FC Dallas 3-1 FC Cincinnati: Getting Dragged by History

Like that, but a painful reality and not a well-staged stunt.

Yesterday evening, FC Cincinnati took three unwelcome strides toward raising the bar for goals allowed in a single season, plus another one toward the single-season record number of losses. With six games left on their 2019 schedule, they’re just eight goals allowed shy of one record and, comfortingly(?), five losses away from the record for losses. What’s left to say after that one besides, do your best to stay out of the record books, Cincy. Fail less often or more gently?

After playing FC Dallas to a relatively even first half – they finished with six shots each, even if Dallas held a 3-1 edge on shots on goal – the game fell apart one piece at a time to ultimately end in a 3-1 win for Dallas. First came two goals three minutes apart – the first a turnover that caught Greg Garza too far upfield thinking Cincy would keep the ball, the second an early cross to a wide-open Zdenek Ondrasek outside Justin Hoyte – then came Kekuta Manneh’s moment of dumbassery and subsequent ejection. Whatever thin hope lingered from Emmanuel Ledesma’s 64th-minute penalty kick (and it was a good call and a rare coherent attack for Cincy) evaporated in the split-second when Manneh shoved his hand into Bryan Acosta’s face, off the ball, and almost certainly provoked, but, when you suck as thoroughly as Cincinnati does, a cool head is just about all you have left.

Before anyone assumes they had a chance, Cincy added just one shot/shot on goal to their first half total – even with a full allotment of players on the field for 30 minutes of the second half. There are no positives left, only the hope of avoiding record-breaking negatives. COYFCC, etc.

Is it worth mulling over what might have been when it clearly didn’t happen? Did a scenario ever exist when a healthy, more sober/tuned-in Fanendo Adi lead a basically competent FC Cincinnati attack? Could having Greg Garza for the entire season would have added a goal or two, or kept four or five goals out? What if Fatai Alashe remained healthy all season? A question hangs over every position and the only answer is, none of it happened.

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 0-3 Real Salt Lake: A Night When Plan A Failed

No, FC Cincy, the voices are not friendly. Do not listen.

Well, that didn’t go well, obviously. Anyone who doubted the game was over after Real Salt Lake’s Albert Rusnak buried his 59th minute penalty (deserved; also, Jefferson Savarino is one of their guys), and his second goal of the game, should have disabused of any notions of a comeback by FC Cincinnati at the 65th minute when Alvas Powell picked up the ball and a head of steam and he carried it up the field…with somewhere between seven and eight Cincinnati players on the wrong side of the ball, i.e., behind him. Powell had to turn back inside Cincinnati’s defensive third to wait for everyone else to show up and, no, that’s not a good sign.

The rest of the game stretched out in a slow, frog-in-a-boiling-pot experience that ended the same way it started: Real Salt Lake three (3), FC Cincinnati zero (0). Then again, the whole thing projected as a depressing illusion because, even in their moments of dominance – at the start of each half, generally - Cincinnati created more corners than chances…which is factually untrue, but just barely, and also barely relevant. The one decent shot I remember FC Cincy getting – e.g., Allan Cruz’s header off Roland Lamah’s cross during the early, salad days – couldn’t have been their one (recorded, and seriously?) shot on goal, not least because it wasn’t on goal. Ah, hold on. Just remembered where the shot probably happened.

The match had a couple of turning points, but none as decisive as RSL’s second goal. Whether by accident or conscious decision (only The Shadow knows what goes on in the hearts of men), Cincinnati seemed over-eager to push for an equalizing goal after letting Salt Lake catch them off guard and against the run of play to score the game’s opening, game-winning goal. There was nothing irrational about giving it a shot, not with Cincy generally deciding what happened and where for most of the first half. It did, on the other hand, result in the home team getting caught too far upfield, with pants around ankles. The goal was all but scored when Savarino found Damir Kreilach just on RSL’s side of the midfield stripe, who would go on to complete the dissection from there. Kreilach played the ball to Baird on Cincinnati’s right and, in all the backward scrambling, Cincinnati’s three, final defenders pinched too hard to one side, leaving Rusnak free to set up the ensuing, fatal shooting gallery. It took RSL putting half their seven shots on target in a two-second span to score that second goal – a depressing spectacle, really – but that probably put three points beyond reach.

To pick up on what came back to me at the end of the penultimate paragraph, Cincinnati came as close to scoring as they managed all game (again. one. shot.) at the beginning of the second half, when one of their corners got highly interesting. That cracks open the door to what might have been, but only wide enough to where all you can see on the other side is darkness. Overall, though, Cincinnati could hold the ball and move it around, but they couldn’t take it anywhere worthwhile. RSL, meanwhile, took over the second half of each half (my work with legal descriptions comes through…), and found more ways to be lethal when they had the ball.

Clash of (What Passes for MLS’s Version of) Titans

Your vacation lives on! I thank you!

[The third and final game I watched this weekend pitted the then and current top two teams in MLS against one another, the Colorado Rapids v. FC Dallas.]

When it comes to parsing this year’s (semi-freakish) power match-up, it’s probably best/safest to break it down into discrete parts. There’s sort of a lot to unpack, and from multiple pieces of luggage. Even so, the balance of the chatter falls on the Rapids side of the ball – they’re the bigger transformation, after all – so I’ll end with them.

Oh, and the game ended 1-1. It really looked like the Rapids would hold on, but I guess that’s why Dallas is Dallas. Victor Ulloa cranking an equalizer from eastern freakin’ Colorado falls in line with things like Mauro Diaz’s passing and Fabian Castillo’s (or Michael Barrios’) dribbling.

Another reason why Dallas is Dallas? Chris Hedges and Walker Zimmerman. These are both good players, really good players. What sometimes gets lost with those two is just how young they are: 26 and 23, respectively. Barring a transfer (something I can see for Zimmerman before Hedges), that tandem has a long future together. In the here and now, though, having them back there buys your team time, maybe even an entire half, to scratch back into a game against a Colorado defense that gives up very, very little.