Orlando City’s plans to make the Playoffs and defy expectations hit a major snag. Injuries ravaged their depth and defined their season.
Orlando City’s inaugural season started out with such extreme promise.
Circumstances change things quickly. And even the most prepared and deepest teams will run into circumstances that shift roles, expectations and ability. Injuries are a fact of life.
When teams get hit harder than others in the course of a season, they have to find a way to adapt. For an expansion team, it is that much harder.
Orlando City’s plan when it went about building its first roster was to anchor the team with established stars like Kaka and Brek Shea. They would then fill in the roster with promising young players who could grow together. It seems the idea was to have the young players play well around these veterans and that would raise everyone up.
Judging by the number of Orlando City players on the short list for MLS’s 24 under 24, Orlando City has a pretty bright future.
Things have not gone as planned though. Those young players have been forced into action and the inconsistency has been a big part of the season and the direction it has turned.
Orlando City, plainly, has had to ask young players like Cyle Larin and Connor Donovan and Harrison Heath and Cristian Higuita, to play more than might have been initially planned.
Entering Sunday’s game, Orlando City had missed the most games due to injury of any team int he Eastern Conference, according to Austin David of The Mane Land:
As I suspected, Orlando has the most players that have missed games, with 16 different players — most of them missing five games or more. After going through all of the teams, I added up all the total man-games lost for each team (the sum of all of a team’s players’ games missed). Orlando once again won this category outright, with a total of 147 man-games lost, with the only team close to Orlando being Montreal, which has 90 man-games lost.
This really shows just how badly Orlando was hit with the injury bug this season. It’s an unfortunate part of the game for soccer and it’s really no one’s fault that so many players took a bad step or tweaked a muscle. These things just happen in the game and, in Orlando’s case, it just happened a heck of a lot of times.
There is no doubt this has put an immense strain on Orlando City. Already as an expansion team, a good chunk of the roster is made up of players cast off or left unprotected from other teams. The Lions were asking for perfect health and some nice cohesion to “defy expectations” and make the Playoffs.
When you put it all together, it is not a surprise Orlando City has had some struggles. Particularly now when the injuries seemed really to mount up.
Getting Brek Shea back alone seemed to add some needed energy and skill to the offensive attack. Other players are sure to be back on the field this weekend against Chicago. That could mean Orlando City is due for a late-season run and maybe that will be enough to get them back into the Playoffs.
When we look back at Orlando City’s inaugural season, injuries will be a major part of it. As the team grows, they should be able to absorb these injuries better, something an expansion team has clearly not been able to do.
