Jim Curtin will try to patch a Union lineup together with just 16 players in Portland

It’s not the Union’s fault, or any of their players’ fault, that the team will be perhaps the most shorthanded it’s ever been for Saturday’s game at the Portland Timbers (10:30 p.m., Apple TV, paywalled).

It’s Major League Soccer’s fault for playing through the FIFA national team window this weekend, a time when clubs are required to release players to nations that call them up.

Eight Union players are gone to their countries’ senior squads, and another four — two from the senior squad, two from the reserves — are with U.S. youth teams. The Union don’t say no to U.S. national team requests, especially for their young players, because they know it’ll pay off in the long run when those players draw big-money interest from Europe.

As a result, the Union will have just 14 field players (not including goalkeepers) available when they take the field at Providence Park.

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“A tough task for sure, very shorthanded,” manager Jim Curtin said in a news conference from Portland. “But the schedule is the schedule, and we play during international windows. Whatever your opinion of that is kind of doesn’t matter, because the game’s coming.”

Curtin didn’t want to reveal his starting lineup Friday, but it’s pretty easy to guess most of it.

Oliver Semmle will start in net. Kai Wagner, Jack Elliott, Jakob Glesnes, and Olivier Mbaizo will be the back line. Mikael Uhre and Julián Carranza should start up top as usual.

The midfield is the big question. Curtin named Alejandro Bedoya, Quinn Sullivan, and Jeremy Rafanello as starters, but did not name a fourth. The best guess from here is that it will be Matt Real, who has some experience on the left side of the midfield diamond.

“It’s not like we’re just throwing a group out there that hasn’t played together and hasn’t had success together,” Curtin said. “So, yes, when you’re missing six starters in MLS, I think every club in every situation would be really hurt by that. But we can’t use that as an excuse — we have to go out, play the schedule that’s in front of us, and try to get a result.”

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Who will be on the bench? That’s really where Curtin’s statement that he’s got 14 field players comes into play. Theoretically, the Union have five more players available: right back Jamir Berdecio, centerback Olwethu Makhanya, midfielders Sanders Ngabo and Nick Pariano, and forwards Chris Donovan and Markus Anderson.

But the Union’s reserve team also has a game Sunday, and has to be able to fill out a squad. So Berdecio and Pariano were kept home — and Pariano is in a special MLS roster spot where if you put an academy product on the reserves all year, you get an extra first-team roster spot. The Union don’t want to burn that.

The national team absences are goalkeeper Andre Blake (Jamaica); defenders Damion Lowe (Jamaica) and Nathan Harriel (U.S. under-23s); midfielders Jesús Bueno (Venezuela), Dániel Gazdag (Hungary), José Andrés Martínez (Venezuela), Jack McGlynn (U.S. under-23s); and forward Tai Baribo (Israel).

Everyone else who theoretically counts toward the Union’s 31 is either injured or out on loan that they can’t come back from (and wouldn’t for just one game).

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“Piecing together all these rosters has been, I’ll just say, unique,” Curtin said. “The reality was we made selections that got us at least cover in each spot on the field — backline, midfield, striker — as best as we could. But I’d be lying to you if I said we weren’t a bit depleted.”

MLS roster rules allow teams to make hardship call-ups from their reserve squads if they have fewer than 16 field players or fewer than two goalkeepers available at a given moment. With Blake at the Concacaf Nations League final four and Holden Trent injured, reserve team netminder Andrew Rick will be Semmle’s backup.

In theory, the Union could have petitioned for an outfield player hardship call-up. In particular, they might have considered two of the reserve team’s top young prospects, playmaker David Vazquez and centerback Neil Pierre. But they’re the two who are away with the U.S. under-19 team, a team that later this year will play in Concacaf’s under-20 World Cup qualifying tournament.

The Union might also have considered calling up C.J. Olney, a central midfielder who’s up there with Vazquez and Pierre in the prospect rankings. But reserve team coach Marlon LeBlanc said after last Sunday’s season opener that Olney has “got some off-field things that he’s got to take care of,” and Curtin referred to the same on Friday — rather ominously, it sounded like.

“I wasn’t, obviously, part of what happened, and I’ll let them handle that,” Curtin said. “When you talk about C.J., he’s certainly a guy that would have been involved as possibly a starter in a game like this. That’s been handled down there at the Union II level, and that’s kind of all I can say on that right now. So I’ll keep it internal.”