For the fourth time this season, Phoenix Rising played at home and failed to come away with a win. After trailing in the first half 2-0 against Sacramento Republic, goals from Jearl Margaritha and Damian Rivera rescued a point but failed to prevent Rising from slipping to last place in the Western Conference.

defensive struggles continue

Things didn’t start well for Phoenix Rising.

Within 18 minutes, Sebastián Herrera found the net to put Sacramento up 1-0. Then, in the 34th minute, Dominik Wanner doubled the visitors’ advantage.

“[The opposition is] going to have some time and space in the game,” Rising coach Pa-Modou Kah said. “That’s just the way the game is. The game is full of mistakes and you’re going to make mistakes.”

That made the eighth game of the season — seven in the league, and one in the Open Cup — that Rising has failed to keep a clean sheet.

“Do you want teams to have time and space?” Kah said. “No. But teams are going to find times and space, and sometimes they give good delivery. Can we defend it better? Yes, 100 percent. That’s the one thing that we’re going to focus on.”

More Phoenix Rising goal of the week contenders

Phoenix Rising’s “Goal of the Week FC” moniker continued to have merit as impressive strikes from Jearl Margaritha and Damian Rivera both helped the club to rescue a point.

Those goals came in spite of Rising creating only 0.42 expected goals throughout the match, and producing less than half the total number of shots of their opponent.

Going into the game, Margaritha started alongside Ihsan Sacko and Rémi Cabral for the third time in a stretch of eight days, before Sacko was replaced at the half-time break.

“You’ve got to give players momentum,” Kah said. “There’s nothing wrong with giving players momentum. It’s easy to just switch, switch, but we felt there was a great momentum with these players, and why not?”.

Ultimately, Rising had the edge in possession but failed to use that to put Sacramento on the back foot for long spells. Throughout the match, the ball was in Sacramento’s defensive third less than 22 percent of the time, compared to over 37 percent in Rising’s defensive third.

Home still not a fortress

For the ninth time in eleven matches, Phoenix Rising again failed to win a home match.

That poor run of form at home is especially evident in 2025, with the club winning zero matches at 38th and Washington despite playing over a quarter of its regular season home schedule.

In questioning after the match, Rising’s head coach Pa-Modou Kah was defensive over the club’s need to find results in the short term.

“All games you have to win,” Kah said. “Can you win all games? Have you won everything in your life, or do you try to win?”

Through four home games so far in 2025, Phoenix Rising has drawn two matches and lost two. That poor tally adds to an underwhelming start to the year as a whole which has seen this Rising squad set a record for the worst start to a year through seven games in the history of USL Championship play in Arizona (including Rising, Arizona United and Phoenix FC).

Owain’s Take

Fighting back from a 2-0 deficit to earn a draw: it’s one of those results that usually earns a pat on the back. After a midweek match that went 120 minutes, that’s usually even more the case.

That said, when you’re propping up the table in the Western Conference, it’s not easy to come away with positives.

Rising is now nearly a quarter of the way through the regular season and has got only one win to show for it. This team is making history for all the wrong reasons, with the slowest start to a year of any club in this league from the state of Arizona.

Trusting the process goes so far, but sitting at the bottom of the table… well, it just isn’t going to sit well for long, is it?

The reality is that Phoenix Rising and its fanbase don’t want success; they expect success. Frankly, they demand success, and that success doesn’t come in the form of scraping into the playoffs and lucking out over a round or two. That success involves finishing in one of the top positions in the conference.

Maybe it’s a little presumptive to expect that from a club that’s failed to do so since 2021, but that is the expectation here in Phoenix.

Just look at what the team is producing on the field at the moment. Rising currently leads the league in goals scored, but they’re also leading the league in goals conceded. At every step, the team finds a way to concede goals at the worst possible moment — either setting themselves up with a mountain to climb by starting slowly, or giving up points in the late exchanges. Until they can find a way to fix that, they’re not going to move very far up the table.

Plus, at the other end of the field, this team still feels overly reliant on Jearl Margaritha. Obviously it’s a good thing to have standout players, but with Margaritha likely to be gone for close to a month soon as international duty kicks in, this team needs to find alternatives and find them quickly.

Pa-Modou Kah insisted that teams don’t lose the league in April, and in fairness, he’s mostly correct. There’s still time to fix the club’s issues and still time to get themselves back on track. But something is starting to feel different. Seven games is no longer the early exchanges of a season, and the excuses from a month ago just don’t carry the same weight any more.

There’s still time to find answers, and this team could well do just that.

But when you’re sitting at the bottom of the table, that time tends to feel as though it gets shorter and shorter very quickly.