Getting Reacquainted with the New England Revolution, MLS's Maids of Honor

To the queen in blue: you are seen, you are beautiful.

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I moved to Boson in 1998, the same season I consciously uncoupled from DC United (successful teams don’t challenge you enough as a fan) and embraced the New England Revolution. The Wooden Spoon stung their bums for the one and only time in their history at the end of that very season. Fortunately, for both me and them, New England became one of the first teams to crack the post-contraction code and that made them the Second Most Menacing Team in MLS for pretty much every season between 2002 and 2007. To be clear, not all of those MLS Cup runs were created equal: with Taylor Twellman and MLS iron-man/assist-king Steve Ralston in the starting XI, the 2002 roster had the beginnings of the Revs’ real glory seasons, but it took additions like Matt Reis in goal, Michael Parkhurst and Jay Heaps leading the back line, plus Shalrie Joseph dominating midfield to transform the Revolution into a team that could win any given game. Throwing a team like that into the playoffs season after season (e.g., from 2002-2009) gave them plenty of chances to win it all. Which, again, they did not. To get a little personal, none of those losses kicked me like the 2006 final and, firmly as believe that spectator sports cannot deliver trauma worth even five minutes of therapy, I do consider that loss formative to how I “enjoy” soccer to this day (i.e., never get too close). The Revs’ history tells a familiar tale from there – you know the drill, players leaving the team one by one, new players coming in who don’t fill all of the hole left by the guys before them, a once-reliable coach sticking around past his sell-by date, etc. Several rough seasons followed, before the 2014 season rolled around. New England had made the playoffs the season before, sure, but they fielded not just a young team, but one that had mainly proved itself IN MLS. It started with Andrew Farrell in defense, but continued up the spine with Scott Caldwell in central midfield and Kelyn Rowe and Lee Nguyen running the midfield. That basic line-up got a boost of nitrous in the person and personality of U.S. Men’s National Team adoptee, Jermaine Jones, who came in as a late-season addition and girded every loin he could bark into shape. And all of those budding youngsters promised a brighter future…until they very abruptly didn’t. The Revolution sulked back into the wilderness for fives seasons after 2014 – I mean, they didn’t do shit – but caught up to the new way of doing things by 2021. Part of that relied on calling in new designated players – the (cliché alert) mercurial Gustavo Bou and one of MLS’s latter-day greats, Carles Gil – but the other half relied on spotting some of the best North American talent of the current generation – e.g., Matt Turner (goalkeeper) and Tajon Buchanan (full/wingback) lead that bunch, but Henry Kessler and DeJuan Jones are nothing to sniff at. That team benefitted from the wisdom of MLS Svengali, Bruce Arena, and leaned on a spine of some old-guard regulars – i.e., Farrell and long-time MLS-above-averager, Matt Polster, but it took a second generation of budding talent to lift the 2021 Revolution team to the then-best-ever regular season in MLS history. And, yes, that record was broken just three years later by an Inter Miami CF team that rode a smash-and-grab reunion to even greater heights. Only to run into the same dead-end that never stopped haunting the Revs. They didn’t even make the semifinals. Ha.

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.