Bruno Damiani’s first start over Mikael Uhre felt inevitable, but it didn’t produce a win for the Union

The Union didn’t sign Bruno Damiani with the biggest transfer fee in team history just to have him be a super sub. He was always going to move up the depth chart at some point, and that point came Saturday night.

Nor was it a surprise that Damiani took Mikael Uhre’s starting spot. Tai Baribo entered the weekend with six goals and Uhre hadn’t scored since the season opener, so Uhre was the obvious candidate to drop. Everyone knew well in advance, Damiani said, as the decision was announced internally Thursday at practice.

But just because something feels inevitable doesn’t mean it needs no backing up. So it mattered that the game ended scoreless, and that at halftime Damiani hadn’t registered any shots.

He was better in the second half, with four attempts, including some close-range looks. Still, none went in, and Uhre subbed in for Damiani in the 67th minute.

Uhre didn’t put the ball in the net either, with just one shot. Though he hit the deck in the box tussling with Orlando’s Rodrigo Schlegel in stoppage time, and on another night it might have been a penalty kick.

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Does all that leave manager Bradley Carnell right or wrong to make the move? In truth, it’s neither. There’s no grand judgment to make after one game.

But the plan would certainly have looked better if it had produced a goal and a win. So it caught the media’s ear when Carnell called Damiani’s night “perfect,” even if that was just one word of many.

“He put himself about, he did exactly what we needed,” Carnell said, again leaving out the one thing Damiani didn’t do. “He had good combinations, good relationships with Tai [Baribo] and Danny [Gazdag] and Quinny [Sullivan]. So yeah, I think whether we start Mikael, whether we start Bruno, whether they play together, I think we’ve seen good returns on what Bruno can bring to the table.”

The words that really mattered were the ones that made it clear this was a rotation, not a demotion of Uhre.

“I’ve been speaking about it for five, six weeks now that everyone has deserved minutes,” Carnell said. “Everyone’s vying for positions in this competition, and I think we we’re having a stretch not too far in the distant future that we’re going to need to run some rotations [in]. … Everyone’s put their hand up and wanted to take part in this, and it’s good to see that everyone can, one, apply the tactics, [and] two, be a good teammate.”

A few minutes later, Uhre said something just as important: He’d been dealing with some foot pain since last weekend’s trip to Inter Miami. That surely made Carnell’s decision easier.

“Haven’t been training fully after the Miami game, and been dealing with it quite a lot the last few days,” Uhre said. “He just went and said he wanted to get Bruno up to speed, and it’s about the team and about winning games. He was completely up front, and I respect that.”

It bears saying that Uhre wasn’t in the best position to succeed. Indiana Vassilev replaced Dániel Gazdag at the same time Uhre entered. And after playing 13 minutes in a tandem with Baribo, later substitutions left him running alone for the rest of the night in a 4-2-3-1, with Vassilev central and Alejandro Bedoya and Cavan Sullivan on the nominal flanks.

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Bedoya had 18 touches in his minutes, and Sullivan just nine. That isn’t a recipe for good service to a striker, especially one running at what was often a five-man back line.

“It’s hard when you have a lot of defenders just standing on the edge of their own box,” Uhre said. “It takes away a lot of the spaces that I like to do my work in on getting in behind … My thought process going into the game [was] just being sure that I was in the box if the crosses were to come.”

Carnell’s decision to sub Gazdag out also bears spotlighting. The 67th minute marked the earliest the attacking midfielder was subbed out for reasons other than injury since 2021, his first year with the team.

As much of a stalwart as Gazdag is, that streak was due just as much to Jim Curtin’s unwillingness to rest him. Carnell is much quicker to rotate.

“Danny’s been a great servant to this team, and he can last a whole game,” Carnell said. “Every time I’m on the sideline and I look down to the guys warming up, I’m like, ‘We could do with him, we could do with him, and we could do with him.‘”

Gazdag credited the manager for being forthright about it in the locker room.

“Obviously, I would like to play 90 minutes all the time, but sometimes it’s just not possible,” he said. “He’s pretty clear with that, and also the way we try to play with a lot of pressing and sprints. To be honest, you need to rotate the guys sometimes.”

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Those were words we didn’t hear often enough from Curtin. Now the Union are seven games into Carnell’s tenure, and his way is becoming clearer.

“Is that the half-yard we need?” he said. “Is that the urgency and energy, is that the momentum and the next wave?”

It certainly isn’t when the energy doesn’t leave the end-line space where the subs warm up.

“We try and keep the momentum, the aggression, the intensity,” Carnell said. “Our job here is not just to play a soccer game. I think all the fans pay a decent, fair price for the tickets, and the tickets are for entertainment, and we build a game model to entertain the fans — to be successful, to play with urgency and energy.”

But he knew that the prices — and they aren’t cheap, for the record — didn’t buy a goal this time, and so did his players. When Damiani was asked if the tie felt like a point gained in the standings or two points lost, he didn’t hesitate.

“I think if you see the match, you will clearly understand me that it was two points left here,” the Uruguayan said, and his adopted English made ample sense. “We work hard, we play to win in the 90 minutes, we try always to play brave, to play forward. And they were losing [as in wasting] time, and it’s normal, it’s a way of playing. But yeah, I think it was two points lost.”

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