Columbus Crew SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: A Light State of Disbelief

“It seems like once they give up a goal…”

I didn’t catch the name of Columbus Crew SC’s color commentator, but 1) she’s pretty good at her job, and 2) she summed up the state of play for FC Cincinnati’s 2020 in those few words. A season defined in less than a sentence.

Cincy is a limited team, without question. The only real question is whether they can be better with the current roster. I’d like to think so, but that’s without having any stirring ideas for rearranging the players in a way that makes them a more dangerous team and in a way that doesn’t leave the back-line for dead. With all that noted, I don’t like how Jaap Stam lined them up against Columbus yesterday - which, despite how MLS’s site mapped that for the prior game against Columbus, looked like the same thing to me. It looks…cluttered, I guess, in terms of going forward. I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. First, some notes on the game/0-3 loss for FC Cincy.

Did Cincinnati ever really look like scoring to you? Was there a moment you thought, “they’re getting closer,” or did the whole thing look like an exercise in holding on for dear life from the starting whistle till the final one? I mean, set aside the fact they didn’t put even one shot on goal (also, really?), obviously.

The way I saw it, it was possible to see the outlines of a goal-less draw, maybe even dream about a 1-0 Cincinnati win until somewhere around the 30th minute. From that point forward, and as happens when a better team plays a weaker on, Columbus started finding seams to spaces ever closer to Cincinnati’s goal. Having Darlington Nagbe around, doing his free-radical thing of unbalancing the defensive and collecting one foul after another in Zone 14, probably did as much as anything to force the slow unraveling, but Pedro Santos, Youness Mokhtar and, later, Luis Diaz joined in the “fun” of tormenting Cincy’s defense. The wheels came all the way off when Gyasi Zardes came on in the 62nd minute and couldn’t stop beating Cincinnati defenders to the ball. Had aliens watched that game, they would have applauded the amount and variety of probing.

New York City FC 1-0 Columbus Crew SC: Scouting One Half of Hell

Yeah, no.

The first thing you have to take into account when New York City FC squares off against Columbus Crew SC is the simple fact that NYCFC is better, player to player. Jonathan Mensah played a damned solid game last Saturday and, within the first half at least, he was Columbus’ one, and nearly only, key player. NYCFC’s Maxime Chanot, meanwhile, played imperious throughout. Hell, Alexander Ring stopped at least three attacks by lunging his foot at the ball and gaining position; there’s a movie analogy for this and I’m loudly dying inside right now because I can’t dredge it up. Honestly, NYCFC made the defensive plays look so easy that it hardly mattered they (mostly) ran out of ideas on the attacking side by game’s end.

Columbus, meanwhile, held fast to one burning idea in the first half: do not allow a goal, even if it means playing Eduardo Sosa as a defensive forward midfielder (no typo). NYC responded by putting up most of their chances (shots turned out to be generous) during that same half; they had a 10-plus-shot-to-dick advantage, a 70/30 possession edge as late as the 55^th minute, and the one goal they’d need to put away the game (sneaky little shit of a goal too). The game ended at a sleepy 1-0.

The Crew came out to play in the second half and it showed; maybe it only took trotting out one of their real regulars - Pedro Santos, the inheritor of the injured Federico Higuain’s duties. They created a couple chances, they pressed a little, and, in general, they stymied NYCFC. And that’s the other key detail: Columbus sacrificed this result to rest key players – e.g., they didn’t start Santos and neither Wil Trapp nor Gyasi Zardes played at all (take it from a Portland fan; starting David “Fucking” Guzman is pure desperation). Crew SC kept its powder dry for Sunday, so 1) don’t expect them to bunker for the first half against FC Cincinnati, 2) they clearly thought they had a better chance to get three points out of the Queen City, 3) they’re totally fucking coming for you like a shitty Liam Neeson vehicle.

With that said, here’s how Columbus is, or has been (that’s “bean,” the English pronunciation) over its last 10 games:

Columbus Crew SC 1-3 Portland Timbers: A Delightful Response...to Everything

Not the Wes Anderson-inspired image I imagined, but still solid.

For your own benefit, drop the phrase “or so it appeared” at the end of every sentence below, and send a thank you to the profit-grubbing partnership of Major League Soccer and ESPN for instituting a black-out policy that forced me to watch this game with one less eye than usual. (Which says so very much.) That’s your caveat for the post below and, crikey, I’ve never used the phrase “I’ll just fucking walk away” about soccer in my life. Well, except that one time I shut down this site. I really did forget about that…

That’s to say, the only version of the Portland Timbers’ 3-1 (three?) win over Columbus Crew SC was the 20-minute one, e.g., the condensed version available exclusively on the app I was compelled to download (GRUBBING BASTARDS! OK, it’s out of my system, but do insert the magic phrase after every sentence). With that, I’ll start to talk about the game…instead of cable TV’s cadaverous grip on what’s left of their profits…sorry. For real this time.

“Again, I really like the response from Portland.”

- Columbus Broadcast-Booth Guy, I think

I totally agree, Columbus Broadcast-Booth Guy! As much as I can only have a head-full of disconnected thoughts on this game, I was delighted to see every Timbers player flying into every 50/50, and in every frame. They didn’t play hungry, the played starved – as well they should have given the start. Even if this loss dimmed their star – perhaps more than a little – Columbus is a 4-3-1 team, with a 3-1-1 home record (no less significantly, do the math on the number of games the Crew have played at home). Given Portland’s record coming in – and their defensive record as much as anything else – this projected as a win for Columbus, maybe even a chance to knock a couple teeth out of Portland.

It went the other way, obviously. The question is why.