FC Cincinnati celebrated the July 4th long-weekend with their first competitively focused match since the start of the MLS summer break.
The Orange and Blue broke into two groups to play a modified 60 minute intersquad game at Mercy Health Training Center in Milford, Ohio, on Saturday afternoon. The intersquad kicked off the competitive slate of matches the club have over the next two weeks in preparation for the return to MLS action on July 22, when Vancouver Whitecaps FC come to TQL Stadium.
“These are opportunities to see progress, individually and collectively. It’s an opportunity where you can when you break it down and you can find the improvements pretty quickly and you can find the areas of concern pretty quickly as well,” FC Cincinnati Head Coach Pat Noonan said after the match. “I have one side of my analysis that'll just be individual, okay. This is how I think guys performed over the course of the 60 minutes, and then the collective, and how the relationships look.”
Kenji Mboma Dem led the way with a hat trick in the match, leading to a 4-3 victory for his side in the match that pitted players on sides selected from the first and second team rosters against each other. Pavel Bucha, Gerardo ‘Dado’ Valenzuela, Tom Barlow and Kristian Fletcher all added goals of their own as well.
One side was dubbed as ‘grey,’ which really just stood for standard training attire, and the other as ‘red,’ for their pennies over the training attire. In their first sample of competitively focused play since the club's 6-2 victory over Orlando City SC on May 23, FCC played four 15 minute periods, with three minute hydration breaks between sessions.
11-on-11 training is not uncommon; typically in those training sessions coaches are stopping play and giving instruction where need be, repeating actions, ending plays early to unnecessary strain, or otherwise manipulating the scenarios to achieve a prestructured goal. The difference between that and an intersquad match comes in the intervention.
The expectation is that unlike a training session, you play through every action and operate as if it was a match. The open play allows players to build fitness, and simulate game situations where players will need to problem solve on the fly and work through things at full speed. So while training helps educate and drill concepts in a safer environment, an intersquad is meant to test and deploy those ideas at full speed and ask players to deal with the outcomes, positive or negative.
“Yeah, you're going to see the good and the bad in a game like this. It's a mixed squad of players and we are looking at some different things with relationships and ideas and so on,” Noonan said of the match. “On the one side, you'll see a very good attacking sequence, and then okay, that means on the defensive side, what went wrong. So you can pull a lot out of it with the positives and the negatives and have discussions about what needs to improve.”
Midfield Pavel Bucha and the grey team got the scoring started early with a strike from the top of the box. But the red side equalized before the midway point on a shot from forward Tom Barlow that pinged off the inside post and in to make things 1-1.
Gerardo “Dado” Valenzuela gave the red side the lead after the start of the ‘second half,’ putting away a penalty kick to make things 2-1, but Kenji Mboma Dem leveled things after the final hydration break – winning a ball after a successful tackle and putting a low strike to the far post that curled around the keeper and in.
Sides traded goals one more time in the late stages of the day as Kristian Fletcher scored off the rush to make things 3-2. Mboma Dem then responded with perhaps the goal of the day to make it 3-3, finishing with a beautiful strike inside the box after a nifty combination of passes between him and Kévin Denkey.
The day was finally won after Kenji Mboma Dem secured his hat trick at the final whistle, once again linking up with Denkey in what would stand as the final play of the day to score and give his side a 4-3 victory.
“With our build phase and wingbacks with attacking midfielders, there are ideas that we've been working on. Defensively, some of the transition moments, and how we've been looking at our outside center backs and how we utilize them, how our first line of pressure recovers, all these little details are stuff that we're analyzing based on 15 games of data,” Noonan shared as to points of emphasis the team is working on.. “This is all just to say these are the biggest areas of focus, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses…and this is an opportunity to further evaluate that.”
The first, and likely final, intersquad match of this midseason break serves as the first of three friendly matches over the next few weeks, with more traditional competitive friendlies scheduled for July 10 against historic English side Burnley FC at TQL Stadium, and a closed door match against Honduran club CD Olimpia on July 16. For more information on those matches and how to watch them, click here.
