Orlando City will play twelve games between the months of April and May. While the team will be playing about a match a week in April, they will play three Wednesday matches in May, giving them three weeks where they will be playing three matches over the course of seven or eight days.
When you play that many matches in such a short period, rotating players in the starting lineup is critical. That means that the team has to prove they have the depth to maintain their performance.
“Five games in a month isn’t so bad. It’ll be May, I think, where we’ll get a bit of schedule congestion,” Kreis said. “And that’s when we’re gonna have to talk about a lot of rotation. And we have to have the requisite number of players that we believe can perform in big games and I think that we’re getting there. So, we’re hopefully moving ourselves into a direction where we have a lot of guys that we can rely on to perform. That’s what you need when you play in this league.”
Orlando City has one major advantage when it comes to depth-- Orlando City B. The USL team allows MLS players to get playing time away from the first team. Their season opener this weekend against the Tampa Bay Rowdies featured Tommy Redding, Kevin Alston, and Pierre Da Silva, who all play for the first team. In addition, OCB gives Orlando City a pool of players to pull from midseason. That’s what happened last year, when Tony Rocha and Mikey Ambrose came signed MLS contracts.
The schedule for April and May is split evenly between home and away matches. Of the twelve matches, six of them will be at home and six will be on the road. But the layout of home and away matches will help the team. Of all those matches, they only play back-to-back away games once. Otherwise, they’ll have time to come home and regain their strength and support at home.
I hope we can get the results, but it’s gonna be a good challenge for us,” Jose Aja said. “I think that we have enough depth and enough quality in the team to make sure that we have good results every game.”
