The Moment: The controversial penalty call FC Cincinnati used to beat Tampa Bay

Pat Brennan | Cincinnati Enquirer

The whole purpose of writing The Moment is to highlight those split-second instances that decide soccer matches and to try to make sense of them, or more specifically, how FC Cincinnati manages those instances.

Sometimes, artful play lends itself to artful writing, but The Moment needn't be a frame-by-frame dissection of a clever scoring movement or a piece of individual skill described in verbose language.

On Saturday when Futbol Club Cincinnati beat the Tampa Bay Rowdies, 2-1, there was nothing artful about the moment that decided the match.

It was ugly. Furthermore, it was controversial and immediately disputed by the Rowdies.

It was the awarding of a penalty kick to 10-man FC Cincinnati by referee Kevin Broadley in the 86th minute.

FC Cincinnati second-half substitute and left back Pa Konate broke in on goal from the left side. A heavy Konate touch pushed the ball well ahead of him, and into a water-logged patch of the Tampa Bay penalty area.

Both Konate and Papé Diakite, the eventual recipient of a red card on this decisive play, appeared to be on awkward footing during the sequence.

Diakite moved in to oppose Konate's goalward run but appeared to slip on the especially sodden area of grass.

Again, it wasn't a slide tackle, but rather a slip, and it left Diakite's boot studs exposed.

Diakite's left boot appeared to contact Konate's right leg. Or, if there was no contact, it was close. Of course, "close" doesn't justify a penalty call. Quite the opposite if "close" was the reality.

Either way, Konate went flying and Broadley was forced to make a decision. He pointed to the spot.

FC Cincinnati head coach Alan Koch said he didn't have a good view of the play from his vantage point on the opposite side of the field.

Of other decisions made in the match, Koch said the refereeing was a "roller coaster."

The Tampa Bay Rowdies communications staff described the moment in a post-match recap thusly: "Cincinnati’s Pa Konate created the decisive moment in the 86th minute, when he advanced into the box and then jumped over Papé Diakité’s legs in acrobatic fashion, drawing an extremely controversial penalty kick."

Ten different players wound up in Broadley's book Saturday night as 12 yellow cards were issued.

The card produced and shown to Diakite in the 86th minute resulted in FC Cincinnati's match-winning penalty.

Emmanuel Ledesma stepped forward, just as he did in the second minute, and coolly slotted home for 2-1.

“My career as a player was long and my career as a coach has been very short so far,” Rowdies Head Coach Neill Collins said afterward in a team news release. “In that time, which spans 20-odd years, I’ve had many ups and down. Tonight would quite easily go into the top five most frustrating evenings of my career. The team was fantastic. My heart breaks for them.”

What can be said of FC Cincinnati at the critical moment was that Konate's run was incisive and, ultimately, successful. There's no penalty call if Konate doesn't make the run.

In that way, FC Cincinnati made its own luck, as most championship-caliber teams do.

And Ledesma took his second penalty of the match better than the first.

The Moment then boils down to Broadley's decision.

If the call to award FC Cincinnati the penalty that resulted in the game-winning goal was a bad one, the blame is at Broadley's feet – not Konate's and not Diakite's.

And it was FC Cincinnati's ceaseless attacking, even when down a man, that forced Broadley to make a decision.