Fury’s scoring drought continues
Third straight shutout loss raises playoff concerns
As if the Ottawa Fury FC needed any more adversity in this up and down season, veteran Jamar Dixon said he felt a crack in his ankle in the dying minutes of a game the Fury just had to have and all he could do was roll himself off the field for the additional time.
It wasn’t the only sound of something possibly breaking around TD Place because the playoff chances for the Fury also suffered a serious crack Saturday night in an unimaginable 2-0 loss to a 13th-place Penn FC squad that had not won a game since July 6 and just six games all season.
A crowd of 5,270 showed up at TD Place Saturday evening hoping to see the Fury take a stranglehold on the eighth and final playoff spot in the United Soccer League’s Eastern Conference.
Instead, many left early, most of them disheartened after watching the Fury fail to score a single goal for the third straight contest to run their goalless streak now to 276 minutes and counting.
All this against a Penn FC squad the Fury had already beaten twice his year by scores 1-0 in Harrisburg in May, then 2-1 at home in midJuly.
“We have made it tough on ourselves,” said Fury defender Onua Obasi. “We had beaten them twice and we came in confident.
“But this (loss) just makes all our remaking games that much more important. We have to win our games now and see what happens.”
“Naturally, after a game like that our heads are going to drop. But we can’t dwell on it. We made some mistakes maybe we shouldn’t be making, not at this point of the season.”
The loss was also frustrating for the fans because the Fury FC won’t see the friendly confines of TD Place again until Sept. 30 in USL action with only an exhibition CapCity Cup contest against the MLS’s Montreal Impact Sept, 7.
Otherwise, it’s road games in New York (next Friday), Toronto, Richmond, Louisville and Toronto again before winding up the campaign with back-to-back home games against Bethlehem and Charleston.
That’s where the Fury’s road record of just three wins and two draws against seven losses comes into play.
The team has not won one away from home since July 4 in a 1-0 triumph over the Indy 11 and just can’t afford anything less than three wins in the five-game stretch out of town.
In the opening 45 minutes, the Fury did just about everything right except score a goal of their own and it came back to bite them in the 45th minute when ex-Fury Paulo Junior fired one past Fury keeper Max Crepeau.
Penn FC’s Aaron Dennis then put it away with a point-blank last past Crepeau in the 80th minute.
“We have to score when we produce (scoring) situations,” said Fury head coach Nikola Popovic. “We produced a lot of situations and did not score.
“We have to have the sensibility to put the ball in the net.
“Things could have been different. We had chances. We had more chances in the first half, then they scored on a lost ball. At the end of the day, a technical mistake costs us the game.”
Naturally, after a game like that our heads are going to drop.