San Jose Earthquakes 1-0 FC Cincinnati: A Hopeless Hat Looking for a Hook

Not always productive...

Several key numbers express what happened in FC Cincinnati’s 0-1 loss to the San Jose Earthquakes last night. Among them?

When Major League Soccer’s tech/video stooges condense games, they typically find 20 minutes’ worth of worthwhile footage. The condensed game for San Jose v. Cincinnati ran under 15 minutes.

The ‘Quakes’ Cristian Espinoza got sent off for a (soft) second yellow card (on his part; make it worth the time, son) at the 51st minute. That left FC Cincinnati 40 minutes’ with a man up.

FC Cincinnati put three shots on goal, two of ‘em after Espinoza’s sending off (and both by Fatai Alashe, I believe), so maybe the solution for Cincinnati involves somehow arranging to always play a man up? I’m just saying, have they tried it? Just asking questions over here, people.

For all concerned, it felt like neither progress nor regression, but, by ball that’s holy, ‘twas hideous. My short read goes something like this: when Espinoza left the field, the game went from one team having some capacity to make something happen out there (San Jose) to two teams flailing hopefully forward till the final whistle put fans and observers alike out of their shared misery. To clear up any potential confusion and/or inaccuracies, the ‘Quakes didn’t dictate the match by putting under pressure on or shots up against Cincinnati; they did, however, dominate possession for as long as they had 11 players on the field, and to an extent that made it impossible for the Orange and Blue to do anything with the ball, precisely because they never had the ball.

All it took for the ‘Quakes to collect these three fragile points was Nick Lima’s set-piece precision strike at the 22nd minute. Jackson Yueill’s two “shots” give a fair taste of San Jose’s attacking puissance (Kitten-Level, Unlocked!), and that says something about converting possession into chances or maybe less pathetic shots. All the same, I’ve seen Earthquakes teams look effective and smart with the ball, but I’ve never seen one look that comfortable playing eternal keep-away. It took a lot of movement to make it work – enough to make me wonder whether they’d fade – and it did work, and maybe that's Matias Almeyda's system in action. From the second Cincinnati lost control or turned over the ball, San Jose would take hold and shuttle it around for a few, often as if they had no particular destination in mind (much like drivers in Hillsboro, Oregon, who I hate with the heat of 1,000 suns.)

USA 3-0 Panama: Perfectly Adequate, Utterly Undramatic

There are many fruit-based comparisons available, but this one is mine.

I'll start with this: if you've missed Major League Soccer during the offseason, the U.S. Men's 3-0 win over Panama should have scratched that itch. Even going beyond (MLS-exclusive) personnel, that match came as close to, say, Columbus Crew SC pushing around, say, the Colorado Rapids as you're likely to see outside the real thing (yeah, yeah, the latest edition ended differently, the three points wound up in the same column). Better still, it all held up, all the way down to the U.S. fucking around with fire inside its own defensive third; pure Gregg Berhalter that, the high-risk, high(?)-reward of playing out of the back...god knows what a more accomplished national team than Panama will do with that high-wire act.

Credit where it's due, though: even if Panama put a couple chances on the American goal (I'd call Abdiel Arroyo's near-self-assisted goal they're best look), the U.S. never looked worse than strained - pretty much exactly what one would expect from a U.S. C-team playing Panama's B/C team. For what it's worth, I'd argue Panama ceded possession more than the U.S. maintained it, but the beginnings of something good lurk in that detail. Whether or not the Central Americans played to practice defending deep (who's to say?), their relative comfort on the ball when they had it stands as the only real warning sign I picked up from Berhalter's first outing as U.S. Men's coach. It's hard to lose sleep over that because, if a game between the U.S. and Panama's A-Teams is an apples-to-apples comparison, this was tangerine-to-tangerine, and nobody really starts its tangerines in the games that matter. Still, it was good to see the tangerines have their day. The question is, how many will one day become apples? (And...thus ends the fruit analogy.)

I'll get to that, but I want to flag one deeply and personally satisfying shift from the Jurgen Klinsmann era to tonight. In his post-game comments, Berhalter made a very clear point in directing a question about what coaching his first game for the U.S. Men meant to him (from a notably close-talking Sebastian Salazar) to praise for the players. If he follows this up by taking full responsibility for the first crushing loss, Berhalter will get a solid year of slack from me. Now, back to the tangerine thing...

A fairly constant stream of chatter plays under friendlies like this, one that acknowledges that the "real starters" wait in the wings to take over when the real games come to town. Anyone who wants to change that equation has to stand out - and several players did that for the U.S. Men tonight, including the San Jose Earthquake's Nick Lima's balls-out tackle and next-level cross to pick out Walker Zimmerman for the U.S.'s second goal; or just everything Zimmerman did with his head all day long (that he might be better with his head than he is with his feet speaks volumes about how goddamn good he is with his head); there was also Jonathan Lewis' nifty change of pace against [Panamanian fullback] (sorry!) to set up the U.S.'s third goal; which went to Christian Ramirez who, in his few minutes on the field, managed to play a cleaner, striker role than Gyasi Zardes managed all night and, golly, did anyone else feel the weight of Taylor Twellman going after Zardes' game? Jinkies....