One month into the USL Championship regular season, there are some usual suspects near the top of the scoring charts.<\/p>\n
Even with its first loss of the season ending a perfect start on Saturday evening, Louisville City\u2019s at the top of the list, while the Tampa Bay Rowdies, Charleston Battery and Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC are all putting up good underlying numbers.<\/p>\n
One side that might surprise you in that top five, though, is Indy Eleven, which has been putting together strong attacking displays so far, even if the full reward hasn\u2019t arrived yet. Saturday\u2019s clash against Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC saw the side concede late for a second consecutive outing, leaving points on the table in a 1-1 draw.<\/p>\n
The underlying numbers for the Boys in Blue have been good, however, with the side sitting on an 8.32 Expected Goals mark through four games as returnees like Bruno Rend\u00f3n and new arrivals like Lo\u00efc Mesanvi make an impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cBruno has had a great start to the season,\u201d said Indy Head Coach Sean McAuley on Saturday.\u00a0\u201cYou can see what Lo\u00efc brings us as a relatively unknown player that we got a hold of. I\u2019ve known him for a few years, and he\u2019s got, he\u2019s got really good quality, and he can threaten the opponent with the pace. Once he gets past people, he picks the pass out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mesanvi hasn\u2019t found the net yet in the league, but he has made an impact off the dribble and in the final third, completing 3.38 progressive carries and 31.72 touches in the final third per 90 minutes. As with other parts of Indy\u2019s attack \u2013 which has only five goals in league play \u2013 it\u2019s not fully come together quite yet, but the potential to succeed has been on display.<\/p>\n
For a side that missed out on the postseason a year ago, the early returns are showing promise and a potential return to contention.<\/p>\n
Here are this week\u2019s rankings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One month into the USL Championship regular season, there are some usual suspects near the top of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[115,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-221913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-news","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}