New England Revolution captain Carles Gil and assistant coach Michael Morris spoke to the media on Wednesday.
Here are some thoughts.
We Got Grass
The big news is that the New England Revolution will be playing on grass when it plays its first game at Gillette Stadium in 2026.
While Carles Gil didn't think that the change in playing surface made a massive difference, Morris was excited by how the playing surface looked.
“[Assistant Coach] Sean [Hughes] and I went [to Gillette Stadium] yesterday when we were done here, and we walked around the stadium," he said. "It looks nice and it is coming into place. It’s amazing that we are going to have an opportunity to play on fields that are going to be at the standard of the World Cup, and we feel we can actually use that to our advantage based off the way we ideally want to try and play in possession.
“It does look very pretty," Morris later added. "Right now, I am not sure what phase it is in, but you can see that it’s laid down. You can see that it is all coming together. I think that once they have done their job, and it looks like they are doing a very good job with it, and they get everything the precise length and everything is all smooth and flattened out, it’s just going to be a surface that when you want to play at a high level, and you have a high level surface. [A good surface] makes play a lot more predictable in terms of the speed that the ball rolls and the precision that you can play at. It looks pretty and then hopefully allows teams to play pretty as well.”
It will be interesting to see how the grass holds up as the Boston Legacy will be playing the day before. The Gillette Stadium crew will have plenty of work to do.
Staying Fit
With New England getting an early bye week thanks to the snow that hit the region, the Revs got some time to recharge without worrying about playing an MLS match. But the club stayed active and played a friendly against Rhode Island FC, who also had a game canceled due to the snow.
“It’s never ideal when you have to make a schedule change," Morris said. "Obviously, everyone was looking forward to the home opener [originally scheduled for March 7], but we were able to find positives in that change. It gave us an extra week to train and to recover some guys who had slight injuries. Last week felt like a productive week of training, and then we had a challenging [scrimmage] match against Rhode Island FC, where we were also able to bring in some players from the development system. It’s always good to see some of the young players who are coming up. So overall, we took a situation that isn’t ideal from a planning standpoint, everyone gets excited for the home opener, and turned it into an extra week to refine some actions we wanted to work on.”
While it is great that the Revolution were able to stay fit, having a challenging scrimmage isn't a positive sign for a club that has yet to secure a point in 2026. Hopefully, when New England hits the field at Gillette Stadium, the squad will look a lot better than it has this season.
