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| No, it's "Corben." "C-O-R-B-E-N," |
Are your favorite goals individual or team? I ask because FC
Cincinnati scored one of each - the former by Fanendo Adi, the latter by Corben
Bone - on their way to resuscitating a 4-3 win at home against an eternally
gasping Toronto FC II. I’m Team Bone because I feel like team goals are more
replicable than solo flights, they make teams feel more like, y’know, a team,
and there’s just…something about pulling a defense apart by running and
passing. (For me, that’s soccer at its best.) Don’t get me wrong: Adi’s goal
was a whole lotta something, one of those moments where a player puts it on
himself to make something happen. (You can find that, and reference for
everything that comes below at The Match Center.)
The downside: FC Cincy needed both of those goals, and more,
to beat a team that has lost twenty one (21) times in this 2018 season. On the
plus side, FC Cincy has players capable of turning a game all on his lonesome.
Birthday Boy Bone (googled that; results above) would score the winner in this
one, but it really is remarkable that Cincinnati would need as many as four
goals to beat a team as bad as TFC II, aka, the only team already out of the United
Soccer League’s playoffs. (Actually, now that I’m looking, they’ve now been
joined by the Richmond Kickers, Seattle Sounders FC 2, Tulsa Roughnecks FC, and
Rio Grande Valley FC, though, mysteriously, not Las Vegas Lights FC, who are
factually beneath Rio Grande in the standings, but who also have a game in
hand, but doesn’t that still look like inoperable cancer for Las Vegas Lights
FC? Why dick around with the whole “mathematically eliminated” charade. This is
when, people, not if. That patient is dead. Moving on…because life is for the
living…)
The other remarkable thing about tonight’s (narrow) win:
Cincinnati hasn’t allowed three goals against any team going back to June 27 – when
they allowed three goals to the same TFC II team. It was a step in an
unfamiliar direction for FC Cincy’s defense, because, whether they’ve paired
Forrest Lasso and Dekel Keinan or Lasso and Patrick Barrett, the team’s central
defensive pairing generally gets along like steak and chianti, controlled,
classy, just hugging every taste bud, etc. There is, however, sub-plot to that,
an asterisk hanging at the end: TFC II’s Tsubasa Endoh scored each goal in his
hat trick from several yards beyond the lands where central defenders roam;
even his third, closer goal came from a place where you’d want a midfielder to
shut him down, not a defender.
