After another slow start, Phoenix Rising picked up a second consecutive draw as they returned home to face Rhode Island FC. Goals from Damian Rivera and Hope Avayevu cancelled out J.J. Williams’ early score and an own-goal from Pape Mar Boye to send both sides home with a point.

Slow starts plague Phoenix Rising again

Slow starts have been the theme for Phoenix Rising this season, and Saturday’s match with Rhode Island was no different.

Within just six minutes, former Rising forward J.J. Williams found the net to put the visitors up by one.

“The first five minutes… poor,” Rising coach Pa-Modou Kah said after the match. “We get smacked in the face, we didn’t react. It took us, five, ten minutes later to react.”

Rising would ultimately fight back into the match, and found themselves an equalizer through quality solo play from Damian Rivera. Just a few minutes later, though, they conceded once again.

“We get the goal, and then again, just a little bit of a switch off,” Kah said. “I think the second half, again, much better, but we have to make sure that we’re ready to go from the get-go.”

For the third time this season, Rising went in at the break trailing. For the second consecutive match, Rising conceded within the first ten minutes. After three games, Rising has yet to hold a lead at any point.

“In football, the first thing you have to do is you have to win your duels,” Kah said. “I think we didn’t win enough duels in the first half. We got far better second half.”

Rising won just 39 percent of duels in the first half, increasing to 59 percent in the second half, while also increasing their shot tally and doubling their shots on target, albeit only a change from one in the first half to two in the second.

Injuries remain an issue

To varying degrees, injuries have plagued the start to Phoenix Rising’s season. Saturday night’s match against Rhode Island was no different.

With several players out and Carl Sainté away from the squad to serve as an unused substitute in Azerbaijan for the Haitian national team, Rising started 17-year-old Jamison Ping and named four other youngsters to the nine-man bench.

“The main proper injuries we have are just J.P. [Scearce] and Casey [Walls],” Kah said. “Ryan [Flood], unfortunately, he broke his hand. There’s nothing you can do about these things, right, he needed to get the surgery. But this is football. Some people have got to stand up, and some of our youngsters are standing up.”

Other notable players to not be included in the matchday squad included Charlie Dennis — who has been seen around the stadium wearing a boot — as well as Alex Araneda and Darius Johnson.

With Rising lacking in defensive midfield due to both injuries and international duty, Kah looked to Noble Okello to fill that spot.

“We trust Noble in that because he’s versatile enough to play, and he’s played in that position,” the coach said.

Rising’s injury woes didn’t solely take place before the game, either. After missing the first match and coming off the substitute bench against El Paso, Emil Cuello saw his first start of the season curtailed in the 34th minute. Kah remained coy about the nature of Cuello’s injury after the match, but sources have told PHNX that it is not a reaggravation of the ankle injury Cuello suffered in preseason.

Attack starting to come together

Two things that Phoenix Rising fans have desperately been waiting for finally came together in this match.

Damian Rivera, who had in his two prior games threatened with his pace and one-on-one ability but ultimately produced little to show for it, finally got his breakthrough. A couple of clever touches allowed him to evade his defenders, before a sensational finish brought Rising level in the first half.

Then, at half-time, a tactical change allowed Jearl Margaritha to make his first Rising appearance of the season.

Moving to more of a 4-4-2 shape, with Rémi Cabral and Ihsan Sacko playing centrally and Rivera and Margaritha out wide, the aim was to allow Rising to de-stabilize Rhode Island’s center-backs.

“I think we did that, by creating that, but I think we could have been a little more forceful with the chances we had,” Kah said.

In his 45-minute appearance, Margaritha created one chance and won all four of his duels.

“I know his quality, and we can make a difference together,” Sacko said.

Owain’s take

If you’d offered a point going into Phoenix Rising’s match with Rhode Island, I think anyone would have taken it. Now, looking back, it seems a genuinely fair reflection on how proceedings went.

The visitors are no mugs, and that’s how they played. Any team with the attacking talent of Albert Dikwa, J.J. Williams and Noah Fuson is going to cause issues, and that’s what Rhode Island did. Rising also had to deal with its numerous injury absences that led to a real lack of depth in the back half of the field.

At times, it felt as though Rising were knocking on the door, and Rémi Cabral failing to get on the end of one particularly threatening ball across the face of goal in the first half gives some hope that this team is just an inch or two away from really working it out in the attack. Equally, however, Rising only managed three shots on target all match.

Then, there’s the slow starts. Pa-Modou Kah brought that up without prompting in the post-match press conference, and he’s right to do so. We’re now three games into the year, and Rising has led for a total of zero minutes and zero seconds. The character shown when the team fights back is one thing, but it’s simply not viable to spend every game fighting an uphill battle because you fell asleep earlier in the match.

None of this is new. The team clearly still has the pieces to pull themselves up and likely improve. Plus, when the various players out injured make their way back into the squad, maybe that will breath something new into the team, even if it’s just added depth.

My bigger concern coming out of the Rhode Island match is, frankly, off the field.

Elsewhere in USL Championship, Oakland Roots set their club attendance record, drawing over 26,000 to the Coliseum for their home opener against San Antonio.

In Phoenix, Rising was also setting records. An official attendance of 5,549 was the lowest in the Rising era for a league match in the first month of the season, save for matches which had COVID-impacted capacities.

A fun, young and more exciting team deserves better than this, and unfortunately it seems clear that the club isn’t putting its best foot forward.

Quietly, some members of the ownership group have had concerns for a couple of years now that attendances aren’t up to scratch. Seeing that they’re only continuing to slide… well, you really have to wonder why the patience isn’t wearing thin.

The fact is that club leadership needs to work out where its priorities lie. If Rising can barely fill half a stadium in one of the largest metro areas in the league — and are drawing fewer fans than they did in a smaller stadium several years ago — then shouldn’t that be the biggest focus from the club’s brass? Shouldn’t that take precedent over days out in the sun watching training sessions, or sitting in on coaches meetings?

You’d hope this kind of a crowd would be a wake-up call, but we’ll have to wait and see if it is. Because if Phoenix Rising is struggling to sell tickets in March when the weather — one of the few things a team really can’t control — is close to perfect…

Well… I’m not sure I want to see what the situation looks like come August.