It wasn’t the Oakland Roots’ day at the Coliseum on Sunday afternoon, September 7. The Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC scored early and added an insurance goal before halftime to give themselves a lead the home team would not be able to overcome in a 2-0 final score for the match.
Pittsburgh came out of the gate firing. Augustine Williams opened the scoring just moments after the initial whistle when a good cross into the box from the left side found him unmarked, leaving him to bury a wide-open shot from in close to make it 1-0 in the 4th minute.
Oakland played much of the first half with momentum on their side despite the early goal, and earned a number of chances to score throughout the frame. Their best opportunity of the match came in the 41st minute, when a perfect corner service from the left side led to a netfront scrum, with the Roots firing multiple shots towards the goal. But unluckily for Oakland, every shot was blocked before it could make its way on target, and the Riverhounds eventually cleared the danger before Roots could finish.
Pittsburgh scored once more in the waning moments of the first half, when Oakland struggled to clear a ball from their own penalty area and inadvertently fouled a Riverhound on the attempt giving Pittsburgh a 45th-minute penalty kick. Williams buried a top left rocket to make the score 2-0 and double his squad’s lead before the halftime whistle.
Oakland fought hard in the second half to claw their way back into the game, but Pittsburgh successfully dealt with the Roots’ pressure for the final 45 minutes of the match.
The Oakland Roots will now head to South Carolina, hoping to get back on track when they play Charleston Battery next Saturday, September 13, before returning to the Coliseum on September 20 to host FC Tulsa.
Talking with the Head Coach
After the loss, Head Coach Benny Feilhaber offered his thoughts on the Roots’ performance and the result. In short, he said, neither was good enough.
“Our staff and our players knew how important this game was, trying to get close to that playoff line,” Feilhaber said. “And obviously we’re running out of home games and games in general. And Pittsburgh comes in here—obviously they’re always going to be a tough team to play—but not in the greatest run of form. We could have utilized last week’s result to springboard two games in a row with wins… so the result is extremely disappointing. And from a performance standpoint, we didn’t do what we set out to do today.”
Feilhaber continued to note that the Roots “wanted to play on the front foot,” noting that with a 1 p.m. game the field was a little drier, making it harder “to play through in the middle.” He said Pittsburgh “likes to high-press and be involved in those areas. They want everything in front of them, if they can.”
So the Roots’ intent in the first half was “to really make them come and high press us, but also be able to play balls a little bit more direct and kind of change the momentum of the game where we wanted. What we talked about was forward momentum. Always balls forward, runs forward, facing forward as much as we can. …It didn’t look like we tried to do that in the first half. We played a lot into what they like to do, which is keep the ball in front and run at you and try and turn you over and continuously try to, you know, get opportunities off of that pressing system that they have. And I just don’t think that we played in the way that we wanted to play.”
He added that “obviously it doesn’t help when you give up a goal early off of a pretty simple cross. They get on the end of it first, rebound, and that kind of stuff can’t happen. And obviously, again, on a moment where they’re high-pressing and we’re kind of slow in what we want to do, and not all on the same page, lose the ball and then commit a penalty.”
It’s tough to come back being down two in this league, Feilhaber said. “We haven’t shown the ability to do so since I’ve been here, to come back from multiple goals, so it puts us in a really difficult situation there too, to work our way out. … We did what we should have done in the first half, which is play a little bit more direct and make them run more backwards towards their goal.”
But halfway through the second half, he said, “the middle of the field started to open up, and so we didn’t utilize it as much because we didn’t have the opportunity to coach it at halftime, which is what I would have loved to do.”
Nevertheless, the game “started opening up a little bit more in the second half,” Feilhaber noted. “We had a little bit more of the game, but Pittsburgh defended well.” Ultimately, he said, “we lost the game in the first half—maybe even the first few minutes of the first half.”
Summary
Scoring:
- PIT: Augustine Williams 4’
- PIT: Augustine Williams 45’
Discipline:
- PIT: Augustine Williams 53’ (yellow card)
- OAK: Neveal Hackshaw 57’ (yellow card)
- PIT: Eric Dick 70’ (yellow card)
- OAK: Ilya Alekseev 77’ (yellow card)
- OAK: EJ Johnson 82’ (yellow card)
Oakland Roots SC
Lineup: Kendall Mcintosh, Julian Bravo, Gagi Margvelashvili (EJ Johnson), Daniel Gomez, Wolfgang Prentice, Panos Armenakas (Ilya Alekseev), Neveal Hackshaw, Jürgen Damm (Bobosi Byaruhanga), Morey Doner, Kai Greene (Camden Riley), Faysal Bettache (Ali Elmasnaouy)
Unused subs: Abdirizak Mohamed, Raphael Spiegel
Line: Shots: 9 | Shots On Goal: 2 | Corner Kicks: 4 | Fouls: 18 | Offside: 3
Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC
Lineup: Eric Dick, Daniel Griffin, Perrin Barnes (Jason Bourgey), Sean Suber, Augustine Williams (Brigham Larsen), Charles Ahl (Chase Boone), Luke Biasi (Abdul Osumanu), Charles Mertz (Brunallergene Junior Etou), Bradley Sample, Roberto Ydrach, Guillaume Vacter
Unused subs: Bertin Jacquesson, Jacob Randolph
Line: Shots: 8 | Shots On Goal: 5 | Corner Kicks: 1 | Fouls: 15 | Offside: 3
