Silva's PK save preserves 1-0 home victory for Riverhounds

With a potential win in the balance, Riverhounds goalkeeper Kevin Silva was locked in as El Paso’s Lucho Solignac stepped up to take a penalty kick in the 90th minute.

Moments earlier, Silva was whistled for a foul in the box for contact, and that left him determined as he stood on his goal line.

“It gave me more incentive, because if you take the penalty, you have to make the save,” Silva said.

That’s exactly what he did.

Silva dove to his right and punched the ball away from the post, preserving a 1-0 victory for the Riverhounds over El Paso Locomotive on Saturday night at Highmark stadium.

After the save and the ball was cleared out of play, several of Silva’s teammates embraced him. The numbers show that goalkeepers are at a major disadvantage when it comes to penalty kicks, but Silva found a way to keep the ball out.

“Mostly it’s just a mental game,” Silva said. “As you see him step up, you try to look at everything he’s thinking about. In my head, I picked that I was going to go right and stick with it. It worked out.”

With the win, the Riverhounds (7-2-1) are in second place in the USL Championship Eastern Conference standings, two points behind Louisville City. They also improved to 5-0 at home in league play and have outscored opponents 12-1, but Saturday’s win nearly slipped away.

After squandering several goal chances in the first half, Russell Cicerone scored 45 seconds into the second half off a cross from Alex Dixon for the lone goal.

Riverhounds coach Bob Lilley was hopeful that the goal would spark the team to put the game away with another goal, but for the second consecutive week, they had to hold on to a 1-0 result.

“It was a good win, and I thought we did some things well, but we have to put more chances away,” Lilley said. “We’ve been very wasteful for a stretch here, and when you do that, teams are going to add fresh players and push more players up the pitch. Then there’s anxiety at the end.”

The list of missed chances in the first half included Dane Kelly and Mekeil Williams getting stopped by Locomotive keeper Evan Newton on consecutive headers off a corner kick in the 29th minute. Newton also got an outstretched hand on a heavy shot by Nathan Dossantos in the 35th minute, and Dixon hit the post seven minutes later.

El Paso pushed for a tying goal over the last 15 minutes, generating a few free kicks and a couple of corners that were defended successfully.

Lilley felt his team was too passive in the late stages, allowing El Paso to make a run.

“Even after we added fresh guys at the end of the game, they were able to play through us,” Lilley said. “Anytime one of their guys had the ball, they had five seconds to look up and make a pass. When you play that passively, you are asking for something bad to happen, which it did. We conceded a penalty. Fortunately, we got a save on it.

“I don’t think El Paso deserved the point, but they gave us a run and we almost handed it to them. It was disappointing. We closed the game a lot better last week against Birmingham.”

The Riverhounds travel to Florida each of the next two weeks. They play at defending Eastern Conference champion Tampa Bay next Saturday and at Miami FC the following week.