With a settled squad and a winning record, the Columbus Crew may have reason to rue the scheduling quirk that handed them two bye weeks before the season is a month old. But D.C. United—winless, banged-up and dispirited—are more than ready to step back from the daily grind this weekend in the hopes of turning the page on their painful start to 2010.
After a week of focused training sessions, the team has been given Saturday and Sunday off, a somewhat unfamiliar hiatus for a group grown accustomed to frenetic schedules in recent years due to international competition. It’s also a timely break ahead of a busy stretch featuring four games in 11 days, starting with Wednesday’s U.S. Open Cup play-in match against FC Dallas.
“When you’re on a roll, a bye week can disrupt the flow,” defender Devon McTavish told MLSsoccer.com this week. “But when you have no flow, it’s sometimes good to get away from the game, from the guys in the locker room for a couple days, step back and come back fresh with a new mentality on Monday.”
McTavish is leaving D.C. to spend the weekend with his family in Winchester, Va., while most of his teammates will linger at home and decompress during one of United’s longest unstructured periods since the outset of preseason training in February.
The bye week has given a welcome bit of extra recovery time to those on United’s lengthy injury list and offered their healthier colleagues an opportunity to bear down in training and prove themselves ready to step into the first XI in the matches ahead.
“It feels like everything that could go wrong has gone wrong so far,” said Chris Pontius, one of several mainstays presently sidelined by hamstring troubles. “When you look at how many injuries we have on the team right now, and to some key players, it’s hard for us to get into a rhythm right now. We have a lot of new faces that are going to have to step in and do the job.”
The soccer gods have dealt D.C. one harsh blow after another thus far this year and the squad is aware that even at this early stage, further losses could significantly damage their hopes of keeping pace with the rest of the Eastern Conference. But at United, the pressure generated by losses and poor performances can become suffocating and the off weekend also provides a release from the daily reality of doubt and disappointment in the wake of their 0-4 start to the campaign.
“It’s good for the guys to get out, do something besides soccer,” veteran winger Boyzzz Khumalo said after Thursday’s training session at RFK Stadium. “Because every time you come here, every day, you’re thinking soccer. You have a bad day at practice, you get frustrated, you know? So it’s good just to get out, go watch a movie or something—go to the park and don’t think about soccer, don’t even watch soccer. Just do something different.”
