Lilley has 'no doubt' Hounds can 'go on a stretch' to save season

Bob Lilley believes that his Riverhounds can pick up points and pick them up quickly as he looks to turn his team’s season around. 

With their loss to Louisville City on Wednesday night, the Riverhounds have now gone seven games without a win in the USL Championship (eight in all competitions if you include their loss to FC Tulsa in the U.S. Open Cup), a far cry from last season’s heroics that ironically included a run of eight games without defeat as they stormed their way to the Players’ Shield at the end of the regular season. 

And streaks were very much at the front of his mind as he spoke to the press after the game, as he stated his belief in the team in being able to turn things around quickly by rattling off a few results in a row to get them back on track after a dreadful start to 2024. 

“We’re going to get on a bit of a streak at some point. It’s our job to fight for every point. If it’s four or five points over the next three games, it’s four or five points. That’s better than one or two and we’ve got to fight for everything. So when we string four or five games together, it has an even bigger impact, and that’s all we can do. Go to the next game, there’s still lots of time. It sucks that we’re almost at the halfway point … so there is urgency now. Hopefully, we’ll win the next couple of games, we’re at 14 points in 15 games. So can we win Saturday to give ourselves a chance to get to 20? There’s no doubt in my mind we can go on a stretch, but right now we’ve got to build confidence, and the only way we can do that is to get three points.” 

As has become the norm when it comes to these Lilley press conferences after defeats, the one word that kept coming up was ‘mistakes’, but for quite possibly the first time when covering the topic, he shared some of the blame across the whole team rather than just the players: “We're making mistakes. And that's on the players, it's also on the coaching staff. I mean, we go over it, but we’ve got to keep finding ways to clean up some of these things.” 

One way to correct things could be to bring in players from the outside who might perhaps be better fits to the system than what they have already, and if the performance of Enoch Mushagalusa on his debut was anything to go by, then it wouldn’t be a bad strategy to adopt going forward. Lilley wouldn’t be drawn into any talk of additional transfers just yet, but did hint that he isn’t necessarily done adding to the roster just yet: 

“I think we're always trying to get better anyways. I don't make a lot of moves. And I don’t anticipate making a lot of moves… unless it's the right fit.”