Cavan Sullivan is expected to return for the Union in Saturday’s game at Cincinnati
Bruno Damiani will also be back from suspension. But the injury bug continues to bite: Milan Iloski, Japhet Sery Larsen, and Alejandro Bedoya are out, and Geiner Martínez is questionable.
Cavan Sullivan has been cleared to return to action for the Union after missing the last two games with an ankle injury.
Interim manager Ryan Richter said Friday morning that Sullivan “should be good” for Saturday’s game at FC Cincinnati (2 p.m., Apple TV). Midfielder Jesús Bueno is also expected to return from a hamstring injury, and should start with Danley Jean Jacques suspended for yellow card accumulation.
The Union will be shorthanded defensively, though. Geiner Martínez is questionable after taking a hit in training; Japhet Sery Larsen is out after having to be subbed out Saturday; and Alejandro Bedoya is out due to what Richter called “something in his eye” that came up Thursday night.
Milan Iloski will also be out with a hamstring injury, as Richter had previously announced. So there will be a choice to make about who starts at striker next to Bruno Damiani as he returns from a suspension.
It presumably will be Ezekiel Alladoh or Malik Jakupović, which will put Alladoh’s lack of contributions back in the spotlight. In Wednesday’s scoreless tie at Nashville, he didn’t register a shot in his first start in eight games.
Still, Richter was pleased with the player’s overall contributions.
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“I think he did a really good job,” Richter said. “He did exactly what we asked for him, with a lot of work against the ball, a lot of stuff that goes unnoticed. He held the ball up well. There were a couple [of] moments that he could have been more dangerous, I thought, but overall let’s start with this: work very hard, do the job that the team is asking, and he did that in a great way.”
He offered no hints Friday about who will start Saturday, just a belief in “the best way that we can approach the game, and how can we set the guys up to be successful.”
The congested October schedule will finally ease off after this weekend. There’s no midweek game before next Saturday’s regular-season finale at Subaru Park (4 p.m., Apple TV). That will give the Union not just valuable time to rest, but time to properly enjoy their stunning turnaround that has clinched a playoff berth.
“That’s something the players deserve to look back at and be proud of, and just recognize how impressive what they’ve done over the last three months has been,” Richter said. “It hasn’t been something that we’ve been speaking about every single day, or putting the target for, or something that we’ve had to use to motivate the guys. But I think once that’s done, we looked back at it, and [were] like, ‘that was pretty good, guys. We did a really good job as a team to bounce back from what the first half of the season was.’”'
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The November FIFA window comes after that, and the Union will likely have some players head to national teams. That raises the incentive for the Union to stay out of the Wild Card playoff round on Nov. 18, the day after the FIFA window ends.
With a four-point gap right now between the Union in sixth (13-11-8, 47 points) and Cincinnati in eighth (11-11-10, 43 points), a win in one of the two remaining games will take care of that worry — especially if it’s in this one.
“Obviously, that’s something that we hope we don’t have to deal with,” Richter said. “The position that we’re in, we have to be targeting that we finish higher than that. And the way that we get that done is by winning this game on Saturday.”
