Locos Scoring Drought Is More Worrisome Than Results

The El Paso Locomotive FC suffered their first defeat on the road in franchise history losing to Fresno FC by the score of 3-0 Saturday night. This most recent loss drops the Locomotive to 5th place in the western conference standing of the USL Championship League. El Paso now has a record of of 7 wins, 6 draws and 4 loses good enough for 27 points, 8 points out of first place currently held by the Phoenix Rising.

While the Locos are currently going through a particular tough part of their 2019 schedule. A part of their schedule where the will have 3 away games in the span 10 days and will have seen them travel from San Antonio to Fresno, California to El Paso, Texas and then to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, as if that alone isn't tough enough, an additional problem has developed along the way. The Locos scoring ability has seem to gone missing.

Beginning their last home match against the Las Vegas Lights were they lost 1-0 on June 22nd, the Locomotive have now gone 270 minutes without scoring a goal, that's 3 full matches. While the lack of scoring can be understood for the first two of these matches, a Las Vegas side that completely parked the bus playing with a defensive line of up to as many as 7 players and then there was the beach soccer match that was played at Toyota Stadium in San Antonio last Wednesday that made it almost impossible for the Locos to establish any offensive rhythm.

However, what we saw in their most recent performance on Saturday night against Fresno FC was of bit more concern. The Locos struggled to create and real scoring opportunities. Aside from one breakaway from Omar Salgado, the Locomotive posed little to no offensive threat the Fresno. Forward Jerome Kiesewetter was a non-factor as scoring almost became an impossibility simply because he could not get any touches on the ball. Let us hope this kind of performance by El Paso was a direct result of a rigorous travel schedule assigned by the USL.

While the Locomotive still have their third away match pending this Saturday in OKC, fans have to hope that a return to routine of taking an entire week to prepare at home will help the team from the 915 find their execution once again. The one thing that should give the El Paso supporters comfort is that the Locomotive as a much better team than what has been seen in the last 3 matches and because of that I don't foresee this scoring drought to last that much longer.