FC Cincinnati get first competitive action under their belt in ramp up to regular season action with intersquad battle at MHTC

FC Cincinnati celebrated the July 4th long weekend with their first competitively focused match since the start of the MLS summer break.Â

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 has 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.”Â

Kenji Mboma Dem led the way with a hat trick, helping his side to a 4-3 victory in a match pitting players 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. Â

One side was dubbed ‘grey,’ which really just stood for standard training attire, and the other ‘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 stop play and give instruction as needed, repeat actions, end plays early to avoid unnecessary strain, or otherwise manipulate scenarios to achieve a prestructured goal. The difference between that and an intersquad match comes in the intervention.Â

The expectation is that, unlike a training session, you play through every action and operate as if it were a match. Open play allows players to build fitness and simulate game situations that require on-the-fly problem-solving and full-speed execution. 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.”

Midfielder 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.