Lilley: Goalkeepers evaluated 'every week' amid change to starter

CORAOPOLIS, Pa. -- I swung by training for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds today at the AHN Montour Sports Complex to observe the team as they get set to face North Carolina at Highmark Stadium this Saturday night. 

This early in the week, there’s still a lot of tweaking to be done when it comes to the starting lineup for Bob Lilley, so instead of trying to work out what formation or personnel will make up the ten outfield players, I focused on trying to get to the bottom of the goalkeeping situation, as this weekend's draw with FC Tulsa saw Gabriel Perrotta start between the sticks ahead of Eric Dick.

Even though Dick sits tied for second in the league in terms of clean sheets, Lilley pointed out after their recent USL Championship win against Miami FC that goalkeeping has ‘not been a strength’ for the team this season:

Last Tuesday’s U.S. Open Cup game against FC Tulsa gave some of the fringe Riverhounds players a chance to show what they could do, and when the starting lineups were announced on Saturday night, the Paraguayan keeper Perrotta appeared to have done enough to keep his spot. 

I started by asking Lilley if his decision had anything to do with his recent comments about Dick’s performances in the USL Championship up to this point in the season: 

“There's competition every week for jobs, that's it," Lilley said. "If players play, their job is to play well and stay in the lineup. If players don't play well, there's going to be changes. We change outfield players all the time. So in the case of Eric and Gabriel, Gabriel played reasonably well in the Open Cup game so we went with him in Tulsa. Eric had eight games and has dropped a lot of balls and was inconsistent. His job is to fight to get back in the lineup. If he does his job and he's doing well in training games, then he'll get more opportunities. That goes for any player.”

Does that mean Perrotta is now the team’s top goalkeeper moving forward and it is essentially his job to lose? 

In Lilley’s eyes he doesn’t really have a ‘number one’ at this stage, and he hinted that there could be further changes in the coming weeks: 

“No, we're not even ten games into the season," Lilley said. "This is not a quarterback situation. This is right now. Players have to perform well to be in the lineup, period, and so we're evaluating that every week. It's not football. So for us, you do your job, you make mistakes in multiple games, at some point someone else is going to get the opportunity. That's pretty much standard anywhere you go.”

Mistakes weren’t able to escape Perrotta’s grasp this weekend against FC Tulsa, as some indecision of his own gave the home side a penalty in the second half (their second of the game, shown at 4:10 in the clip below), and although Perrotta was able to spare his blushes by keeping the ball out of the back of the net, the fact that this seems to be an emerging issue amongst the Hounds players indicates that there is a much larger problem at hand here. 

These mistakes can only be coming from one of two places. Either it is something inside themselves that needs to be figured out, or certain messages are not being passed down effectively enough by goalkeeping coach Jon Busch.

Wrapping up my conversation with Lilley, he believed that the former was the issue, claiming that it is down to the players to limit the errors that they’re making and hinted that if they don’t cut it out, then the cycle of goalkeepers is only going to continue further:

“Decision-making under pressure, every athlete has to deal with in every sport," Lilley said. "These are things these goalkeepers have dealt with since they were 12. Mistakes happen, they have to be able to manage the game and hold those to a minimum. Mistakes are always going to happen, but when you're making big mistakes consistently that's not what we're looking for, no team is. So it has nothing to do with training, players have to perform. If they make poor decisions in big moments then at some point that catches up to you. Nobody is immune or going to play error-free. But, big mistakes on a consistent basis in a position like, goalkeeper … players have to be able to manage the game especially in that position.”