New coach Diego Gomez will make his Rising debut on Saturday

Diego Gomez met with reporters on Friday for the first time after replacing Danny Stone as head coach of Phoenix Rising FC last week.

Stone was fired after a string of poor offensive performances, capped by a 5-1 loss on June 28 at Memphis. His firing was announced the next day.

Stone’s assistant Gomez was named interim coach.

“Obviously, as a staff member, it was a week that you have to approach in a different way. A tough week,” Gomez said Friday during a Zoom news conference. “For all of us as a staff and as players, but I think the players have been professional and have trained incredibly this week. The whole staff has worked really hard as well. And we’re in a really good position for tomorrow’s game.”

The Rising are 5-6-6 with 21 points, good for eighth in the 12-team USL Western Conference. They play next Saturday at 6 p.m. against San Antonio FC (4-5-8, 17 points, 11th in the West). The top eight teams from each conference will advance to the playoffs.

Gomez said he didn’t want to compare himself to Stone, but said he had noticed minor improvements in the team over the past week of practice.

“Of course, I have my own ideas and we have been working to implement them little by little with the team,” Gomez said. “We will see something (Saturday).”

He said he doesn’t expect a complete change, but he cited one change in particular: “We want to be a courageous team,” Gomez said. “It’s courageous with the ball. It’s courageous without the ball.”

Goals have been hard to come by for the Rising. The club has yet to score two goals in a game since a 2-1 win over Orange County on June 8. Before last week’s crushing loss, the Rising had drawn two weeks in a row, scoring just one goal in the two games.

San Antonio could have a chance to turn things around. The club is bottom of the league in clean sheets and tops the league in goals conceded with 24. San Antonio has conceded 10 goals in its five-game winless streak.

“San Antonio is not in good shape right now, but we know the capabilities of the team,” Gomez said. “They are a team that has always been one of the best teams in the league, and it is a stadium where it is very difficult to go and get points. They are a team that is going to be tough, that is going to make the game difficult, that is going to put pressure on you and win duels, but we are confident that we can go out with our tools and go and get the three points.”

Gomez knows the club is still in the playoff race and must raise its level of play.

“I see a group that is hungry, and I am hungry personally. I want to win on Saturday, and I want to do well for this club, the staff and this group of players.”

In the 89th minute of Phoenix Rising FC’s 5-6-6 Lamar Hunt US Open Cup match against Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders FC, forward Ka

Lani Kossa-Rienzi caught a long ball.

After dribbling side-to-side through a crowd of Rising players, he found space and sliced past two Rising defenders, scoring an arcing goal that sealed the game for a 2-1 victory.

It was the Rising’s best run in tournament history, and since then, the defending champions have taken a turn for the worse. The following week against Indy Eleven, the Rising lost by the same score when a free kick from just outside the box slipped through the hands of the Rising’s top goalkeeper, Rocco Rios Novo. There were just five Rising goals in their next six games, in which the Rising drew each game, in addition to a 2-1 home win over Orange County on June 8 and a 5-1 loss to Memphis 901 FC last weekend. During that difficult stretch, the Rising went 1-3-2, leading former assistant coach Diego Gomez to take over as interim coach when the Rising fired former head coach Danny Stone on June 29.