There is only one question to ask as the New England Revolution head out west to Sandy, Utah to face Real Salt Lake (930 PM EDT/Apple TV).
What are we doing?
What is MLS doing playing a full weekend of games during a two-week international break? Take a quick glance at the league's availability report and just see the wave of international absences hitting teams 3, 4, 5, 7 players at a time. At least the Energy Drinks had some sense to postpone until Wednesday due to the nor'easter currently battering southern New England and greater NYC.
Sam Lattof
But the number of domestic games that should be played in the next two weeks is zero. While the great Matt Doyle points out with the new CBA and calendar shift this should be the last time MLS plays during an international window, that would require a lot of not-smart people to suddenly and drastically start making smart decisions. Consider me still one of little faith.
Now, if we're being honest, sticking the Revs with a game against a Western Conference opponent isn't the end of the world. Normally dropping points on the road out west is usually somewhere between a formality and a rite of passage. Except RSL has their own long laundry list of injuries and for reasons that border on cruel and unusual punishment, played midweek and lost in Seattle.
Perhaps the Revs would have won this game at full strength anyway, but now have to figure out things like do we keep Ethan Kohler at center back or move him to CDM to cover Raines/Yusuf? Does Matt Polster start at rightback with almost no midfield depth? Is today the day we see the Daniel Gazdag striker experiment?
Seth Macomber
These are all not unreasonable things to test in a late September road game out West; however, I would be outraged if the Revs were having to do this against Miami or one of the top teams in the East. Fourth-place Charlotte and fifth-place Chicago could literally have homefield in the playoffs decided by a match with 9 players unavailable due to national team commitments. Philly and Orlando (sixth/seventh) have a clear fight for playoff seed and could combine to put together a full starting lineup of eleven players away on top of, you know, that miserable storm they're adjacent to.
Galaxy-Rapids (eighth/seventh in the West) could have massive implications on the play-in match on the other side of the bracket. LAFC and Dallas are fighting for homefield (sixth/fourth) with almost double-digit international absences between the two of them.
Yes, it is tremendous work by all involved on the whole fair competition aspect of the schedule makers' jobs...you know the same people who put the Revs up against NYCFC twice in about three weeks and against Nashville twice in the first half of the year instead of, I don't know, actually attempting to balance your already unbalanced schedule to at least split up all of the conference games to something close to one pre-World Cup and one post-World Cup to account for the summer transfer window.
Oh and all of the games are again being crammed in the usual evening window, with no afternoon games at all and just one game on Sunday (Columbus-Inter Miami), because let's keep making the same mistakes while we're at it and give fans as few opportunities as possible to watch games while dodging the USMNT and NFL. Because it's fall now, it's only going to get harder next year when the regular season extends into December.
Seth Macomber
At least that means we can watch Peyton Miller and Brooklyn Raines make their full senior USMNT debuts against Peru this afternoon.
Again. What. Are. WE. DOING?!?!
For all the growth and progression MLS has done since COVID as far as acquiring and selling players, it continues to do a disservice to its product with decision-making and scheduling that at times looks like it was drawn up in the dirt on a playground at elementary school recess.
I'd like to say the rest of this column is going to be more positive, because as always we're joined by our new friend Kyle Sipple of Wasatch Soccer Sentinel, but at the moment there is no soapbox for RSL to stand on because it is stuck in a quagmire of it's own misery. But be sure to check out all of their game coverage over on their site.
1) Four game losing streak, one point in eight games, four points in thirteen games...are things as dire as the form guide indicates for RSL right now?
Short answer: yes, things are definitely that dire. Longer answer: they're actually more dire, in my opinion, than the form guide or the team's placement in the table would indicate. The team needs a lifeline and it's unclear where that could come from this season. RSL sold one of their best players, Utah native Zavier Gozo, for a record amount of money and we've yet to see that return be invested back into the squad. Pablo Mastroeni seems entirely out of ideas to turn things around. After the Seattle match, he praised the team by saying the boys "executed the game plan to a T". That's not exactly what you want to hear after your team, which has the worst form in the league, loses 2-0 to the other team with the worst form in the league. RSL have only won 1 game away from home in the last 14 months, so I wasn't particularly optimistic for that game, but it's hard not to feel demoralized as a result. This winless streak, which is now at 13, is the worst in RSL history!
2) Zavier Gozo is now with Crystal Palace, Diego Luna just had surgery, who is running the RSL attack now and who needs to step up and help?
Candidly, no one is running the attack right now, which is one of the big problems. In theory, it should be designated player Morgan Guilavogui. But Morgan, just like everyone else on this team, has not been good since the World Cup break. Our primary goal-scorer Sergi Solans, who is a rookie after having been drafted by RSL this year, hasn't found his goal-scoring form again. Part of that is a result of how disjointed our team has been in general. Saba Lobjanidze has been a bright spot since joining RSL, but Pablo has played him out of position a few times, preventing him from stringing together consistent minutes in his preferred position. As you can tell, we desperately need creativity, a spark, or any sort of positive change. Taylor Booth recently joined his brother, Zach, here at RSL. Maybe he'll be that player, but that remains to be seen.
3) RSL has slipped down to 13th but are still 3 points away from the play-in spots. Are the playoffs still a realistic goal or is this a squad that desperately just needs to get to the offseason?
We all know that MLS is weird. I do think it's possible that RSL stumble into the "playoffs" by making the play-in game. Even if that does happen, I think we're unlikely to see anything different than what we've seen from this team in the past: it would likely result in a quick exit. I think a team like this can exist in mediocrity for a long time--and they have! We don't even win the Rocky Mountain Cup anymore like we used to (which is our made up fan trophy we fight the Colorado Rapids for.) But we've won enough, made the playoffs enough times, that coach and front office contracts have been renewed, some people promoted, etc. So that said, I do think that the collapse this season will be important for an actual reckoning to take place. It's hard to get away with being THIS bad for this long. The offseason is absolutely calling our names.
Lineup/Injuries/Predictions/Etc
The availability report is extremely dire for this game, so some minutes will be spread around. In addition to the long list of injuries, a number of players will be out on international duty: Juan Manuel Sanabria, new signing Luc de Fougerolles, Saba Lobjanidze, Luca Moisa, Kobi Henry, and Colin Guske. I'm not sure what the formation will be or who will be starting, but I do know that it will be a bit wacky. And MLS is wacky. So who knows, maybe this is the game RSL turns things around. (I predict a 2-0 loss.)
