Lights vs Swope Park Rangers - Match Preview - Goals Galore?

The Lights are coming off of a relatively disappointing home draw against Reno last Saturday night, but they get a chance at immediate redemption in front of the home fans with another home game tomorrow - this time against the in-form Swope Park Rangers.

Swope Park has won their first two games, and has scored eight goals in the process. If the Lights want to come out of this one with all three points, they are going to have to keep Swope Park quiet. Specifically, they are going to have to come up with a game plan for Swope Park's center forward Kharlton Belmar, who has scored four goals in his first two games this season (and average a goal every other game last season). They'll also have to watch out for Hadji Berry, a new signing for Swope Park who also managed about a goal every other game for his former team last year.

But there is hope for the Lights, because so far this season Swope Park's effectiveness in attack has almost been matched by their incompetence in defense. Though they have scored eight in two games, they've also conceded five - which means that they are going to give the Lights some chances.

And the Lights have shown, over their first two games, that the attack is starting to really click.

Our first game, of course, they scored three goals away from home. And while last week they only managed to put one in the net, they had 20 shots compared to Reno's 11. And it's not like those were all just potshots either, 15 of them were from inside Reno's eighteen yard box.

The problem was that they only managed to put 5 on target, which is a really really really low accuracy rate. That is really going to need to improve if they want to pick up all three points against Swope Park.

But what this game is really going to be about is a test of two very very different styles of play.

Let's look at some stats:

In the Lights' last game, at home, against Reno, they attempted 313 passes (75 of them long passes), and only completed 65% of them. Against Fresno, away from home, they made 255 passes (105 of them long), and only completed 46% of them.

So over the course of two games, the Lights have completed only 321 (or 56.5%) of their passes.

Swope Park Rangers have completed almost three times that many. In their first two games, they have completed 946 passes, and have a pass accuracy of 84%.

Swope Park are almost top of the league in pass accuracy and volume. The Lights are rooted to the bottom.

Now to be clear, pass accuracy isn't everything. The Lights are clearly going for a counter attacking style, with lots of focus on long balls to move the ball vertically very quickly. But at the same time, football is essentially a passing game, and more passing generally correlates pretty highly with higher league position.

Long story short, we can't keep giving the ball away every other pass and expect to do well this season.

So for this game, even though the Lights are at home, expect Swope Park to have the lion's share of the ball, and expect the Lights to try to hit them on the break.

And expect goals - at both ends.