After not scoring for Coruña, Carles Gil nearing important marks for Revolution

When the Revolution signed midfielder Carles Gil to a designated player contract on Jan. 30, there was a bit of trepidation amongst denizens of The Fort: the Spaniard hadn’t scored in 18 competitive matches with Deportivo de La Coruña during the 2018-19 campaign, and had only scored 13 goals in his professional career. All that money for no goals? Yep, that had some people scratching their heads at Brad Friedel and the Revs’ front office, and understandably so — the name Guillermo Hauche and his YouTube "highlight" reel was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

In this reporter’s analysis of the move, I wrote the following: “If you’re concerned about the lack of goals from Gil, I wouldn’t sweat it too much. I would think he’s here to create and to draw defenses to him with his skill, and that should help free up a team member, unmarked, to score.

“And if he does score, I’d call that a bonus.”

Suffice it to say that with his performances in the navy blue kit this season, Gil has assuaged those fears, putting them to rest. And thanks to his penalty and assist to Michael Mancienne in Saturday afternoon’s 3-3 draw, Gil moved one step closer to a rather elite grouping in club history: the double-digit tallies mark for one season, as he now sits at nine goals and 10 helpers.

It’s a mark that has been hit with regularity over most of the last decade — with the exception of 2016 when Kei Kamara scored seven of his 12 goals on the year down the stretch — with two seasons seeing a pair of players hit that mark: last year with Cristian Penilla (12 goals, 7 assists) and Teal Bunbury (11 goals, 4 assists), and in 2017 with Kamara (12 goals, 5 assists) and Lee Nguyen (11 goals, 15 assists).

And two players doing it in the same season had happened three other times before that:

2005 — Taylor Twellman (17/7), Clint Dempsey (10/9)
2003 — Twellman (15/4), Pat Noonan (10/7)
1999 — Joe-Max Moore (15/8), Giovanni Savarese (10/2)

But double-digit marks for both goals and assists? That’s a rare feat, indeed, having only been accomplished once before.

Diego Fagundez nearly hit it last season, when he scored his ninth goal in the season finale; he had 10 assists as the No. 10.

Before Nguyen did it in ’17, only Dempsey in ’05 came the closest to hitting it. Noonan had eight assists in 2004 when he scored 11 goals, and Moore had eight helpers in ’99.

The year before, Raul Diaz Arce also had eight assists to go along with 18 goals.

Including those players listed, the Revolution have had 22 different players score 10 or more goals in a season. Twellman pulled it off five times, including a team-record 23 goals in 2002. Moore, Noonan, and Nguyen have each scored 10 or more goals twice during their respective tenures.