FC Cincinnati 1-1 Nashville FC: Hell, Yes, And to Hell with False Narratives

A lie, I tell you. A damned, dirty lie. Either way.

It’s rare that you have to wait that long for at least one person to fuck up during a penalty kick shoot-out, but that was in keeping with the game: tighter than a duck’s ass and, don’t worry, I won’t use that for the image. FC Cincinnati slammed the first decisive kick over the line, and they left tonight with their first playoff win in team history (seriously?). (Also, here's the Match Center for all of the details you want and more!)

Nothing should be taken away from Nashville SC, because they played a hell of a game. They even came damn near to fluking to victory by way of a looping oddball of a goal by Anthony Bourgeois. That erased Corben Bone’s far more attractive (can I call it sexy?) extra-time goal, the one that let me think - no, dream - that this game would end within the time allotted by The Founders (aka, 90 minutes). When the game reached the penalty kick shoot-out and Nashville couldn’t stop scoring…I don’t know. I’d prepared various parts of my body for some kind of inevitable, even if I can’t remember what parts guarded against which event. As one ball followed another into the back of the net and the inevitable drifted into the unimaginable…look, I’m glass half-empty as a motherfucker. I wasn’t expecting the best.

Curiously - or not, honestly - the glass filled over that invisible halfway mark when Kenney Walker stepped to the spot after Nashville’s Justin Davis skied his missed penalty kick into history. I trust Walker to piss ice water, and he did. Moreover, Cincinnati had just survived Forrest Lasso stepping to the spot just one kick before and - won’t lie - that worried me. I can’t explain why, especially when I rate Lasso’s foot-work higher than your average defender’s. Maybe it’s simple as a life-long bias against central defenders in attacking roles that don’t involve their heads. Whatever, I held my breath all the way through his wind-up, hands and arms wrapped around my head to keep…I dunno, something in. The doubts from spreading, maybe?

Seeing a man of technique like Walker stride forward, and a team leader to boot? I’d prepped for him missing but mostly out of respect for The Fates. Of course Kenney Walker buried it, and FC Cincy won the shoot-out, its first playoff win in team history, and the chance to keep dreaming of arriving in Major League Soccer with a trophy in the trunk.

Penn FC 1-2 FC Cincinnati: Consider Yourself...Boned!

My feelings are complex...

When you’ve watched soccer a damned long time, it’s nice to see something you haven’t before. It’s even better when that something plays footsie with absurdity, a la Tiago Calvano’s attempt to get into Danni Konig’s head and/or fuck with the ref’s request that the two players “kiss-and-make-up” early in the game. They need a different color card for this one…when Calvano actually went for Konig’s lips…in another setting, mandatory training would have followed therefrom. Damn.

It’s nice, in a sense, that Penn FC got at least a little of theirs back in this game, because they got…boned in this game. Not to get hung up on sexualized metaphors, but I didn’t come up with Corben Bone’s surname, and there aren’t a lot of verbs that better capture a player who had been theretofore invisible (Bone) stealing the ball from a dallying Aaron Dennis and curling in the game winner. That goal, when added to Emanuel Ledesma’s equalizer, lifted FC Cincinnati to a 2-1 road win over Penn FC, a result I’d call more unfortunate than unfair for Penn; or, FC Cincy’s side, fortunate…and still a little unfair. Not undeserved, mind, just unfair to Penn FC.

On the other hand, screw Penn FC because I wasn’t pulling for them. Still, my condolences. Man, it’s like there’s a devil in one ear and an angel in the other…moving on…

My notes from last night (at least the ones I can read; this was a late, second feature for me yesterday), the teams played fairly even game - and the numbers, read in the clearer light of morning, back up the impression (the link above takes you to The Match Center, aka, The World of Your Imagination). If they decided games by decision like they do in boxing, I could even be persuaded to call the game for Penn. (As my notes in the first half have it, and this is verbatim, “PEN has been better, but not much…meh; good on crosses, not great.”) That doesn’t matter, of course, as demonstrated/symbolized by the way (I think) Richard Menjivar had Cincy ‘keeper Spencer beat for a late Penn FC equalizer, only to have Forrest Lasso perfectly position to head away the shot.

If the game turned on anything in particular, I offer the old cliché, “that little bit of quality.” Cincy’s attackers fired more accurately at Penn’s Sean Lewis, and they forced great saves out of him - with Ledesman leading the list. There are also the kinds of players Cincinnati can call from its bench: it was Emery Welshman’s shot, after all, that Lewis spilled to Ledesma for the Orange and Blue’s first goal. If either Nazmi Albadawi or Kenney Walker changed the game, I missed it, but I do think that Welshman’s running, in terms of both speed and distance, might have given Penn the new look they finally couldn’t handle. And, again, Cincinnati has held that advantage all season - i.e., having real quality on the bench, as well as different varieties of it. Moreover, even if Albabawi and Walker don’t come on and change the game (for the record, still shrugging at that one), Cincinnati can rest almost all of their players without giving up much in quality - at least at the USL level. And that is a luxury…trust me on that one.

FC Cincinnati 1-0 Penn FC: Fanendo Adi's Rosetta Stone Qualities

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.

Nashville SC 0-0 FC Cincinnati: "Rivalries" and (Re-) Checking the Levels

No, I said "left" at Team Stats. LEFT!

Before getting to the game, I want to repeat something I said on Twitter. I am a Ronnie Woodard stan. She offered that rare commodity to soccer color commentary - i.e., talking cause, effect, and on-field mechanics, stuff it’s easy to miss when you’re watching through a screen - and with a quiet confidence. It’s something you don’t even know you miss after 20 years of listening to, say, a clown like Alexi Lalas express his love for set-pieces. To give just one example, she praised the play of FC Cincinnati’s centerbacks, Dekel Keinan and Forrest Lasso, on the way to damning Emanuel Ledesma, Danni Konig and Nazmi Albadawi for failing to defend enough. Basically, the lack of defense from the forwards made it easier for Nashville SC to find their attacking players in front of FC Cincinnati’s defense, and that put the latter under pressure for most of the night.

She could be wrong, but I still felt smarter. With that out of the way, I want to focus on another in-game comment from the broadcast booth, one pulled from some domestic soccer publication and with regard to FC Cincinnati:

“One of the most impressive teams ever assembled for a lower division American soccer club.”

To flip the script, what does that say about Nashville SC? The home team owned the balance of play and chances in last night’s 0-0 draw between these two teams - or at least until the final 10 minutes. If you go to this game’s “Match Center” (which is pretty one-stop shopping; check there for highlights) and to the “Distribution” tab under Team Stats, you will find the buried treasure…

…sorry, kidding. To give them credit, the USL website arguably puts up more complete data than Major League Soccer’s, but it takes a road map, plus a couple secret handshakes to find it. Back to the game…

FC Cincinnati 2-0 Ottawa Furr...shit, Fury: Good Ruler, Terrible Context

Another layer of meaning? Are you fucking kidding?!

Watching the replay of FC Cincinnati’s 2-0 win over the visiting Ottawa Furry…crap, Fury, begged more questions than it answered. Again, knowing as little as I do about the USL Mark 4.0 (maybe?) makes this project a little like staring at a ruler, only with no idea what it’s measuring. That said, based on the replay, and a growing body of FC Cincy games, I feel confident with the following statements:

Cincinnati clearly looked the better team, but not a dominant one; I described their first half as “a game of fitful probing.” That had everything to do with Ottawa’s defense, a compact organized bolus that tangled up just about everything anyone tried to move through it. That’s their M.O., according to the booth - playing compact and countering down Route One - but, with a losing score-line and a half-time pep-talk blowing a breeze up their backsides (maybe), Ottawa tried to play a little in the second half. That step improved the game more than Ottawa’s chances, with their best chance (from eight shots? when??) coming when team captain/avatar, Carl Haworth, nearly walked in a goal early in the second half. Ottawa is a goal-a-game kind of team - one of those pertinent details one can only find by piercing a layer of mysterious veils on the USL's official website (gateway to Ottawa/hell) - and it showed. Still, I upgraded them from “just no fucking idea what they’re doing” to…well, this, I suppose:

“Who is Cincy? When have I seen them on their game? When off? No sense that Cincy will seize the game and run away with it.”

Even if I barely remember what that meant, it feels pretty fair. That said, one thing I have noticed about Cincinnati is that they tend to find the game all at once - i.e., after 15-20 minutes of half-hopeless dicking around, they sneak in a half-chance, then, two, three minutes later, they put a better-than-hopeful shot in goal. They score more often than not too, nearly two goals a game. Hold on, need to back-track a bit for another note…

Not every player on the field plays this way, but USL Soccer feels closer to rugby, aka, soccer’s twice-removed cousin, because more of the passing looks more territorial than planned. Getting the ball nearer the opponent’s goal holds a thin, yet permanent edge over how it gets there, and that means half-blind, mostly aspirational headed passes and the balance of balls out of the back look like thinly-veiled clearances (wow, second veil reference…whatever have I been watching?) show up all over the field, and attacking means chasing forward passes into space more often than it means deliberate, defense-unlocking interplay.

Happily, both of Cincinnati’s goals worked against that generality - and the reality that Cincinnati has that in them makes as good a comment on the team as I’ve got. Both attacks came down Cincy’s left and both involved Corben Bone, an MLS journeyman who might have backed into becoming a USL journeyman courtesy of Cincinnati’s (so far) steady squad rotation. His career aside, Bone paired with Blake Smith, Cincy’s left-back, nicely as steak pairs with red wine. They combined for the first goal (with Smith providing the final ball), while Bone delivered the assist for the second, a cracking beauty fired back against the grain from just outside the area by Nazmi Albadawi. Between delivering the pin-point cross that let Albadawi kill off the game and pinging the pass that freed Blake for the cross, Bone played a decisive role in the win. And that opens up a couple discussions.

Toronto FC II 3-3 FC Cincinnati: It's What You Do at the Rodeo

You beat eight fucking seconds for starters...

OK, yes, it took reviewing notes from the prior two games to firm up some context (this is from the win at North Carolina, and this from the draw at home to Bethlehem Steel FC), but the handle I’ve got on FC Cincinnati’s performance feels reasonably assured…

…my grasp o the state and standards of the rest of the United Soccer Leagues, on the other hand…still working on getting the fingers where they need to go more maximum grip. For instance, I kept hearing comments on the narrow-shouldered youth of tonight’s home side, Toronto FC II - something that definitely factored into at least two of Cincy’s goals - but that same aw-shucks-ma’am gaggle of teenagers came back from two goals down to tie the gameat 3-3 (you should have highlights through that link by tomorrow morning). Moreover, TFC II kept Cincinnati wheezing under pressure for the final 20+ minutes, they generally played the United Soccer League’s Eastern Conference leaders even, and three or four of those players rather neatly stood out - that includes players who got regular shouts from the commentating booth, like Dante Campbell, Lucca Uccello, Ayo Akinola (scored one, too), and, especially, Malik Johnson - and with an assuredly desperate Greg Vanney and Tim (probably) Berbashenko (probably) in attendance. Coaches like character a little bit more than the next professional, and TFC II’s (probably) teens interviewed pretty nicely this evening.

It makes sense, obviously, to ask where TFC II sits in the USL East? Dead last, you say? The point FC Cincinnati gave them tonight pushes them to three big points on the season, one for every draw they rescued from being another of their 12 losses. That -20 goal differential sort of rounds out the picture of a game one has to think Cincinnati should have won. They didn’t. Jordan Hamilton saw to that, along with the rest of his (apparently) young team, only they didn’t do it with the same dizzying combo of power and finesse (if/when they get to the highlights, do stick around for Hamilton’s goal).

On Cincinnati’s end of things, how bad is this really? They’re still 3-0-2 in their last five (they kicked Richmond hard and true while I was away)), and, at 9-3-4, still atop the Eastern Conference, if with two teams in reach (Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC and Louisville City FC) per games in hand. (Is that English? Roughly? If not, check the USL standings). In that sense, most signs point to no. Also, consider that (again, per the broadcast), Cincy has four of their next five games at home (Nashville SC is their lone road game, and that’s with Ottawa (woo-hoo!), Tampa Bay Rowdies (um), Charlotte Independence (uh-oh), and New York Red Bulls II (um) on both sides of that). More to the point, because I started watching when I did, I don’t know the 9-3-4 team that lives on paper nearly as well as I know the 1-0-2 team I’ve watched over three games now. That team might have beat North Carolina FC, but they also suffered hot flashes throughout; the same team should have taken all three points against Bethlehem Steel FC just as surely as they should have stolen three points from TFC II today.

They didn’t, again, and now I’m interested. So, what went wrong?

FC Cincinnati 2-2 Bethlehem Steel FC: A Brand New Them (Dammit!)

Incredibly, I'm not first to that analogy.

This has to be quick. It’s late, I got all kinds o’ shit ahead in the next two days, etc. etc. etc. [Ed. – Disregard; I passed out in the pasta salad before I could post last night. Still I preserved most of the mess.]

Where to begin, usual caveat applies - e.g., this counts as my second, 90-minute game with FC Cincinnati - only with a twist - e.g., motherfuckers changed the whole damn line-up on me. I come from Portland, Oregon, people. Portland. It takes injury (and inexcusable) jogging to get knocked out of the Portland Timbers starting eleven. I’m used to almost pointless predictability in my line-ups, that’s all I’m getting at. Anyway, moving on…

FC Cincinnati cannot be happy with that game - i.e., the one where they broadly outplayed Bethlehem Steel FC from about the 15th minute, if with major ups and downs between that point and the end. (See here for all the stats and highlights on offer here; I'll try to find other sources going forward.) That game absolutely became Cincy’s for the taking after the 55th minute with the rather stupid sending off of Olivier Mbaizo, a Bethlehem defender(?) who tackled too hard and then couldn’t manage the slew of mini-provocations that followed.

Now, hold that thought, because a whole bunch of crazy crap happened roughly ten minutes after that sending off.

How to keep this short? OK, it took both teams a while to get rolling in the game, but FC Cincinnati generally took over when noted above, but Bethlehem still scored first, the cheeky bastards. That took a piece of raw persistence from Derrick Jones, someone Philadelphia Union fans should recognize (I think) and also definitely in the Top 3 players on the field tonight, but that also kicked the game into “give-a-shit” gear for both teams. Cagey switched to combative, to some extent. And that’s when things turned.

After Mbaizo lost too much of his shit to be ignored (he practically begged to be sent off), Cincinnati took advantage, even if it took 10 minutes to take advantage. Cincinnati’s two goals came within (roughly) one minute of the other, and they also followed from a sort of poetic justice. The guys who scored them - Russell Cicerone and Nazmi Albadawi - had been Cincy’s best players on the night, so seeing that rewarded felt good. Cicerone scored the prettier goal and he scored second, but the after-glow on that fucker got snuffed out under one minute later when Bethlehem’s theretofore invisible Fabian Herbers turned a short feed/burst of speed (relative to Cincinnati’s Jem De Wit) into Bethlehem back in the game. He leveled the score, and that’s where the game ended, 2-2, and with Cincinnati with the bigger disappointment.

North Carolina 0-2 FC Cincinnati: Mostly Groping Toward Understanding

Hell adjacent, but also a start.

First of all, I’m gonna fuck up some names. Second, I don’t really know this team, FC Cincinnati, either, because this was my first 90 minutes with them. A speed date, if you will. That said, I think I picked up a reasonable sense as to who does what on FC Cincinnati, or at least this specific version of their roster. Or against this specific opponent. Again, this is the first step to me knowing what I’m talking about, and give it a month or two.

Hold on, backing up: FC Cincinnati beat North Carolina FC 2-0 in the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees, North Carolina (that’s Cary, NC). They looked reasonable for the win, but North Carolina gave them plenty of breathing room by taking…just terrible shots, more around than on goal. And that “around” was very general. As noted in my catch-up post on FC Cincy, they have a decent knack for creating wide-open chances, and tonight was no exception. There, I’m thinking their second, more than their first: when Nazmi Albadawi found Emery Welshman in that much space on Cincy’s right, it isolated the (surprisingly nimble) forward against (I’m guessing) Carolina’s left-sided centerback, and Welshman sat him right on his can with a cut inside, fired the shot, and, boom, FC Cincinnati bags their insurance goal in the 87(-ish) minute, game very much over, and Cincinnati three points clear on top of the United Soccer League’s Eastern Conference. (Just five points behind Western Conference leaders Real Monarch SLC; also this puts Cincy level on points with Timbers 2, but with a game in hand.)

To step back still further, it’s sort of a trip starting with this team where I did - i.e., tonight - but I don’t think my personal experience differs so much from an “O.G.” Cincinnati fan. (Again) This team is two years old and counting, for fuck’s sake, and, at time of writing, I’m not sure how new or old any of these twits are to the team. For instance, Emanuel Ledesma, team points leader, came over from the New York Cosmos just this season. Russell Cicerone, the player who stood out most tonight, turns out he’s a rookie, an at least one-time MAC player of the year award, and, no, I’m not looking that up, because who cares what you did in college, kid, but damn good game tonight. You made that first goal, but, wow, didn’t Danni Konig literally wrestle that fucker home? And that was Cincinnati’s first goal. Also, when did Konig sign? Ah, just May 2017.

My point is, players can’t have deep roots with this team, because this team does not have deep roots. There is no “street cred” with this bunch. We’re all fucking newbies at this rodeo.

Now, to the game itself and what it told me about who does what, I absolutely insist on beginning with the statement that you can’t possibly know the tip of shit about a team by watching one game. There are too many variables involved - starting with the quality of the opposition (wait for it) - to allow any reasonable person to think he (or she) can make any kind of firm statement about any player, the tactics, or just anything about a team after just one viewing. With that firmly in mind, dig this…

Guys, I've Met Someone: On a New Team, Swinging, and the Solution to Everything

Just 2015? No shit?

I’ve always prayed for this day, without believing it would arrive. At long last (fucking long, guys!) the much-fabled, oft-misunderstood Soccer Gods finally smiled on one of their longer suffering Jobs. (That’s me. I am Job. Or Gob. I hear some people do that.)

At various, yet shockingly consistent, and yet also virtually never wire-to-wire…um, years, since a severely misguided internet made it possible for every asshole (again, me) to write about Major League Soccer, without editing, never mind overseers, I have written about Major League Soccer. A three-four year stretch of me writing about the Portland Timbers in the lower leagues happened…and that might have two-three years, mind you. (And I can’t prove it either. Once I sour on a blog, I delete the motherfucker like I never knew it. Seriously, I am Cronos and I eat my children.) In most of those years, I tried to cover every part of whatever league I invested in most that season. That always ended with me overwhelmed, bummed, or jaded (in all honesty, it was jaded, like, 3/4 of the time) before the first ball rolled in the playoffs. Still, I could fake keeping up until, oh, 2010. Once expansion really kicked off…forget it. I’ve been gasping by Week 15, if not before, ever since. Even for the glory years with the condensed games.

That brings me to the miracle. Its name is FC Cincinnati, aka, the answer to my prayers and the solution to my problem. Also, the team that will join Major League Soccer in 2019.

If I haven’t mentioned that I was born in, and spent the first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio, yes, I spent the first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio. I once heard it said that Danny DeVito collects people from New Jersey, wherever he can find them; that’s me with people from Ohio, only the shy version of it. In other words, whenever I meet people from Ohio (or, sometimes, that general area of the Midwest, if mostly north of the Ohio River…um…), I quietly, but almost automatically love them. I left Ohio, basically, but it never left me. I’ll agree that identifying with a place you almost never visit doesn’t make much sense, but I still rarely go a week without thinking about Ohio. And which one of us is crazy, because I don’t think it’s me.

Close observers might have caught the pronoun I slipped in front of “Portland Timbers” up above. Yes, that was “my.” I stand by it. I love my Portland Timbers and I moved to Portland, Oregon not once, but twice in my life. I ultimately settled here  and that was very intentional. I love Portland. And yet I still look at real estate prices in Cincinnati from time to time…shit would blow the mind of a Portlander....