Orlando City SC 5-1 FC Cincinnati: On Showing Up to Work Drunk

Just gimme till noon (or Colorado). I'll rally....

Shit got dark in a hurry in that one, didn’t it? FC Cincinnati managed to play Orlando City SC even in a first half that offended at least three of the senses (but which three?); the low quality aside, that’s 45 minutes’ worth of earning a point on the road. There’s no denying that Darren Mattocks pulled Cincinnati’s one bright moment from some as yet uncharted hole of his ass, but the teams went into the locker rooms tied a 1-1.

It took less than a third as much time for Orlando to rack up three more goals, only one of them not built at least partially from garbage, and they game arguably ended with that, the Lions’ third goal. The hits (to the groin) kept coming, sadly, and FC Cincinnati walked out Orlando City Stadium with the biggest loss in its short MLS history. I’m not sure how a team goes about exorcising such a low-rent demon – e.g., would beating Orlando by the same spread in Nippert Stadium do it, or will it take getting beat just as badly by a better team? (do witch doctors charge hourly?) – but, when FC Cincy fans swap horror stories, I expect this one will come up now and again. Or until the mists of time swallow it and eclipse its memory…

On a personal level, I need to acknowledge the few blind-spots I had coming into the game. While I would not have known that a family emergency would take Roland Lamah back to the Ivory Coast (and I join everyone in hoping that ends well), I definitely slept more than I should have on injuries to Allan Cruz, Leonardo Bertone, and Fatai Alashe. Bad as that was (especially, Bertone, a player I rate in line up), it should have been clear that someone connected to FC Cincy had done something unholy when Greg Garza pulled up gimpy at the fifth (fucking) minute; two of those things happening is bad luck, but all three is clearly a curse, and I can only hope that a rigorous investigation and eventual spiritual purging will follow, because things simply cannot go on like this without some unacceptable number of seals breaking.

So, no, the “dodgy-sausage” line-up didn’t help, but even that leads to my first question about what really happened out there – and bear with me a little as I talk this out. As happened last weekend in Cincinnati against Montreal, Orlando looked just fucking awful out there. To pick on just one guy, Sebastian Mendez looked borderline incompetent every time he touched the ball; Cristian Higuita, a player I’ve seen dominate games, coughed up the ball over and over again. With these two games as a sample, I’m left wondering to what extent Cincinnati makes teams bad. If that’s what’s happening, that’s a good thing, if only in a practical sense (aesthetically, on the other hand, it is death). Honestly, the two teams involved (e.g., Orlando and Montreal (who drew New England in Montreal yesterday) muddle the sample by way of being terrible, but if teams keep looking awful against Cincinnati, that would be something at least. Thus endeth the silver lining.

FC Cincinnati 0-3 Real Salt Lake: A Night When Plan A Failed

No, FC Cincy, the voices are not friendly. Do not listen.

Well, that didn’t go well, obviously. Anyone who doubted the game was over after Real Salt Lake’s Albert Rusnak buried his 59th minute penalty (deserved; also, Jefferson Savarino is one of their guys), and his second goal of the game, should have disabused of any notions of a comeback by FC Cincinnati at the 65th minute when Alvas Powell picked up the ball and a head of steam and he carried it up the field…with somewhere between seven and eight Cincinnati players on the wrong side of the ball, i.e., behind him. Powell had to turn back inside Cincinnati’s defensive third to wait for everyone else to show up and, no, that’s not a good sign.

The rest of the game stretched out in a slow, frog-in-a-boiling-pot experience that ended the same way it started: Real Salt Lake three (3), FC Cincinnati zero (0). Then again, the whole thing projected as a depressing illusion because, even in their moments of dominance – at the start of each half, generally - Cincinnati created more corners than chances…which is factually untrue, but just barely, and also barely relevant. The one decent shot I remember FC Cincy getting – e.g., Allan Cruz’s header off Roland Lamah’s cross during the early, salad days – couldn’t have been their one (recorded, and seriously?) shot on goal, not least because it wasn’t on goal. Ah, hold on. Just remembered where the shot probably happened.

The match had a couple of turning points, but none as decisive as RSL’s second goal. Whether by accident or conscious decision (only The Shadow knows what goes on in the hearts of men), Cincinnati seemed over-eager to push for an equalizing goal after letting Salt Lake catch them off guard and against the run of play to score the game’s opening, game-winning goal. There was nothing irrational about giving it a shot, not with Cincy generally deciding what happened and where for most of the first half. It did, on the other hand, result in the home team getting caught too far upfield, with pants around ankles. The goal was all but scored when Savarino found Damir Kreilach just on RSL’s side of the midfield stripe, who would go on to complete the dissection from there. Kreilach played the ball to Baird on Cincinnati’s right and, in all the backward scrambling, Cincinnati’s three, final defenders pinched too hard to one side, leaving Rusnak free to set up the ensuing, fatal shooting gallery. It took RSL putting half their seven shots on target in a two-second span to score that second goal – a depressing spectacle, really – but that probably put three points beyond reach.

To pick up on what came back to me at the end of the penultimate paragraph, Cincinnati came as close to scoring as they managed all game (again. one. shot.) at the beginning of the second half, when one of their corners got highly interesting. That cracks open the door to what might have been, but only wide enough to where all you can see on the other side is darkness. Overall, though, Cincinnati could hold the ball and move it around, but they couldn’t take it anywhere worthwhile. RSL, meanwhile, took over the second half of each half (my work with legal descriptions comes through…), and found more ways to be lethal when they had the ball.

FC Cincinnati 1-1 Sporting Kansas City: The Car Is Running All Right, But Where Is It Going?

I mean, what does this dog actually look like?

Just to mention it, ESPN’s broadcast of the game played roughly two minutes behind real-time. That allowed me to catch wind of two of FC Cincinnati’s bigger moments – the penalty call that gave them their first goal, and Nick Hagglund’s late offside goal (um, how is that not in the goddamn highlights? Are you motherfuckers Billy Barring me?) – and now I know that knowing events two minutes in the future would improve nothing in my life. It washes out as existing in a state of suspended animation, really, which I don’t recommend.

As it happens, that’s a pretty good short-hand for the state of FC Cincinnati as a team. Every game they’ve played so far bore some kind of wrinkle. When they played both of 2018’s MLS Cup finalists, they faced shadows of last year’s editions – something that’s only become more apparent since. When they hosted the Philadelphia Union, the rain pouring on the field seemed to weigh on their shoulders just as much. Today’s 1-1 draw against Sporting Kansas City, meanwhile, was lousy with wrinkles. To begin, SKC started a clear second choice team, ignoring general, well-intentioned advice to “focus on the league” after eating five fist-fulls of shit in Mexico mid-week. (Watching SKC’s Johnny Russell at the end of the game, who went the full 90 in Monterrey, makes a solid case that Peter Vermes took the correct approach; poor bastard was gassed.)

The real wrinkles broke into the skin with the unfolding of the match itself; by the end, the oldest, saggiest human being on Earth would have looked at that and thought, “goddamn, get some Oil of Olay up in this thing, stat!”

Where to begin? Players for both teams pissed away perfect chances – Kelyn Rowe for SKC, Kekuta Manneh for Cincy – and on opposite ends of the game. Just….terrible goalkeeping gaffes led to both goals – a bout of confusion by Adrian Zendejas early in the first half (link above), then Spencer Richey reprised something terrifyingly similar early in the second (also, I’m not sure that Greg Garza didn’t poke the ball past Richey when he fell down). With the exception of FC Cincinnati’s first goal – which, as I saw it, came during a time when SKC had recovered from Cincinnati’s strong opening - game-states generally loosely tracked those events. The same goes for Hagglund’s unfortunately offside winner, which capped a late (again, you must release the video), ultimately futile rally by FC Cincy, and that leaves what might have been gasping for life on this game’s cutting room floor.

New England Revolution 0-2 FC Cincinnati: 1st Violin, 2nd Violin

I'll cut you. Bitch.

For all the unorthodoxies you’ll see down below, my primary take-away from FC Cincinnati’s 2-0 road win over the New England Revolution is fairly direct: I trust the roster construction.

Related, the heresy lingers around those roots.

To start at the beginning (feels natural), the only thing that surprised me about today’s result was how early and easily Cincinnati got up in New England’s shit. I expected a little deference, even though I didn’t see it as justified, i.e., see the Revs’ performance today, that’s not a good team at the mo, and may never be a good team so long as Brad Friedel holds the reins on their collective future, but that’s another topic for another post. All the same, anyone who looked at Cincinnati’s rebuild and saw a team that would spend its inaugural Major League Season punching out of the confines of a turtle’s shell would do themselves a favor by reassessing that theory. And, as pointed out by plenty of people (or just the ones I follow) on twitter, FC Cincinnati beat New England soundly with “starters” missing (this is a case where it’s OK to say, fuck the box score, seriously, ask a New England fan how much they value the edge in shots, corners, crosses and fouls).

It’s here that I admit that, until literally just now, I didn’t actually know who FC Cincy’s designated players are – but, for the record, Fanendo Adi and Allan Cruz. Both players missed todays’ game, and that’s where the $64,000 question kicks in: did you FC Cincinnati miss either player? Did you miss them (OK, yes, Cruz a bit; still studying)? What does the designated player really mean beyond the guy who gets paid more to play on the same team? For now, I’m treating that as both an open question and a gadfly for the Orange and Blue’s two DPs – i.e., if the team can win without you, how much does that “designation” really matter? But that, and the general concept of earning one’s place on a roster, rightly belongs as something to file away.

Now, for the specific heresy – honestly, I didn’t want to bury this, because controversy sellz – I’m not as geeked up on Kenny Saief as everyone else seems to be. And I’m talking about a reasonably healthy cross-section of FC Cincy fans and neutrals (e.g., MLS stringer Sam Stejskal). I’ll give him every manner of credit for his grass-cutting feed that Kekuta Manneh stabbed home for Cincinnati’s game-winning goal and, yes, he scored the insurance goal to boot…but it’s what he did between there and there that left me underwhelmed. First, Manneh owns Cincy’s first goal, and all the way down to his genuflection to (presumably) Mecca: he was the player who wrestled the ball up New England’s gut, found Saief wide open on the Revs’ right, and then continued his run under the decidedly unconcerned watch of New England’s Wilfried Zahibo (aka, proof that not all French players are either elegant or good). After that, in between a creditable right-time-right-place moment for Cincy’s second goal, I didn’t see much that set Saief apart from a clumsier version of an MLS-standard box-to-box midfielder. He under-hit obvious passes in momentum-killing ways throughout the game, lingered too long on the ball several times and, despite a period of 20-25 minutes when it appeared New England utterly failed to account for his presence on the field, he basically threw away at least two totally free runs up New England’s gut.