Columbus Crew SC 2-2 FC Cincinnati: Hell Is Full of Mistakes

The caption reads, "epic butt goal." On par.

Since I'm a day late at least, and since everyone who cares to knows that the first “Hell Is Real” match ended with FC Cincinnati drawing Columbus Crew SC 2-2 in Columbus (wee victory!), I’ll rein in the usual narrative excess and just spit out some bullet points. Here goes:

- This was a bad result for Columbus. Leaving the closest thing you get to free points in MLS on the table puts them where Cincinnati has been since the middle of the summer – i.e., thinking about 2020. Moreover, they throttled their own modest momentum.

- One last note on Columbus: they’re surprisingly wasteful. An uncomfortable quantity of their forward passes end as unfinished thoughts and they resort to the pointless cross too willingly. And yet, even when they do getapileofchances to put away the game (see the link under "a" for the most egregious and heave out another sigh of relief) and stay in the conversation for seventh in the East*…let’s just say I could hear the choking sound all the way over here on the West coast and a day and a half later.

(* aka, the only open conversation left to the teams below the playoff line in the Eastern Conference, as I see it.)

- Every goal in the game followed from a clear defensive lapse. For starters, I’d argue Pedro Santos’ goal was nothing more or less than a beautiful ending to a bad play – i.e., Cincinnati’s failure to manage a quick restart (and I’d put real money on Santos missing that shot 8 times out of 10). As for the rest: Maikel van der Werff had no reason to nudge Gyasi Zardes off the play; Columbus gambled so hard on covering Kendall Waston that they left Darren Mattocks free for Cincy's first; and Roland Lamah’s cross had no business finding Emmanuel Ledesma through that crowd (but nice run by Mattocks on that play, even if he didn’t finish it). These are the things that happen to bad teams.

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 1-1 Sporting Kansas City: The Car Is Running All Right, But Where Is It Going?

I mean, what does this dog actually look like?

Just to mention it, ESPN’s broadcast of the game played roughly two minutes behind real-time. That allowed me to catch wind of two of FC Cincinnati’s bigger moments – the penalty call that gave them their first goal, and Nick Hagglund’s late offside goal (um, how is that not in the goddamn highlights? Are you motherfuckers Billy Barring me?) – and now I know that knowing events two minutes in the future would improve nothing in my life. It washes out as existing in a state of suspended animation, really, which I don’t recommend.

As it happens, that’s a pretty good short-hand for the state of FC Cincinnati as a team. Every game they’ve played so far bore some kind of wrinkle. When they played both of 2018’s MLS Cup finalists, they faced shadows of last year’s editions – something that’s only become more apparent since. When they hosted the Philadelphia Union, the rain pouring on the field seemed to weigh on their shoulders just as much. Today’s 1-1 draw against Sporting Kansas City, meanwhile, was lousy with wrinkles. To begin, SKC started a clear second choice team, ignoring general, well-intentioned advice to “focus on the league” after eating five fist-fulls of shit in Mexico mid-week. (Watching SKC’s Johnny Russell at the end of the game, who went the full 90 in Monterrey, makes a solid case that Peter Vermes took the correct approach; poor bastard was gassed.)

The real wrinkles broke into the skin with the unfolding of the match itself; by the end, the oldest, saggiest human being on Earth would have looked at that and thought, “goddamn, get some Oil of Olay up in this thing, stat!”

Where to begin? Players for both teams pissed away perfect chances – Kelyn Rowe for SKC, Kekuta Manneh for Cincy – and on opposite ends of the game. Just….terrible goalkeeping gaffes led to both goals – a bout of confusion by Adrian Zendejas early in the first half (link above), then Spencer Richey reprised something terrifyingly similar early in the second (also, I’m not sure that Greg Garza didn’t poke the ball past Richey when he fell down). With the exception of FC Cincinnati’s first goal – which, as I saw it, came during a time when SKC had recovered from Cincinnati’s strong opening - game-states generally loosely tracked those events. The same goes for Hagglund’s unfortunately offside winner, which capped a late (again, you must release the video), ultimately futile rally by FC Cincy, and that leaves what might have been gasping for life on this game’s cutting room floor.