Tijuana fires 23 shots and hits the crossbar, but can't get past Puebla in 0-0 draw

Twenty three shots. Twelve corners. One crossbar. And the scoreboard, stubborn as ever, stayed at 0-0. Club Tijuana crashed into the Puebla goal over and over at Estadio Caliente, and what should have been a rout ended up a draw that leaves both sides with the feeling they left something on the field.

Tijuana's control of the match was clear almost from the opening whistle. Adonis Preciado tested the keeper early with a shot that drifted just wide of the post, and from there the hosts kept piling up corners and chances without letup: Ivan Tona, Ignacio Rivero and Francisco Gonzalez all had their looks before the half hour mark. The clearest opportunity came in the 72nd minute, when Jackson Porozo met a Gonzalez corner kick with a header that cannoned off the crossbar. That strike off the woodwork sums up Tijuana's afternoon pretty well: plenty of insistence, no reward to show for it.

Puebla, for its part, spent most of the match simply holding on and looking for the occasional isolated strike. Luifer Hernandez had a header that drifted off target before the break, and early in the second half he forced a low shot that the home goalkeeper handled without much trouble. Mathias Tomas also tried his luck from outside the box, but Puebla never managed to string together the kind of sequence that would have truly worried Tijuana.

The numbers don't lie, but they weren't enough

The stat sheet backs up what played out on the field: Tijuana was clearly the superior side in terms of volume, even if it never translated into a goal.

According to our expected goals estimate based on the match's shot data, Tijuana generated 1.16 xG compared to just 0.38 xG for Puebla. The gap is clear and backs up the home side's dominance, though it also makes plain that none of its chances were truly clear cut: plenty of shots from outside the box, not much clean finishing inside it.

The result also runs counter to our pre match projections. Beforehand we gave Tijuana a 56% chance of winning, with a draw at 26% and an away win at just 18%, while our goal projection had the hosts at 1.8 and the visitors at 0.95, for a total of 2.75. None of that showed up on the scoreboard: the team expected to win with authority instead ran into a Puebla wall and ended up splitting the points.

Yellow cards went to Mathias Tomas, Iker Moreno, Rafael Fernandez and Joban Gonzalez, in a match that, despite the territorial dominance on one side, was never especially rough: Tijuana committed just six fouls to Puebla's ten. The substitutions didn't change much either, as neither Elias Manoel nor Eduardo Mustre could unlock what the team's overall play couldn't solve.

What the draw means in the standings

In the tournament, Tijuana arrives at this match with a record of 4 wins, 4 draws and 3 losses in 11 games, while Puebla has 4 wins, 4 draws and 4 losses in 12. They are neighbors in the standings, separated only by goal difference, and this 0-0 doesn't change that picture much: both sides add a point that keeps them in the middle of the Liga MX table, still far from the positions that truly matter.

In the end, the lasting image is of a Tijuana side that did almost everything right except the one thing that counts, and a Puebla side that knew how to get by with little. Porozo's crossbar will stand as the image of what could have been and wasn't.