Last Saturday at Cashman Field marked a milestone evening for Las Vegas Lights FC. With a 1-0 win over El Paso Locomotive FC, the new era in Vegas is officially underway.
After undergoing a change in ownership, sporting director, manager and entire roster this past offseason, Las Vegas earned a hard-fought three points to secure the first win of Head Coach Dennis Sanchez’s tenure.
“I’m proud of them,” said Sanchez. “I felt like they deserved it, they put a good shift in. We talked all week about how we could maximize the energy out of the group and outwork our opponent, and they did that tonight.”
Vegas center back Fabien Garcia may feel a little hard-done to not get credit for the goal – it went down as an own goal off El Paso goalkeeper Javier Garcia – but he and the team will take the result.
“We’re building right now,” said Garcia. “[Opponents] need to be scared when they’re coming to Vegas. A 1-0 clean sheet is the best result we can do right now. We’re going to work on many things, the group is growing.”
Sanchez mentioned last week how it still feels like preseason. New players have been signed and shuffling in throughout the first few weeks of the year, and both coaches and players knew it would take a bit of time for everything to start jelling.
JC Ngando, who’s on loan from Major League Soccer’s Vancouver Whitecaps FC, is one of the recent signings whose impact was immediate on Saturday. He was excellent defensively in central midfield, as well as provided the cross to Garcia on the goal.
“[Saturday] was the first win, but the first two weeks were very good,” said Ngando. “It was just a lack of chemistry…It was hard to understand the way we all work. The coach has really good ideas, but for us to all be in the same mind and play the same game was really hard. Today was our best performance, though, because we got the win.”
After a tough 2023 campaign that saw the club notch just three wins, this is a promising start. The next test for Sanchez & Co. will be translating the Week 3 performance into a positive result at Oakland Roots this Saturday (7:00 p.m. PT, Stream on ESPN+).
“We have to continue to improve in all phases,” said Sanchez. “We know that this group can score goals, so we have to make sure that we’re in games and that we have the right mentality. We’re going to keep working and keep progressing forward.”
Added Ngando: “The goal is to always be the protagonist of the game. So home or away, the way we play never changes. We’re Las Vegas, and we’re going to show the game we want to play.”
