The Philadelphia Union created scoring chances. They controlled possession for large stretches. They kept the New England Revolution out of the box for the most part.
Yet the Union came away with a scoreless draw Saturday night, extending their winless streak to six – 0-3-3.
Philadelphia’s last victory was July 29 against New England at PPL Park.
It looked as if the Union would defeat the Revolution once again at Gillette Stadium, but they couldn’t capitalize. Still, the Union hold a 3-0-3 record all-time against New England, but that’s of little consolation right now.
“Frustrating night,” Union manager John Hackworth said. “Despite us having a lot of the ball and possession, and doing what we needed to do, it wasn’t good enough for a win tonight. I thought the fact that we controlled the tempo so much kind of took our foot off the gas a little bit in the first half.
“There were really some opportunities to jump on this game and would have opened it up a lot and it I think it would have been a much different second half, so it’s frustrating. A frustrating night.”
The Union (7-13-5) helped extend the Revolution’s winless streak to 10 matches, a club record.
On a night in which the Union played well enough to win, they were left a bit bewildered.
They won’t stop working, however.
“I think if you look at our record and you look at the way we’ve played, we’ve had some difficulties scoring goals, but I’ll take our soccer any day,” Hackworth said. “I’m encouraged by that. I’m encouraged by the way we’re playing. We just have to continue it, and the last part is that we have to execute. We have to take our chances.
“There are some growing pains here, for sure. And as well as we play sometimes, we make some bad mistakes. (There are) little places where we need to be more mature, more disciplined, we lose our heads in moments where we make bad decisions and that’s growth. We have to mature to get better.”
The players are seeing results in training and in the games. They’re just not always seeing wins at the end.
“I’m sure it’s got to be frustrating, everybody wants to score goals,” defender Sheanon Williams said. “It’s frustrating. What’s most frustrating is that we come and play extremely well, and we have the ball most the time, and we have really, really good chances, but it’s going to happen. Not everything’s going to go in, but it’s frustrating when you play like that and you don’t get the result you want.
“Like the stats show, they didn’t really have much and we had a lot (in the first half). But you can pass the ball around all you want and if we don’t score goals, then it means nothing. So, we just have to work on getting a bit more dangerous and finishing off our opportunities. It’s good that were making opportunities. Now we just have to make sure we finish them.”
The Union return to action in two weeks with a visit to Toronto FC on Sept. 15.
