Mikael Uhre is set for his Union debut Saturday at Montreal

After watching Mikael Uhre’s first week on the field with the Union, manager Jim Curtin is ready to debut his new star striker Saturday at Club de Foot Montréal (4 p.m., PHL17).

“He’s had a good week of training with the group — obviously still getting used to his teammates but has shown really well in training,” Curtin said. “He has some speed to stretch the defense, he’s shown really good movement in the box, and he’s finished off some plays and scored a lot of goals this week.”

Curtin didn’t say whether he’d start Uhre, not that he would, of course. But he said “it’s safe to say he will play a role in this weekend’s match, one way or the other, for sure.”

The circumstances of Saturday’s game will be unusual. Because Montreal’s Stade Saputo doesn’t have undersoil heating, the team plays its early-season games indoors at venerable old Olympic Stadium. Which means playing on artificial turf, and not-great turf at that.

It will be the first time the Union play an MLS game at the Big O, where the Phillies played the Expos for decades and Carli Lloyd led the U.S. women’s soccer team’s epic 2015 World Cup semifinal win over Germany.

Believe it or not, though, this won’t be the first time the Union’s organization plays a game there. The club’s reserve team played the first game of its existence at Olympic Stadium in 2016. Current Union assistant Ryan Richter was in the starting lineup, and a 17-year-old Mark McKenzie was on the bench.

“The building has a lot of history … and I respect that, for sure,” Curtin said. “The surface is a different story.”

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The turf can be quite a home-field advantage, as the many teams Montreal has beaten there in the Concacaf Champions League can attest. The club long known as the Montreal Impact is in the quarterfinals for the fourth time in 14 years.

Seven years ago, the Impact reached the tournament final playing all of its knockout home games at the Big O. This season, CF Montréal has already ousted Mexico’s Santos Laguna, a team it famously faced in 2009 when the Impact was a second-division club.

On Wednesday, the current squad will start a series against juggernaut Cruz Azul at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca.

That could affect Montreal’s lineup, as Curtin knows well from the Union’s CCL run last year.

“Every MLS team in the U.S. and Canada, their priority should be the Champions League right now,” Curtin said.

Also impacting matters will be the suspension of Montreal’s top striker, Romell Quioto, because of a red card in last Saturday’s season-opening 2-0 loss at Orlando City. But promising young American playmaker Djordje Mihailovic should be on the field, amid reports that Leeds United’s new American manager, Jesse Marsch, wants Mihailovic as one of his first signings.

Leeds is also still in pursuit of Union alumnus Brenden Aaronson, whom Marsch coached to great success at Red Bull Salzburg.

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There is much mutual respect between Curtin and Montreal manager Wilfried Nancy, two men who weren’t big-name hires but have earned success on their benches. They also both rose up through their clubs’ youth team coaching ranks, were assistants in MLS, then got the top jobs. Nancy got Montreal’s a year ago, when Thierry Henry resigned because he couldn’t be with his family in the pandemic.

Both Curtin and Nancy talked about the times they’ve crossed paths at games, and the text messages they exchange throughout the year.

“He had a lot of different minds and different head coaches that he worked with, similar to how I had a lot of different people in and around me during my time in the academy, [then] assistant coach, first-team coach,” Curtin said. “Some can look at that as a negative — I think he took the right approach and he looked at it as a positive. … He took all those things and now has formed it into his own team, and his own identity, and his own principles.”

Watching Nancy’s team, Curtin added, “you say, ‘Wow, that’s an organized, good, talented group, and they fight and play for him.’”

From up north, Nancy returned the compliments.

“What I like is he had the time to put things in place,” Nancy said, and he’d surely like to have that too. Not only did Nancy have to replace Henry on short notice, he’s the eighth manager in Montreal’s 12 seasons in MLS. The longest any has lasted was Mauro Biello’s 93 games from 2015 to 2017.

“Each year, Philadelphia’s players get better in clear ways,” Nancy said. “They’ve played with the same system for a while, but little by little they add concepts to make the team better. It’s consistent work that reflects a long-term vision, and I have a lot of respect for that.”

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