It was a holiday matchup to forget for Phoenix Rising as a lone first half goal from Michael Adedokun gave visitors Lexington SC their first-ever away win in USL Championship play.

First half snoozefest

In a Fourth of July matchup at home, Phoenix Rising fans would have hoped to see some fireworks out of their team.

But from the early exchanges, it become apparent that that wasn’t what they were going to be treated to.

“When you watch the game a little bit, I don’t think we came out sharp out of the block,” Rising coach Pa-Modou Kah said. “Both teams, to be fair. They have one shot on goal, and it results in a goal. We should have done better with the goal, but again, sometimes in football, these things happen in terms of you not taking the opportunities that are in front of you. It’s painful, but we’ve got to learn and move on.”

Over the course of the first half as a whole, Rising recorded just two shots, and an expected goals tally of just 0.09. Beyond that, the performance seemed lethargic for large spells of time.

“I feel like we need more movement from the front,” defender Carl Sainté said. “I know how hot it is […] but I feel like we can manage that better.”

Zero shots on target for Phoenix Rising

After a disappointing performance before the break, Rising needed to step up in the second half.

“[The message at half-time was that] we are far better than what we showed, and that we have to up our intensity and fight more,” Kah said. “I think we showed it, but we did not create enough to actually put their goalkeeper under pressure.”

While the second half was overall an improvement, especially as fresher legs entered the match in the form of Darius Johnson and Ihsan Sacko, Rising simply didn’t do enough to look as though they were going to score.

In the end, they didn’t force a single save out of Lexington goalkeeper Brooks Thompson. That was the first time since 2016, when the team was known as Arizona United, that the team has failed to record a single shot on target in a league match.

“Missed opportunity, disappointing loss,” Kah said. “We didn’t do enough, and when you don’t do enough, you don’t deserve to win. It’s as simple as that. No shots on goal. Our key players were not on today.”

Lexington could have punished, but didn’t

Despite an improved Phoenix Rising performance in the second half, Lexington still could have found ways to increase its advantage.

On several occasions, the visitors found breakaway opportunities as Rising threw more and more bodies forward, but ultimately failed to find the back of the net for a second time.

In stoppage time, substitute Hugo Mbongue got a shot off at the end of another breakaway for the visitors, but his effort was ultimately saved by Patrick Rakovsky.

Owain’s take

Well, that was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t it?

In Phoenix Rising’s only home game of the month, on a holiday weekend, the hosts dropped an attacking stinker of the likes we haven’t seen since the Arizona United days.

Perhaps Rising’s coach Pa-Modou Kah summed it up best with his words after the match.

“If you don’t create nothing in the game, you cannot come after and say you deserved something out of the game,” he said.

Simply put, Phoenix Rising deserved exactly what it got out of a clash in which the team didn’t really show up at all.

Rising’s total expected goals tally came to a measly 0.35. It’s their lowest since March 2024, over a year ago, in league play.

Even ignoring expected goals, which don’t really capture dangerous spells of pressure that don’t result in shots, you can ask yourself: when did Phoenix Rising really look like scoring a goal? I really can’t think of a single moment that I was convinced that the hosts were going to find a breakthrough.

It means that Rising now drops to a perfectly balanced record of five wins, five draws and five losses at the midpoint of the regular season. They sit right in the middle of the pack, in sixth place in the Western Conference, within touching distance of a top four berth that would give them hosting rights in a playoff match for the first time since 2021. You’d expect this team, given its trajectory over the season save for the last two weeks, to continue to get better and make a genuine fight for that top four.

But it hasn’t been a pretty couple of weeks. Conceding four goals to Texoma, a League One expansion side, was poor enough, but at least the match had a redeeming factor in the fact that Rising scored five of their own.

I’m not sure what the redeeming factor was from Rising’s loss to Lexington. Frankly, I don’t think there was one.

It was an all-around poor performance that Phoenix Rising will want to forget in quite a hurry. How quickly this team can do so and get things back on track could make a huge difference in an otherwise too-close-to-call Western Conference.

Top image: Phoenix Rising FC