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In the oil-well drilling industry, when oil is located but it’s difficult to extract because of the underground conditions, it is said to be “tight.� You know it’s there but you just can’t get it.

You could make the case that ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ City SC’s offense is tight. The team knows where the goals are and how to get them, but its offense remains buried. The count now is five goals in nine games, getting shut out six times, with just one goal in the past five games.

“We’re doing our best in trainings,� said defender Josh Yaro. “I see the attacking guys out there every day after training doing extra shootings, trying to find a solution. So it’s just a matter of time. Sometimes you go through these times when it’s difficult, whether either you’re conceding a lot of goals or you’re not scoring a lot of goals, and it’s tough, there’s no hiding behind that. But I think as a team, we are doing everything we can, whether through hard work and through doing extra training and extra finishing, the attacking players get their reps in so that they feel confident in games, and we have guys that have proven that they can score. It’s not like, all of a sudden, we don’t have anyone on the team that can score. We have a lot of guys that can score, and I truly believe that that’s come in an amount of time.�

“I’m not too worried,� City SC coach Olof Mellberg said. “As long as we are better than the opponents and create more chances. And the more chances we create, the bigger the chance of scoring. But I think I said early on, we all need to contribute in attack, same as we do in defending. We have a lot of players who can score goals and we’re looking at a lot of set pieces as well, where we have possibilities, strong on set pieces, a lot of players are good in the air, and also good takers on the on the free kicks, on the corners. That’s one example. And just trying to keep creating chances.�

But just in case, City SC brought in an alternate energy source at the close of the transfer window Wednesday, acquiring Xande Silva, a Portuguese winger, in a trade with Atlanta, where he was mostly a reserve, for general allocation money. Silva joined the team in practice for the first time on Friday and Mellberg said he will be available for City SC’s game at Los Angeles FC on Sunday at 6 p.m. in the game of the week on Apple TV Season Pass.

City SC’s attacking corps is a combination of injured and unsuccessful so far this season. Nobody has more than one goal, nobody has more than one assist and only Cedric Teuchert has a goal and an assist, both of which came almost two months ago. Playmaking midfielder Eduard Lowen will miss his fifth game in a row dealing with a personal matter and defensive midfielder Chris Durkin will miss his fourth with a knee injury.

So the acquisition addresses an area of need.

“I think it depends a little bit on the score at the moment, with the injuries and so on,� Mellberg said. “There’s no doubt we have a lot of center backs, for example, and in the attacking positions, depending on how we play, we don’t have that many players. But this was a player who came up quite late in the transfer window and gave us an opportunity that we took.�

Silva scored a bunch of goals when he first came to Major League Soccer from France but has been mostly quiet in the two seasons since.

“He’s got speed, he’s got power, and can play in various positions,� Mellberg said. “He hasn’t had that much consistency throughout his career, been in and out a lot, stop and start. He hasn’t been a starting player over a long period of time, which I think has affected him. It’s not easy when you’re maybe not an important player in the team, week in, week out. So, you get minutes here and there. He’s definitely a player with potential and I hope we can get that out of him.

City SC’s past two games have produced two of their best expected goals totals of the season, but just one actual goal. But they’ve been close. Against Columbus, City SC had a goal wiped out by what many felt was an overeager offside call that was too close to be reversed by VAR, and against Vancouver, VAR took back a goal on an offside call that was missed and hinged on the definition of the word “deliberate.�

“Most of the games we played were quite even,� Mellberg said. “I think probably we’ve been the better side in five of them. A couple of games have been even, and in two games we haven’t been the better side, San Diego away, even though they didn’t have many chances, I thought they were the better team on the day. Philadelphia, we didn’t have a good game, and I thought they were overall better than us. The rest of the games, the opponents weren’t better than us. And at home, we’ve been the better side in all our home games.�

City SC will be without goalkeeper Roman Burki for the seventh, but potentially final, game, and will also be without right back Tomas Totland, who was back on the game-day roster last week after missing four games with a hamstring injury, but now he’s out again. Joakim Nilsson and Jannes Horn both were back on the roster last week but didn’t play and Mellberg said they are “even more ready.�