FC Cincinnati 0-0 Chicago Fire: What Should Have Been (And Are You Thankful?)

The only through-line.

Well, FC Cincinnati fans, that was the kind of game this team was built to deliver, a safety-first grind that put a wall of defenders between the opposition and your goal. It was effective to a point – Cincy got the slow-death 0-0 draw, didn’t it? – and it was entertaining to a lower point. It lacked for moments, clearly – see the abbreviated list of “highlights” – but it provided little gasps of drama here (e.g., the five-minute flurry by the Chicago Fire after the 60th minute) and there (the last 10 minutes), and either team could have taken it…

…it fits the 2019 season for both teams that neither of them did. Still, if I had to hand out a trophy, it would go to FC Cincinnati, who had the lower bar of achievement to leap over. At this point, Cincy can only tie the single-season record for losses. Can I get a "what what?" or “huzzah” or something?! (What is the sound of enthusiastic Ohioans?)

There’s not a lot to unpack, fortunately, because I’ve got a maddening match to watch in just over an hour (go, Portland!), so I will keep this really brief. The Fire remains three points behind the New England Revolution, the only team in the Eastern Conference they have any chance of leaping over – and the Revs have a game in hand. With allowances for miracles, I’d call their chances doomed in every sense but the mathematical. Cincinnati, of course, has nothing better to do than to pick up as many scraps of their dignity as possible before the season ends. Their only real loss on the afternoon came when Kendall Waston picked a suspension in the next game for that bullshit yellow card on Nemanja Nikolic. Waston’s elbow grazed Nikolic’s chin at most, and Cincinnati still has avoiding the single-season record for goals allowed to play for.

To wrap up Chicago, they looked the better team throughout, but barely. Their best attacks came mostly from early crosses (so many crosses, and when the crossed to Cincy’s defense once it condensed, forget about it), and Maikel van der Werff and Matthieu Deplagne cleaned up the worst of those. Przemyslaw Frankowski and Nico Gaitan did their best to keep them going, but it was pretty damn headless, or Cincinnati’s defenders made it so. If I had to pass on anything from Chicago’s performance to pass down to the youth, I’d go with Bastian Schweinsteiger playing out of pressure; so composed, even elegant, that everything around him looked a little Keystone Cops. The biggest shocks included how far Aleksandar Katai has regressed and the fact that Chicago can’t field anyone better than Brandt Bronico. More than anything else, the Fire needed a player to put his laces through the ball. They never found him, or he never found the ball. Moving on...

Montreal Impact 0-1 FC Cincinnati: Taking Care of (Super-Belated) Business

Elvis would be super-belatedly proud.

I won’t pretend that was enjoyable. My phone became infinitely more interesting around the 20th minute, but I more or less hung in there (hanged in there?), with allowances for prep-cooking and my cat doing something vaguely interesting. FC Cincinnati was reasonably good for its 1-0 win over the Montreal Impact. In Montreal, too. I’m not sure that matters, because neither of these teams has a future that extends beyond October 6.

When Allan Cruz stabbed that lucky bounce home about halfway through the first minute, the only relevant question became whether Cincy could hold out for the 90+ minutes ahead (also, against pretty much anyone). Cincinnati answered by clogging the middle with a low-block, which L’Impact got worse at figuring it out as the minutes ticked higher. They found Orji Okwonwko on the weak-side a couple times in the first half, but he was offside or sloppy in the defining moment, and things generally descended into hope-and-a-prayer crosses by the end of the game, Ignacio Piatti looking about a month too early (for him) and too late (for Montreal), and a lot of aimless possession by Saphir Taider and Samuel Piette. Montreal never looked particularly threatening, so…yay, Cincinnati!

Cincinnati ground out this game and, based on the attack last night, and recent games generally, that looks more or less like the entire tool-kit. They don’t have an attacking upside to save them. Even with most of the season gone, you still see Cincy players make runs to the same space (Darren Mattocks is freakin’ awful about crowding the left), and don’t even get me started about transition – e.g., at least two breaks forward, and with numbers in Cincinnati’s favor. In both those moments (and maybe a couple others), the runs came straight out of a family Thanksgiving Day “Turkey Bowl” after “first dinner” and the first fifth of whiskey, and the final pass referenced neither run, so, no, I wouldn’t call transition Cincy’s long suit either.

They scored first, though, and that’s all that mattered last night. Well, that and Przemyslaw Tyton pawing away a rare, truly clean shot on goal by Montreal. Had that gone in – or even had Joe Gyau’s stumble into Bacary Sagna been called as a PK (I would have called it) – Cincinnati could have drawn, or, god forbid, lost this game.

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.

Columbus Crew SC 2-2 FC Cincinnati: Hell Is Full of Mistakes

The caption reads, "epic butt goal." On par.

Since I'm a day late at least, and since everyone who cares to knows that the first “Hell Is Real” match ended with FC Cincinnati drawing Columbus Crew SC 2-2 in Columbus (wee victory!), I’ll rein in the usual narrative excess and just spit out some bullet points. Here goes:

- This was a bad result for Columbus. Leaving the closest thing you get to free points in MLS on the table puts them where Cincinnati has been since the middle of the summer – i.e., thinking about 2020. Moreover, they throttled their own modest momentum.

- One last note on Columbus: they’re surprisingly wasteful. An uncomfortable quantity of their forward passes end as unfinished thoughts and they resort to the pointless cross too willingly. And yet, even when they do getapileofchances to put away the game (see the link under "a" for the most egregious and heave out another sigh of relief) and stay in the conversation for seventh in the East*…let’s just say I could hear the choking sound all the way over here on the West coast and a day and a half later.

(* aka, the only open conversation left to the teams below the playoff line in the Eastern Conference, as I see it.)

- Every goal in the game followed from a clear defensive lapse. For starters, I’d argue Pedro Santos’ goal was nothing more or less than a beautiful ending to a bad play – i.e., Cincinnati’s failure to manage a quick restart (and I’d put real money on Santos missing that shot 8 times out of 10). As for the rest: Maikel van der Werff had no reason to nudge Gyasi Zardes off the play; Columbus gambled so hard on covering Kendall Waston that they left Darren Mattocks free for Cincy's first; and Roland Lamah’s cross had no business finding Emmanuel Ledesma through that crowd (but nice run by Mattocks on that play, even if he didn’t finish it). These are the things that happen to bad teams.