Charlie Hatch

chatch@enquirer.com

While the schedule says Futbol Club Cincinnati has two regular season matches remaining, talk to anyone at the club and they’ll tell you the playoffs started a month ago.

That’s the current state for a club that will play its four final matches on the road. And if the team makes the United Soccer League Playoffs, its current sixth-place standing means another cup run would have to come from away games.

“It feels like we’re in the playoffs already,” FC Cincinnati head coach Alan Koch said after training Monday. “Sometimes the best preparation for the playoffs is to start playing playoff soccer before you get to the playoffs. We’ve got to get into the playoffs first, of course, but it does feel like the playoffs already.”

That’s not some mindset Koch has tried to instill on his personnel. Instead, it’s simply the predicament Cincinnati finds itself situated in.

On one hand, the season ending means an increased intensity for players battling for playing time, or in some cases, a roster spot in 2018. But then there’s the other reality, where a trip such as last Friday’s to then second-place Charlotte Independence resembled a trip FC Cincinnati might have to make come later in October if the teams are paired in the postseason.

Charlotte is now fourth – in the last spot awarded home-field advantage in the first round. Sitting five points clear of Koch’s side, Cincinnati would need to win its last two matches and watch another half dozen results all go in its favor for the team to have another match at Nippert Stadium.

Theoretically, if FC Cincinnati went to the USL Finals, the club would likely have four additional road matches on top of the four that close the regular season – two months of road-trip soccer.

“If we get to do that, I think we’ll all be hugging each other,” Koch joked. “I have no problem being on the road for, what, another six weeks? Let’s go for it. But that’s just the reality for where things are.

“People are trying to be utopian and trying to hope we can play a home playoff game. I know it’s still mathematically possible. Our goal as a group is just getting into theplayoffs. …And when you get in, anything can happen.”

Koch said the playoff vibe set in during the week of the 2017 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup semifinal. In that span, Cincinnati lost 5-0 to Louisville City, then 3-2 to New York Red Bulls in Open Cup extra time and finally a 4-0 drubbing at New York Red Bulls II.

“That week, the heightened senses of the magic of the cup run and two smacks in the league,” Koch said. “Since post that week, it’s been the playoffs for us as a group and you can see that in how we approach training and how we approach each game. … It’s showed in how we’ve managed to get results in certain games where a lot of teams would’ve quit.”

Goalkeeper Mitch Hildebrandt said the playoff mentality settled in after the club drew 2-2 at Saint Louis FC, courtesy of Danni Konig’s 95th-minute penalty to equalize.

Since the week following Cincinnati’s three losses, the club has since gone on a six-match unbeaten run, which ties this season’s longest undefeated spell. It’s the longest of strictly USL matches.

Of teams currently in a playoff position, only the Tampa Bay Rowdies, who now sit in second, have found more success during that timespan. But Hildebrandt said it’s too easy to suggest FC Cincinnati is a team to beat entering the postseason. Although he did concede Cincinnati is looking increasingly dangerous.

“Not at all,” he said at practice Monday. “We’re sitting in sixth right now, so there’s five teams ahead of us that are teams to beat. …We don’t play ourselves. That’s the good thing about it. I wouldn’t want to face us but we don’t play FC Cincinnati. We play Ottawa. That’s all I’m worried about.”