Riverhounds finally find net with five-star display

It was former President Jimmy Carter who once spoke of a ‘Crisis of Confidence’. 

For these Riverhounds after the past few weeks, that is exactly what you could accuse the team of having, without a win in eleven games and without a goal in over 500 minutes. 

But on a glorious night at Highmark Stadium, those concerns were all washed away like an Oneill Cruz home run in the Allegheny River as two goals from Junior Etou and further efforts from Robbie Mertz, Sean Suber and Kenardo Forbes saw the Riverhounds end their droughts for both goals and wins in style with a 5-0 victory over Oakland Roots. 

Warning … there are going to be a lot of videos in this piece. But after the past few weeks, just sit back and enjoy them. 

The opening ten minutes honestly had me thinking of copying and pasting from some of my previous reports, because it played out the same way. The Riverhounds would get forward, but couldn’t do anything with it. You could even see a little bit of tension brewing in the camp when Bradley Sample had a few angry words for Emmanuel Johnson after the latter made the wrong run at the edge of the box, giving you the feeling that this game was going to be just like every other over the past few weeks. 

Then came the moment that was 585 minutes in the making, and boy did they make it worth the wait for the Riverhounds fans. I said in the keys to the game that a scrappy goal or even an own goal would be enough to get the team their confidence back. The way they took this one, you’d have thought they’d spent the past month playing like the 1970s Brazil teams. 

Mertz took control of the ball in midfield and charged towards the edge of the box, his pass found Sample who played the inch-perfect pass through to Etou to fire into the far corner to break the duck and send Highmark Stadium into a mixture of joy and relief: 

Bob Lilley has spoken this year about decision-making, and this whole passage of play could not have gone better if he’d mapped it out himself. From the run, to the cut inside, the pass and the finish. This whole move was perfect and gets you asking where this has been from them for the past few weeks.

Not willing to sit on comfort, the Hounds continued to take the game right down Oakland’s throats and managed to get their lead doubled on the half-hour mark. After a handball in the box, it fell to Mertz to take on the responsibility of increasing the team’s lead, and he did exactly that:

Much like the previous goal, what I take away from Mertz here is confidence. Having not found the back of the net all season, to take a penalty like that with the stutter step took real intestinal fortitude and could have backfired on him horribly if he’d got it wrong. 

And then as if the night couldn’t get any better, we had the perfect bookend of the Suber redemption story. The villain last week after his mistake handed Monterey Bay the win, he more than made up for it with his looping header from Sample’s cross on the right-hand side of the box: 

As a show of just how perfect the half went for the Riverhounds, Oakland couldn’t even register a shot in the opening 45 minutes, but where that once might have been a sign of worry, because of how you would still have that creeping doubt they’d concede eventually, on a night like tonight, those concerns honestly just never came up as the Hounds went into the break with a comfortable lead.

Not content with keeping the score at three, perhaps to send a message to the rest of the league to not write them off any longer, the Hounds wanted more goals and they got more five minutes after the restart and this one might have been the best of the bunch. Mertz won the ball back in midfield, controlling the ball out wide and then pushing it through behind the backline to Langston Blackstock who placed an inch-perfect cross onto Forbes' head to fire into the back of the net:

Whilst the fourth might have been the best of the night, the fifth was by far the funniest as Etou reacted the quickest to a bobble by Oakland goalkeeper Paul Blanchette to tap home Edward Kizza’s rather weak cutback:

Honestly, I could just leave the report like that and be happy. After all the fans deserve to have something to smile about after everything that the team showed them in June and what has been of July. I won’t leave it without also mentioning how solid the backline was that Oakland were restricted to just two shots all night, neither of which were on target, because they need some love too. 

Perhaps it’s just the cynic in me that just has that little bit of lingering doubt and concern. Pulling off one game like this is great. It gives the fans and the team the boost they need, it sends the 4,936 fans that showed up tonight happy, and quite frankly it gives us in the press something different to write about rather than coming up with different ways to talk about the same stuff again and again. 

But this will mean nothing if there isn’t tangible progress from here moving on. It doesn’t have to be as entertaining as this, there will be times when ‘winning ugly’ will be seen as acceptable. But what happens if they revert to the norm of the past six weeks when they kick off against Hartford Athletic next week on ESPN2? So I’d ask you just to exercise a little bit of caution before celebrating too hard, because the tough work is still to come if they are to turn this season around and finish the job.