Union’s Sergio Santos, José Andrés Martínez lead a long injury list; Leon Flach signing to boost midfield
Martínez is out for 1-2 weeks with an ankle injury that proved less serious than first feared. Santos could be out for up to four weeks with a toe injury.
Union midfielder José Andrés Martínez has an ankle injury that’s expected to rule him out for 1-2 weeks, but that’s a far better scenario than was first feared when he pulled up lame in Saturday’s scrimmage against Chicago.
“There is no fracture or break,” manager Jim Curtin said Wednesday on a call from the team’s training camp in Clearwater, Fla. “When it happened live, as a coach you expect and fear the worst.”
Curtin said he’d likely rotate the Union’s diamond-shaped four-man midfield into a box shape, with Jack Elliott and Alejandro Bedoya playing behind two attackers (presumably Jamiro Monteiro and Anthony Fontana), for Wednesday’s closed-door scrimmage against Orlando City.
» READ MORE: Anthony Fontana will be the Union’s top playmaker to start the season
That may be a preview of what we see in the Union’s April 7 Concacaf Champions League opener at Costa Rica’s Saprissa, if Martínez needs closer to two weeks than one to fully recover.
And it’s small potatoes relative to the rest of the Union’s injury list, which is worryingly long. Kacper Przybylko will miss the Orlando scrimmage due to back spasms, and is day to day; Cory Burke has a groin injury and hasn’t gotten on the field at all yet; Ilsinho is out for another two weeks or so with a calf injury; and Sergio Santos is out 3-4 weeks due to a toe injury.
That leaves the Union with just one healthy striker, 18-year-old academy product Jack de Vries.
Oh, and Monteiro and Olivier Mbaizo are gone on national team duty with their respective countries, Cape Verde and Cameroon, through the end of March. (Coincidentally, they could play against each other on Friday in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier.) If they return on schedule, they’d arrive just in time to leave for Costa Rica.
Curtin made the point that the Union were barely bitten by the injury bug at all last year for most of the season, especially when it came to the team’s top players.
“We had, you know, I’d say the core of 12 to 13 players playing together all the time. … Is it going to be perfect like that every season? Absolutely not,” Curtin said. “So you need your depth to step up. We see it as an opportunity. We’re not going to sit and complain or make excuses when guys are out.”
» READ MORE: Union manager Jim Curtin says the team still has ‘a piece or two’ to add to the roster
Curtin doesn’t expect the game at Saprissa to be an attacking showcase. And he knows from experience that defending has to come first in Concacaf games, having played in a fair number of them.
“You can’t win a series against a team in that first leg, but you certainly can lose it,” he said. “So we will have to be smart and not allow ourselves to be opened up and concede silly goals, especially toward the end of games when fatigue sets in. We’ll regroup after that game, hopefully we’ll get a piece or two back by the second leg, and go for it at home to win the series.”
There’s a reinforcement coming, but it’s not of the attacking kind that the team still needs. The Union will sign U.S. youth national team player Leon Flach, a 20-year-old who can play central midfield or left back, from German second-division team St. Pauli for a transfer fee of around $300,000. The deal was first reported by Transfermarkt.com.
Flach was born in the Houston suburbs to German parents, and moved to Germany as a child. He has made five appearances for St. Pauli’s first team this season, and has played twice for the U.S. under-20 national team.
The deal isn’t done yet, so Curtin obviously couldn’t say anything about Flach. But he hinted that there will be some people coming in “to help us,” and “if you have an American passport, it’s quick” to get into the country — especially compared to Stuart Findlay, who still can’t get his visa approved.