FC Cincinnati 0-0 Chicago Fire FC: 25% Game, 75% State of the Union

I'm guessing it wasn't as obnoxious, but who knows?

With FC Cincinnati posting another scoreless draw, I decided to do a little spelunking into what something like that looks like on the numbers side. Over the past five games - and this counts Wednesday night’s double-donuts result hosting Chicago - Cincy posted a total of 43 shots, with just 13 on frame. They hit their highwater mark against the Portland Timbers down in Orlando - twelve shots, five on goal - and their lowest against Columbus Crew SC, when they fired five shots, two of them on goal. Watching all those minutes has been...meds?

My much-abused memory tells me they attacked better than usual against Chicago last Wednesday night, forcing three big saves out of the Fire’s Robert “Mrs.” Shuttleworth, with Jurgen Locadia’s standing out as the nearest miss of the bunch. (There’s no select highlight for the shot Siem de Jong wailed over the crossbar, but I count that as Cincinnati’s most tactically-replicable chance created in the run of play.) According to the box score, they managed eight shots in all against Chicago, with three on frame, numbers that put them just under their five-game average for shots (8.6) and just over their five-game average for shots on goal (2.6).

While it’s no state secret that Cincinnati doesn’t create much for offense, those numbers are some combination of manifest and ever-so-slightly-fucking depressing. Off-season renovations to the roster made some kind of learning curve inevitable, but those numbers leave an obvious question hanging in the air: how does this get better?

To continue on a high note, I was delighted to see Cincy come and get after the visitors from Chicago - that goes double given the maddeningly passive approach they took when they visited Chicago (since I checked, they posted eight shots, just one on goal in that one). And, maybe had Maikel van de Werff nodded home Haris Medunjanin’s beautiful set piece (see above for link, first one; also, what the hell were the Fire defenders thinking on that one?), that would have forced Chicago to open up a little bit more…on the evidence above, however, I don’t have much faith that they would…

…also of note, Cincinnati has scored just one goal over the past five games and that was back in Orlando…which I miss in this weird way I can’t quite explain…maybe the “bubble energy” better matched the ambient, brittle weirdness of 2020, but who knows?

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...

FC Cincinnati 1-2 Vancouver Whitecaps: Life at the Bottom of the Barrel

Call it a figure 3 1/2.

FC Cincinnati lost 2-0 to the Vancouver Whitecaps at home last night in a game in which they did everything right and everything wrong in the same 90 minutes. They dictated the direction of traffic most of the night and produced twenty of chances (literally), only to get burned by a couple randos going the wrong way up a one way. The second goal they coughed up – i.e., the one that put the break into the bend – followed from the kind of failures an overload forces by design. When Ali Adnan (Jr.; hope that’s right) ran into the channel, he begged the question that FC Cincy failed to answer: who marks the fullback when he runs into the channel between the fullback and the centerback?

I suppose “random” better applies to Vancouver’s first goal, a long-range knock-back from a player (Hwang In-Beom) scoring just his second in Vancouver white. The real pisser is that Cincinnati fired plenty of credible shots toward the Canadians’ goal – e.g., Justin Hoyte’s corker in the opening couple minutes, Emmanuel Ledesma’s near-post sneaker, another one from Ledesma around the 57th (note how the name repeats), Mathieu Deplagne’s one-time attempt at a lob (off the crossbar), and even Leonardo Bertone’s late free kick that kissed the outside of the post – but it’s also worth noting that, of all those shots, at least three of them weren’t at actual risk of going in. If one wanted to explain this game by numbers alone, that 20/3 split between shots and shots on goal for FC Cincinnati finishes the thought that started with the possession/passes/passing percentage number. If there’s some alternate timeline where FC Cincinnati ran up the score on those chances, Darren Mattocks didn’t start in it.

And to think it all started so promisingly. In a preview twitter thread, I singled out Allan Cruz as a potential key to the game and underlined the general importance of Cincy being the first team to score. Cruz delivered as early as the first 5-6 minutes (fine, it was six; five just has a certain ring to it) by capping off a…reasonably well-executed goal (per the cliché, they all count). Cruz almost did it again at the start of the first half, but Maxime Crepeau made the save, and thus ended two promising starts to as many halves. Sadly, as just as some guy whose name I don’t remember and who I’m not about to dig deep enough to find (also, if you read this, claim it!), the tweet that argued that Cincinnati struggles to close out halves. Based on last night alone he (pretty sure) wasn’t wrong.

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 0-2 New York Red Bulls: Counting the Hands on Deck (on One Hand)

(The woman at the back senses what you're all thinking...)

I plan to start and end on the same talking point – i.e., questions personnel. First, what can a team do when its heretofore most reliable player makes a catastrophic mistake? FC Cincinnati’s shot at three points went out the door when Kaku found the ball that Mathieu Deplagne lost between his legs (dude. look down.) and slotted it past Spencer Richey. That wasn’t the only decisive moment yesterday – think what might have been had Luis Robles got a little less hand to Fanendo Adi’s header – but it came late enough in the game, and with things rolling fast enough downhill, for Cincinnati to rescue Deplagne’s error. Again, that’s one of your more reliable players…

‘Twas an ugly game, one that ultimately ended in a 2-0 loss for FC Cincinnati. The New York Red Bulls scored a second goal (1 + 1 = 2!), but that was just a little dunking that made the game read a little more lopsided than it should have. The Red Bulls were visibly the better, more talented team but that translated more to moving the ball forward than chance creation. Cincinnati created more shots – e.g., Adi had (and failed) a one-on-one test of his own – and that made this a game that could have ended either way…but you’ll have to move to an alternate universe if you want a happy ending…you think Alan Koch still coaches in that universe? (Nah…)

There isn’t a lot to analyze after that. New York tends to turn games ugly, and that bogged down large chunks of the game in a series of close-quarter wrestling matches over the ball. It wasn’t a permanent neutral, but neither team passed well (or often, for that matter) – which is to say, the Red Bulls have nothing to gloat about (and this performance makes me want to dial back talk of escape velocity for them; New York is grinding out wins, not designing them). They put two shots on goal and both of them went in, end of story. Before that point, they wandered aimlessly in the attacking wastes and survived the odd scare from Cincinnati…hold on…

I want to pause to bitch about the utility of the shots/shots on goal stat. At some point in the second half – a moment The Mothership didn’t think to add to the highlight reel – Adi and Roland Lamah combined on a solo raid that ended with Lamah getting the ball inside the Red Bulls’ penalty area. New York shut down his first look, but Lamah spun out of it and got free for a shot. He missed, obviously, and the ball rolled wide of the whole damn net. Still, that was, 1) a good chance, and 2) one of the worst looks for New York’s defense all night. And yet, according to the numbers, one of Cincy’s best chances shows up as one of its six shots off target, more fuck up than opportunity, and that's backwards.

FC Cincinnati 0-2 Philadelphia Union: Alternate Timelines & Lassoing Metaphors

They do dress better over in that timeline...

To start with a notice from the Department of Corrections/Over-Reach: my preview tweets suggested that FC Cincinnati might benefit from the Philadelphia Union playing in a 4-4-2 diamond. Nope.Oh, and before getting rather existentially into the weeds below, I don't intend any of what's below to stand as "what it all means" judgments about FC Cincinnati, or their larger fate in 2019. If anything, this loss complicated all that.

If you missed the Philadelphia Union’s 3-0 win over Columbus Crew SC, you caught a fairly linear encore with their 2-0 win over FCCincinnati. It featured the same feeling of suffocation, of no way to keep the ball going where your team wants it to, and no thorough way of keeping it away from where they don’t. It seemed like Philly won every 50/50 ball, that they always had a player where they needed one to be and, even when it was one lone Union player that had to perform in order to keep bad things at pay, that player performed.

The Union had a better afternoon on the slippery turf of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium, pure and simple. That left me more curious than usual to see how that game looked according to the box score, and FC Cincy’s tiny handful of shots feels like the number to highlight – even more than Philly firing off three times as many (and, just to note it, the duels/tackles data says the Union didn’t win every 50/50, and that says something about the function of perception). To hang a frame on it, this was the performance that critics of FC Cincinnati’s roster build expected to see in 2019, present company included. And, after yesterday’s loss, I mean that globally: expansion teams are supposed to look out of their depth, lacking in polish and sophistication, and on both sides of the ball. And that brings me to the Union’s second goal.

Matthieu Deplagne has impressed me as much as any player on FC Cincinnati’s roster; I’m also a Forrest Lasso stan going back to last June, think the world of the big lug and his upside, etc. And yet, examining the anatomy of that goal reveals that both players fucked up in that moment – Deplagne with his clearance-in-two-minds that dropped the ball at David Accam’s lurking feet, Lasso for biting on Accam’s cut eagerly as the world’s dumbest trout. Mistakes happen in these decisive moments (when mommy and daddy love each other very much, this is how goals happen, etc.), but that split second in time captured the macro-trends of the larger contest: the Union forced Cincinnati to do things…sub-optimally all game long. For the just the second time in 2019, FC Cincinnati looked like the out-classed expansion team.

Atlanta United FC 1-1 FC Cincinnati: Is It Still a Magic When You Can See the Strings?

If there's no body, it's just people standing around....

Full disclosure: I was fixing a flat on my bike during the first half of Atlanta United FC v. FC Cincinnati. For those wondering, no, it’s not a fixee.

Counter-point: if you pull up the MLS App’s summary for the eventual 1-1 draw and check the timeline, you will see very few dots on the thin grey line that corresponds with that time period. Don’t think I missed much, in other words (and, holy shit, do I need bifocals). Here is what I did see:

Two classic banks of four that looked solid, if not impenetrable. Heartening as it was to see that, my personal most heartening moment came with Mathieu Deplagne crossed the ball and Fanendo Adi nodded it home. A conspiracy of “rules” declared the goal offside (again, I would have allowed it*, this is how I roll), but that moment gives at least an answer to the question of whether Cincinnati can be competitive in 2019. Cincinnati did not create many chances overall (WARNING: the box score may cause depression; other side effects may include a burning sensation, mild psychosis, the runs and immediate death), but that move came during open play and, if you worry about the team surviving on set-pieces alone, seeing decent attacking play of any kind spells R-E-L-I-E-F.

Better still, Roland Lamah scored FC Cincy’s late, reasonably deserved equalizer in open play as well, and this is how one winds up with hot cockles (and helluva(n) assist by Kenny Saief!). Just to note it, Lamah looks better than I thought he would coming into the season. Also, the selected highlights on MLSSoccer.com come just one clip shy of showing every single one of Cincinnati’s chances in this game. Marinate on that for a minute.

(* To wrap up the offside thing, I had an interesting debate with a guy on twitter about this and, as conceded there, calling offside on a strict black-and-white system simplifies things for all concerned; and yet I would adjust the rule to read that, if a player is mostly on-side (say, 80% or more), the goal should count. The way I see it, players already have to adjust to the way any given referee calls a game, so what’s one more wrinkle? But I digress.)

The Space In-Between: Catching up on MLS, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati

Perfection is perfection, Mike Brady.

Major League Soccer’s offseason has lasted long enough for me. With an eye to keeping limber and toned, I’ll be tracking the league the same way I always do: once a week and from somewhere between a bird’s eye view and an airplane flight path. I will drill down on Thing 1 (Portland Timbers) and Thing 2 (FC Cincinnati) when there’s something to talk about with either – more on that below – but I’ll never see enough about any of the other teams to go granular on them. Fair warning.

Whether this starts a tradition or steps off from the wrong foot, I’m going to talk about MLS as a whole first – not least because the main point there applies to every team in MLS, including Thing 1 and Thing 2. (No, I’ll stop that right now…and has anyone ever done a version of that using penises for the “things”?)

When I read through (most of) Matt Doyle’s (aka, The Armchair Analyst’s) 2018 Global Review (which takes some time), two loose concepts kept surfacing: first, and most important, it gets a little easier every season for teams to lose touch with the pack in MLS, never mind the leaders; think your pudgier cyclists during the Tour de France. For those who journey through Doyle’s Labyrinth, you won’t read a naked and proud positive about any team until you get to the Number 18 spot (of 23 MLS teams), where he notes that Mauro Manotas balled out for the Houston Dynamo in 2018, scoring 25 goals across all competitions. The teams below Houston’s playoff-dodging squad are 2018’s pudgy cyclists – e.g., your San Jose Earthquakes, Orlando City SCs, the Colorado Rapids, the Chicago Fire, Toronto FC – the squads who put one foot in front of the other here and there last season, but never enough to really be part of the playoff conversation. Doyle used a really clean call-response to sum up Orlando’s season, but the same applied to them all (and Houston, honestly, and probably Minnesota United FC too):

“DISAPPOINTMENT: The whole season, really.”

Still, one team underlines the point about falling behind better than the rest: San Jose. They ended 2018 the worst team in MLS, none of their signings returned on investment, the head coach, Mikael Stahre, never really settled in and got yanked before the end of the season (having built no confidence), and Chris Wondolowski aged another year. Shit was bleak, basically, even if admirably scrappy. San Jose also won the Supporters’ Shield in 2012 with a sound defense and a set of brawlers for forwards. The league moved on, the ‘Quakes fell behind, and, despite some effort (but….the world’s longest outdoor bar?!), they haven’t yet figured out how to catch up. Every team in MLS: This could be you. You don’t want this to be you, so don’t let it be you.