CHESTER, Pa. — Marco Fabian and Anthony Fontana scored, and the Philadelphia Union bounced back from their worst loss of the season to beat the short-handed Fire 2-0 on a sweltering Saturday night at Talen Energy Stadium.
The Union, who lost 4-0 at Real Salt Lake last Sunday, increased their lead in the Eastern Conference to four points over D.C. United, who were idle.
The Fire (5-10-8, 23 points) were without top midfielders Dax McCarty and Nicolas Gaitan. They have one victory in their last 11 games and fell to 0-8-3 on the road, where they haven’t won since May 2018. Their winless streak reached four games.
Fabian opened the scoring for the Union (11-6-6, 39 points) in the 11th minute with a low-driving right-footed blast into the left corner from long distance. It was his second goal in three games. Fontana, 19, replaced Fabian in the 61st minute and scored on a deflection four minutes later.
“Obviously, it was frustrating to come away with another loss,’’ Fire defender Grant Lillard said. ‘‘I thought we had some good moments in the game. We executed some parts of our game plan, and we are growing more as a team. We’re trying to get through this struggle together. It’s one of those things where there is no one else to blame but us, and we’re taking that responsibility and trying to fix it and move forward to get this team back to winning ways. We believe in the group we have, and we’re excited to get back to work and fix what we know we can.”
Union goalkeeper Andre Blake stopped two second-half headers from former teammate CJ Sapong, who returned to the Philadelphia area for the first time since scoring 36 goals for the Union from 2015 to ’18.
Blake got a break when Diego Campos blasted a late shot off the crossbar.
‘‘It was a disappointing result,’’ Fire midfielder Brandt Bronico said. ‘‘A lot of guys gave a really good effort. I thought we had some really good spells of play going forward. Defensively, we were pretty solid minus the two goals. So I think we can take those positives away from this game.”
