Turf Trouble: New England Revolution Forced to Adjust to Playing Surface

"It seemed a little bit like the guys were still adjusting to the turf. It’s been a couple weeks since we played on it. That’s a strange one for me this year, the way it rolls."

Photo By J. Alexander Dolan

The playing surface at Gillette Stadium is always a hot topic but New England Revolution head coach Caleb Porter surprisingly mentioned the turf after the Revs’ 1-0 win over the New York Red Bulls.

“It seemed a little bit like the guys were still adjusting to the turf,” Porter postulated. “It’s been a couple weeks since we played on it. That’s a strange one for me this year, the way it rolls. It seems like the guys are still figuring out, the weight of passes, calibrating it. I’m confident next week we’ll be a little cleaner on it, because I just felt like there were some bad touches and giveaways that we had early in the year that we aren’t having recently.”

Whether it be the home or away team, the effect of the playing surface can be seen by observers. At times the ball can scamper off the pitch at a rapid pace while in past years the ball appears weighed down by a ton of bricks.

New England trains on a grass pitch and also travels across the United States playing mostly on natural grass. Even when the Revolution are home for a week, there can still be a feeling out process for how the turf will play on match day.

“We don’t play on it every week,” Matt Polster said. “We train on grass and we have to adjust to this ourselves. You don’t want to make any excuses. We should be able to deal with it a little bit better than we did today.”

So it will be interesting to see if New England can limit the amount of turnovers now that we are past the halfway point of the season. If so that would seem to line up with Porter and Polster’s comments.

But if the Revolution continue to give the ball away, the underlying issue might just be poor decision-making combined with a lack of quality. Specifically on Saturday, Mark-Anthony Kaye and Polster were gifting the ball to their opponents in the midfield.

While skeptics will argue that it isn’t worthwhile complaining about New England being forced to play on turf, the Revolution are clearly saying that it affects their play. With the World Cup coming in 2026, hopefully a permanent switch to natural grass will be on the horizon.