RSL coach Juarez on inconsistent goalscoring: “We’ve been missing that piece for four years”

In a rare bit of transparency, RSL coach Freddy Juarez told reporters that the club hasn’t had a veritable goalscorer in their ranks for nearly five years.

I’ll present Juarez’s comments below with annotation. They very much speak for themselves.

“Goals win games. Goals win games. If we’re not scoring, it’s going to be tough to win games. We have to put the ball in the net. The thing we talked about today was, we have to score our chances. We scored one, we didn’t score the others. We scored two, actually — one for them.”

“In this league, it’s tough. Especially for us, we’ve got to play near-perfect all the time. We don’t get to buy those players that come with goals. We’ve got to create chances and chances. It’s not an easy task.”

“Since I’ve been here, for the four years when I get here with Jeff (Cassar), with Mike (Petke), and I’ve now been over, we haven’t had the guy that’s going to score a lots of goals. That’s 100 percent exactly what it is. We have to scrap, we have to claw. We have to defend right. When we get a goal, sometimes they come in bunches. Sometimes we go through phases like this, where they’re not coming consistently. That one goal we got should have been enough. We needed to be tougher.”

“1-0 should be enough for us. I’d love a 2-0, but it is what it is. You can talk all you want, but we’ve been missing that piece for four years. Five years, almost.”