 |
| It can also be a soft, cushioned lie. |
I want to start with a question: if you’d never seen people
play soccer before, how would you know that, say, Bayern Munich, or glory-days
Barcelona FC were good-to-great teams? On one hand, sure, if you watched 90
minutes of a game and just followed the reaction of the crowd (even on the
simplest level of hearing the elation that follows a goal), you’d understand
those teams to be better than their opposition…
…but if you don’t know the quality of the opposition, all
you could really say is, “that team in the blue and red vertical stripes sure
looked better yesterday! Do you like your blorpduckle with a splooge of kepetzal?
(That’s me doing alien cuisine, the point is I’m an alien observing a soccer…never
mind.)
For as long as I’ve followed FC Cincinnati this season - and
period that started with the June 9th road win against North Carolina FC,
and includes everything up to tonight’s surprisingly (probably?) tight 1-0 home win over Penn FC, but not last week’s draw against Nashville FC (busy) and the
friendly, because fuck friendlies, if you can prevent a player from skiing,
they shouldn’t play exhibitions by the same logic, but I digress. (Also, for
the curious, here’s my origin story as relates to FC Cincinnati, aka, I come by
this semi-honestly.)
Over that period of time, FC Cincinnati has generally looked the better team on the field in those games
(for the record, this is now my 8th game, and I’ll work on the sidebar. someday),
and today was no exception. Another general trend: FC Cincy seems to take 15-20
minutes to come into a game, and today was no exception. The chances piled up
in the end, until Emanuel Ledesma - always the man most likely to - ricocheted
a free-kick off the back of the Lucky Mkosana (i.e., the ironically-named dreadlocked
dude who posed a moderate active threat for Penn FC tonight), and into the goal.
And that wasn’t even Ledesman’s best chance, because that came in the 54th
minute when he made space for himself and pounded a powerful lefty off the
post. Still, Ledesma scored the winner, as he has for much of Cincy’s 2018.
They’ve got players like that all over the roster too, attacking players
contributing steadily, whether it’s Danni Konig, Nazmi Albadawi, or even Corben
Bone.
