CINCINNATI – The press room was quiet as Pat Noonan emerged from the locker room and took his seat at the dais after Saturday night's 2-1 loss to the New England Revolution.
He opened his remarks with a thank you to the players for the effort and courage they displayed on the field and the attitude they displayed as they pushed through another evening of nearly 90-degree heat and played their third game in eight days across 2400 miles, three time zones, and untold emotional, mental and physical fatigue.
But when the mic turned to the gathered press, Pat Brennan of The Cincinnati Enquirer asked what was truly on everyone's mind: "How is Nick Hagglund?"
Hagglund, a Cincinnati star, local, and the only player on the team to have been a member of the club dating back to its first match in MLS, exited Saturday's game on a stretcher after a tackle where he came together with New England Revolution winger Esmir Bajraktarevic. The play, while physical, wasn't malicious by either side and was otherwise innocuous on first glance. But as Hagglund stayed down, hearts began to race, and anxieties rose with them.
"He broke his fibula. So, he's going to be out for a couple months," Noonan responded to Brennan as a wave of shock, exasperation and heartache all audibly escaped in unison from the gathered press, FCC staff and all those in TQL Stadium's MedPace Tunnel Club who could overhear the presser.
Slowly that dread reached the FC Cincinnati supporters as news began to spread outside of that room. "I'm sick," one supporter tweeted to the news, "this breaks my heart," another added. 'Devastated,' 'crushed,' and‘ pain' are all other words used to respond with empathy for not only a beloved member of the FC Cincinnati roster but one of their own—a Cincinnati native and now an icon.
On a night where so much felt unfortunate or unlucky, Nick Hagglund's injury felt simply unfair. Playing all those matches across this week? Challenging. Playing a team who had not played in the midweek and therefore fresher, 'so it goes' as Kurt Vonneget would say. Playing without star players like Miles Robinson and Matt Miazga, unfortunate and in some ways equally heartbreaking, but not something they weren't expecting heading into the game.
Beyond the complications of not having Hagglund available to play (a wholly separate issue that will surely be discussed in the days and weeks to come), the unfairness of having a man so deeply committed to this club and city go down with another injury and face another months-long rehabilitation process seems like cruel and unusual punishment.
Hagglund, 31, underwent season-ending hamstring surgery at the end of the 2023 season and spent his entire "off" season working to return to the pitch in time for the 2024 campaign. Instead of training with the team in full while in Clearwater, Florida, for preseason he spent his time running and working with Head Athletic Trainer Pat Tanner (among others) to return to the pitch. But his presence as a leader and love of his team was such that while in theory, he could have done that training away from the team, he did so alongside the team activities so as to be near them.
Now, it is that same athletic training staff (led by Tanner) who were the first to care for Hagglund and help as he was moved onto a stretcher and carried out through the West tunnel of TQL Stadium.
"That's a tough one for the group," Noonan added, visibly as heartbroken as the rest of the Cincinnati community would soon become. "Obviously for Nick, first and foremost. It's tough to see a key piece go down like that, and obviously the news wasn't great. Timeline and all of that, I don't know.”
"(Nick) is a key piece, on and off the field. He's a leader of our group. So, on top of the defeat, that news is tougher for our group because, like I said, Nick is important."
The injury also overshadows, in another example of the truly unfair, that Hagglund was having one of the best performances of the season in his 45 minutes after coming on as a sub at halftime. As a reserve to start in order to manage his fatigue and fitness levels given the challenging week the club had just faced, Hagglund was dominant in the backfield and many times fundamentally changed the match with his ability to win aerial duels and battle the Revolutions target striker.
The hearts of Cincinnati will ache a little longer and a little harder after this one. The loss, a game that, under different circumstances, could have seen a different result, became almost an undercurrent for the larger consequences that had occurred on the field. If the scales of luck, even, were at all just, FC Cincinnati would have found one more goal in the dying minutes to equalize the score and emerge from the match with at least a point despite going down to nine men in the final moments of the match and the draw would at very least fade into the obscurity of 'not-ideal-but-ultimately-liveable-outcomes-given-the-circumstances' draws.
But the scales appear unjust, and thus, FC Cincinnati left TQL Stadium empty-handed in the points department and further hampered in the center back group.
The match itself was a tale of two halves. In the first half, Noonan felt the club didn't get the simple things right, leading to an overall lack of energy in the stadium, never allowing those on the field an opportunity to find a rhythm to play within.
"We didn't give (the fans) much to cheer about in the first 45 (minutes)," Noonan said. "But it starts with me. I don't think that was a version of our group that we should have seen tonight, so I can't blame those guys for anything. I don't think in the first half we were able to take the space in an efficient way to then open up different ways of breaking pressure because it was too predictable."
With very little offensive threat to speak of in the first half and two more conceded goals putting FC Cincinnati in the hole going into the break, it was a dreary but still optimistic environment with 45 minutes to play. The Orange and Blue had proven their ability to score multiple goals in quick succession in very recent memory, making the hope of not only earning a point but a victory still in the cards.
Noonan made a radical change to his group on the field, making three subs to start the second half, and FCC came out looking like a squad that would find its victory by the final whistle.
What would end up being the lone goal on the night came from Yamil Asad in the 65th minute, a header on a corner kick served in by Luciano Acosta that got no celebration and hardly even recognition. FC Cincinnati, led by Asad, simply picked the ball out of the net to run back to midfield and restart play. Back to business.
"He had a strong performance. Aside from the goal, I thought with the ball, he had good composure, found the right passes in most moments and pushed himself really hard from a physical standpoint because he hasn't had that many minutes to this point," Noonan said of Asad. "It was good to see him get on the score sheet, but that was a reward of everything that's kind of led up to it. I think he's done a really good job for our group and thought he was strong again tonight."
"It's a mix of feelings. It's my first starting game, my first goal but it couldn't be useful," Asad said after the match. "We didn't show our level. I think we can do much better than what we did…but it is still up to us. We have to recover now and keep pushing."
"So like I say, it's a mixed feeling. I was happy I could score but it doesn't matter. We lost and let a chance slip away."
The second-half performance, though, regardless of how it came to be, was the positive takeaway Noonan highlighted post-match. Despite being in a two-goal hole, with all the baggage they had headed into the game and the heat still relentlessly pounding down, Noonan's players battled with every second the ref would give them.
When Obinna Nwobodo took an unfortunate second yellow card in the 69th minute and went down a man for the final 20 minutes of the match, FC Cincinnati continued to look dangerous and as if they were going to find the equalizer. When Nick Hagglund exited that same energy persisted despite now being down two men because an injury sub was unavailable to them, FCC found opportunities up until the end.
By the time all was said and done, FCC had out xG'd New England to the tune of 1.7 to 0.7.
"I just thank the players for the effort that they gave tonight. I know you hear that a lot, especially when things don't go your way, but for the third game in eight days, what some of those guys did physically throughout the week and to push themselves tonight, down a couple goals and a man, and then two men, it speaks to their character," Noonan said. "That's the positive that comes out of this. So, I thank them for that.
FC Cincinnati will now have a week to regroup and focus on what's next before heading to Dallas for a cross-conference matchup. There will be short-term problems, medium-term problems and long-term problems to solve. Of which Noonan and his brain trust have been and will continue to work. But if anything, even with the heartbreak and any number of impossibly difficult conditions they may face, FC Cincinnati proved on Saturday night that no matter how long the odds are, this group is going to fight until the referee and only the referee will stop them with their final whistle.
"We can't feel sorry for ourselves," Pat Noonan said. "We have to keep going."
And they will. There's no doubt about that.
