The Pittsburgh Riverhounds got the result, winning 3-1 over a struggling Loudoun United team Saturday night at Highmark Stadium, but coach Bob Lilley was less than pleased with the way they achieved it.

He called it a poor performance, and though his group is the current league leader in points, it’ll need to be more dialed in down the stretch if it wants to stay there.

“I didn’t think we played with enough energy,” Lilley said. “I thought (Loudoun) started slow, and we needed to put our foot down on the gas in the first half. There should have been more chances and more goals. We got two goals, one on a keeper mistake, but I felt like we just let them stay around and then they got a goal. We were taking shortcuts defensively as a team. We wouldn’t do that against Columbus or New England. It’s a problem, and it’s frustrating. I told the guys that it was good that we won the game, but it was one of our poorer performances in Pittsburgh this year. That’s disappointing at this time of the year.”

The Hounds (15-5-9) maintained their one-point lead in the USL Championship Eastern Conference standings over Tampa Bay. Loudoun (7-19-3) is in second-to-last place.

Another positive was Albert Dikwa took over the league lead in goals, moving his total to 16 after scoring a pair Saturday. He did it in front of an announced crowd of 5,512, the largest for a home regular-season game in Hounds history.

Dikwa scored his first goal in the 21st minute off a nice pass from Kenardo Forbes. Two minutes later Edward Kizza cashed in on a misplay by Loudoun keeper and Allderdice grad Dane Jacomen, who was making his return to Pittsburgh.

Kizza put a weak shot in on Jacomen, who fumbled it right back to Kizza, and he put in the rebound.

Jacomen had a busy night. He faced 19 shots, eight of which were on target. He had a nice sequence in the 36th minute where he stopped a pair of shots during a barrage by the Hounds. Junior Etou had the first shot. Dikwa followed up with two tries: One was blocked, and the other made it to Jacomen. Forbes blasted one last try that was blocked.

Kalil ElMedkhar scored for Loudoun on a beautiful strike into the top-right corner from 25 yards in the 61st minute, which made the last half hour interesting.

But Dikwa put the game away in the 89th minute. With Loudoun pushed forward, Luke Biasi lobbed a pass into open space and Dikwa ran it down for a clear breakaway.

Dikwa took the keeper one-on-one, made a move and struck a clean shot into the back of the net.

“Let me tell you that’s the most difficult position to be in as a striker to be one-on-one with the keeper, because you have a thousand thoughts in your head,” Dikwa said. “The good thing was I had a lot of experience, because I have missed chances like that in the past. I just tried to control myself and make a good decision. I kept eye-contact with the keeper, faked him out and put it in.”

The Hounds were without starting keeper Jahmali Waite (Jamaica) and reserve midfielder DZ Harmon (Liberia), who were on international duty. Christian Garner started in place of Waite.

Waite posted a shutout for Jamaica in a 1-0 win over Honduras in the CONCACAF Nations League on Friday night.

With the Hounds squandering a 3-0 lead before recovering for a 4-3 win at Harftord a couple weeks ago coupled with Saturday’s performance, Lilley said there’s plenty of material to show they need to improve heading into a game at Miami next Saturday.

“In this sport you need to show up, and we didn’t show up at our best tonight,” Lilley said. “Because of the opposition maybe we get the result anyways, but at this time of the year we have to be at our best consistently and we weren’t close tonight. It’s not a little tweak here or there. We have a lot of work to do, so hopefully we’ll go into Miami with the right habits and mindset.”

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