. Not to take anything away from Cincinnati, because they succeeded in their primary task of staying organized and forcing Chicago to break them down. More often than not, this took the form of watching Chicago under-achieve.

At some point during the game, the suspended Bastian Schweinsteiger stepped into the broadcast both where Chicago’s commenters talked to him about the first half of Chicago’s season. When the conversation turned to the things that might have held them back this year, Schweinsteiger named some demons that plagued Chicago in this loss: not all eleven players showing up (only Francisco Calvo, Dax McCarty and Gaitan stood out as clear positives, kind of the point); issues with communication/coordination (the serial mistiming of passes to runs; by the end of the game, both McCarty and Gaitan resorted to angrily gesturing at teammates to fulfill their most basic functions) and a lack of intention and purpose among the attacking players (which most often manifested in “wings-‘n’ prayers” flails from range from far too many Chicago players). One could make a decent case that Cincinnati didn’t win this game, so much as Chicago lost it. Chicago’s 5-2-4 home record shows they do this (literally) more often than not - again, math: 6 not-fully successful home results > 5 fully-successful results – and, when you’re not winning on the road ever, you need three points at home to get anywhere.

FC Cincinnati 3-2 Houston Dynamo: Tortoise and Hare Metaphors, Strained

Knew I wasn't the only one who mixed that metaphor....

To start with the big question, what the hell just happened out there? If I’m allowed a follow-up (yes, go ahead), did I like it?

The answer to that hinges on what I really think about the Houston Dynamo’s apparent decision to sit out the first 50 minutes of the game. Could head coach Wilmer Cabrera really have sent them out under instructions to cool their heels through 50 minutes, even if hell and high-water washed over it all, and that they’d start playing then and only then? I don’t want to take anything away from FC Cincinnati, who won every header and clogged even more passing lanes over the same period, and they absolutely deserve credit, both for that and finishing their chances (Rashawn!) on their way to a 3-0 lead (not that one, this one). All the same, Houston struggled to build out of the back, and with lack of trying front and center. Midfielders played the ball backwards over and over again throughout the first half, and without any visible pressure around them; both of their d-mids, Juan Cabezas and Matias Vera, dropped centrally to act as an outlet, but Houston’s defenders bypassed that option again and again, in favoring of shoving the ball up the wings. And Cincinnati’s midfield players – led by Emmanuel Ledesma – chewed that shit up every time.

The Dynamo applied its first (remotely useful) spell of pressure around the middle-50s, when they finally pinned Cincinnati into its defensive end and set up a siege that, ultimately, came very, very (very, very) uncomfortably close to forcing a draw, or…let’s just call it God forbid. The thing that undid Houston was ‘keeper Joe Willis letting a weak shot to roll between his legs just as Houston got its momentum going (see "this one," above). There was no reason to assume that would prove the difference when it happened – honestly, I expected Cincinnati to score one more until about the 80th minute – but Houston flipped a pretty big switch once they found it. When the Mark (probably) Gantor (probably; no offense; I love referees) blew the final whistle, the game ended in a desperately-needed 3-2 win for FC Cincinnati. I call this a great result, and without reservation. After the worst loss in franchise history any win is an unqualified good thing, don’t look gift horses in the mouth, and mind where the Pope has a shit, and so on. (Wait…I always get the thing with popes and bears turned around.)

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Louisville City FC: Holy Shit, a Win! (And the Scrabbling Path Forward!)

Suspense is contextual.

I will be brief, I will be brief, I will be brief. [Eh, you be the judge.]

I have two big, related takeaways from FC Cincinnati finally gaining a clear positive during its 2019 season with a 2-1 win (in extra time!) over Louisville City at scenic Nippert Stadium in the over-revered, yet under-valued U.S. Open Cup. First, Louisville’s press disrupted everything Cincinnati so much thought of doing for most of regulation time. Sub-first, I do wonder whether they ran themselves legless – not that I blame them either, given how close that came to being the path to success.

Second, and most crucially, how much did knowing how to manage Louisville help FC Cincy? My personal theory: an uncomfortable amount.

By pressing the way they did – and successfully - Louisville played an underdog’s hand in this game, but Cincinnati holds a clear edge in talent. Making that count took playing around Louisville’s press – something it took Cincinnati the first five minutes of the game to break even once, but it took most of regulation to finally tilt the field in its favor and, this is key, irrevocably.

Once Louisville gave up the (glorious) second goal (Team Kekuta!), and after so much exertion, I couldn’t see them coming back into the game. The underdogs had to take their foot off the gas eventually and, once they did, Cincinnati put the game in a…well, stunningly poorly executed choke-hold. Fuck me, if I didn’t feel like I was yelling “finish him” for a whole goddamn hour.

I’m happy for the win, particularly the spirit of it. Anyone watching the huddle after Fanendo Adi scored his first goal of 2019 (srsly, that can’t be right) should feel heartened by Forrest Lasso’s cross-talk with Adi over the celebrating mob. I have no idea what Lasso said, but everyone looked bought in and that’s how you build a team – aka, Step 1 to Success in team sports.

To go the other way with a thought that feels complicated: the first 70 minutes felt like Cincy bending without breaking while getting muscled all over by Louisville. That dredged up something I’ve noticed from FC Cincy during its long, dark winter-but-it’s-summer in MLS. FC Cincinnati has one hell of a time getting on the front foot in any game. Against a team capable of dominating them, the switch never flips and that's one theory on their string of regular season losses; when playing a Louisville team doing the soccer equivalent of throwing itself onto a hand-grenade to victory, it takes, as it happens, about 78 minutes. The larger point, and I’m going to emphasize this: Cicinnati does not have a reliable way to assert itself in games.

Timbers Triumph: On a Plan Coming Together

Not my fault. That show was manifestly stupid.

Everyone knows the super-agent movie trope when the super-villain sets up some Rube Goldberg contraption to kill the super-spy, often one that functions on a glacial time-line, as opposed to just putting a big bullet straight through the friggin' head of his nemesis. That approach to taking care of the biggest of one's 99 problems is so obviously silly that only an obvious movie could lampoon it (one of the not much lamented Austin Powers franchise; funniest thing I've ever seen Seth Green do, for sure).

But I understand the super-villain mind. When some asshole has foiled your plans for world domination over and over and over – maybe he even hurt or killed that fluffy white cat you love with all your nefarious heart – you don’t want to just kill the guy: you want that son of a bitch to spend his last hours (and good revenge totally requires hours) tallying up all the ways he's fucked. All the ways that you, Master Super Villain, have 100%-guaranteed, and from every possible angle, that he is fucked. The goal isn't just to vanquish one's foe. For all I know, it's to see if you can't make him cry a little. (NOTE: Roger Moore squirted a few every time he had to run for a scene by the time of his long-overdue retirement from the Bond franchise; NOTE to NOTE: Apocryphal; NOTE to NOTE to NOTE: I heard he had a stunt double run for him, which isn't remotely Bond-esque, but my story about tears is 100% fabricated.)

I'm not saying I wanted the Portland Timbers to dominate and humiliate the Vancouver Whitecaps yesterday. First of all, that would be just rude, what with the classy tweet they posted today congratulating the Timbers and the Timbers Army. I mean, I can be vulgar, crass, etc. etc. I do, however, aspire to some basic quantity of class. Good taste...I'll do that later (Edit, Randall: Oh, the punches he pulls; there's some rot in the attic, people; war crimes in his head earlier today).

That said, beating Vancouver the way the Timbers did last night, and at the end of this season, shares more than a couple things with the super-villain's Super-Spy Death Trap. Timbers fans have studied its shape and structure for months now. Over time, they came to understand that the mechanics of the Timbers machine is overly complex, it has too many goddamn parts – and most of those don’t ever seem to fit together right – and it took far too goddamn long to function well, never mind as promised. And yet, isn't that glorious, mangled contraption working like gangbusters right now? I mean, holy shit, the goddamn thing works!

Timbers Draw Vancouver: Expectations Managed

Dear World: You're welcome.

Before getting into the meat of this thing, I want to state that I will post some thoughts on the first legs of the other three MLS Conference semifinals. It's only the mini-games for Montreal Impact v. Columbus Crew and Seattle Sounders v. FC Dallas. I sat all the way through DC United v. New York Red Bulls...of which I could say I have no regrets, but...

While we're on the mini-games, something struck me as I reviewed the (limited) tape for the Portland Timbers goal-less draw against the Vancouver Whitecaps. They're funny things, the mini-games, in that they inflate the competence and calamity of any given game. Don't know why that never hit me till today, but, yeah, that's a pretty distorted lens in the end. Have no goddamn clue how I'll adjust to that next season.

Wait, they're also the opportunity to pick up on little things one might have missed – e.g. because I watched the game with muffled sound, I didn't know that Taylor Twellman and Adrian Heath spotted a naked tricyclist in Portland last night. Ah, shine on Rose City, you crazy diamonds. I also missed how Madden-esque Twellman has become (e.g. obsessed with his own sometimes trivial fixations at time; see, potential concussions and theories on the state and presence of Steven Beitashour's wedding ring). There's a certain charm to it, really, Anyway, the game. The game, the game...

At least three people today told me that they were satisfied with the result, again the goal-less draw that, let's face it, anyone reading this post watched earlier today. Once one takes in all the factors – injuries/ailments to Diego "Mystery Ailment" Chara and Adam "Flu" Kwarasey, respectively, as well as a sometimes visible lack of rest (for some more than others) - that's a damned hard position to argue against. And I don't intend to argue against that, so much as to drag the result back to a kind of cold, neutral perspective. Because, to be clear, today's draw would pop little beads of sweat into Timbers fans' brows, and rightly so, under virtually any other set of circumstances. And so begins today's tale of acceptance...

MLS Week 28 Review: Blow-by-Blow, Team-by-Team

Our interns, hard at work.

As regular readers know, we at C & C Labs (Conifers & Citrus Laboratories, LLP) experiment continuously with framing, formatting and concepts, all with the long-term goal of presenting the perfect readable post. Yes, we've laid some mutant eggs – let us not forget...well, shit, already forgot it, apparently, but, suffice to say, we've laid some eggs that the mother not only walked away from, but quietly pushed off a cliff. And she's right. Fuck those things.

At any rate, somewhere in the middle of spacing off during...again, I dunno, some game, we came up with another approach, this one involving a full-spectrum review of Major League Soccer review that taxes neither writer nor reader. And doesn't that sound...just nice? This is really straight-forward (for once): I frame every game that happened in the week just past and wrap it up in one of two ways:

1) I provide three talking points for each club for the games where I went the full 90; and
2) Just one talking point per team for each game where I only took in the 20-minute mini-game.

Nifty, I think, and clear, I hope. The "interest rankings" have been updated at right. So, let's get rolling.

MLS Week 28
It's pretty easy to frame the week as a whole: the clubs that look ready showed it by winning where and when they should. The clubs that didn't? Well, they choked, didn't they? Some more than others, too, but most begged questions along the way. In the former column (winners!), you've got Columbus Crew SC, New York Red Bulls, the New England Revolution, and, if you're stretching, FC Dallas. So, who blew it this weekend? How about the Houston Dynamo, the Seattle Sounders and...goddammit, the Portland Timbers. Yeah, we're in there...especially given what Orlando did to Sporting Kansas City just today. Jeez-and-Us. Then again, guess who else slipped? The mighty, mighty, almighty Los Angeles Galaxy. So the league condenses again!

On to the games, full 90 first!

Portland Timbers v. Sporting KC; already written up, and in some distress.

Timbers Review/Preview, Week 3/Week 4

Start running on those legs and kill! KILL!!

This past weekend, the Portland Timbers choked a draw out of Sporting Kansas City. This coming weekend, they travel to the Great White North to kick off the Cascadia rivalry/fronting for 2015 against the Vancouver Whitecaps. (And, curse my wretched lot, I am going to miss this one, at least the live broadcast. Life, you see.) As always, let's start talking about what will happen by looking back at what happened last week.

So, that KC game. Was it two good, albeit colt-legged, teams canceling each other out (per the SBI podcast) or just a flat-out disappointment (per ExtraTime Radio)? Personally, I prefer to think of it as proof of the theory that it's easier to stop goals than to score them. In that vein, the one area of agreement was that Portland's defense held up pretty well. And that's pretty much it for meaningful happy talk. Coherence and creativity neither started, nor brought relief off the bench. Per my review, I felt Sporting stifled the usual suspects in Portland's attack, especially on the right, which could explain why I was able to single out Dairon Asprilla and Alvas Powell for the faint praise I offered. Anyway, the only person I came across who felt much of anything by the end of this...well, wet turd, was Back Office Gavin, who found inspiration somewhere in there to rage against pragmatism.

A sliver of a novel talking point emerged when one of Stumptown Footy's people dubbed Liam Ridgewell his Man of the Match. Nothing wrong with that, but I keyed in on Nat Borchers, if only for winning a pair of foot-races toward Portland's goal against KC's Dom Dwyer (which surprised me, actually; is Dwyer that slow, or is Borchers faster than I thought?). Visibility means good things or bad when it comes to defenders, but I was most interested in what all that said about the nature of Ridgewell's and Borchers' partnership, and how it normally functions. While it's almost certainly still a work in progress, I had assumed that Ridgewell would be the guy stepping to the play and Borchers the one laying back and reading – and those foot-races suggest Borchers as a last line of defense. Anyway, call it something to watch and, maybe, hold one’s interest during one of those inevitable slow games.

MLS Review, Heading Into Week 2 (my only rhyming title of 2015!)

Well, there you go. Portrait of the Artist....

OK, heading into CBA Year 1, Week 2 of Major League Soccer. As noted in previous posts, for the sake of wallet and liver, I'm going to try to forgo the nationally broadcast games, because those require bars. It's all MLS Live 'round here, except when it comes to Portland Timbers' games. Fortunately, MLS Live's slate isn't too shabby this weekend.

This passes on some thoughts on things in Week 1 and after – and it's mostly after. Or looking forward. That might change going forward, but that's for next week or never.

1. Week 2's Marquee Match-up
The schedulers didn't make it easy, but I'm going with Columbus Crew SC v. Toronto FC. By all accounts read or heard, Columbus took it to the Houston Dynamo, in spite of the loss, while Toronto clawed back with smarts, guts and, in fairness, a big payroll, against the Vancouver Whitecaps on the road. Call it a match of depth and breadth versus the big names, a chance for the old guard to take on the newest iteration of the new guard. Honorable mentions, well, shit, they abound: FC Dallas v. Sporting Kansas City; the New England Revolution's opportunity to rebound versus New York City FC's shot at legitimacy. (Insufficient detachment bars me from nominating Portland v. Los Angeles Galaxy; I'll refrain till Portland clears some unspoken threshold. It probably says enough that I can't wait to see how Vancouver rebounds against the lowly, loathed Chicago Fire...that's down to Portland playing Vancouver in a few weeks.)

2. Corrections Department Opening in Orlando
So...in my first wrap-up of Week 1, I called Orlando’s draw "lucky." OK, yes, they were lucky to equalize, but the consensus of my shrinking pool of sources generally credited the Floridians with the better game on Sunday. Turns out it catching only the second half warped the perspective a little. That's not to say that Orlando doesn't still have to prove it. They do. It could be that they have less to prove than I figured, at least.