D.C. United will try for their first back-to-back wins since April when they host a struggling Inter Miami side still waiting on their superstar reinforcements on Saturday night in Washington.
D.C. (8-9-5, 29 points) won three in a row back in the latter half of April but has only taken four total victories since then. On Tuesday night, it edged a short-handed FC Dallas side 1-0 on Taxi Fountas’ second-half winner, despite seeing the home side create most of the chances.
It was D.C.’s seventh defensive shutout of the season, but the first credited to goalkeeper Alex Bono, whom coach Wayne Rooney opted for over Tyler Miller after Miller allowed two first-half goals in a loss at Nashville last weekend.
“Towards the end, I think we got a little bit lucky on a couple of occasions from my point of view,” Rooney said. “But yeah, it’s always great when you keep a clean sheet.”
Team-leading scorer Christian Benteke will return after he was suspended for Tuesday’s game for yellow card accumulation. But team assists leader Mateusz Klich will be serving the same kind of suspension after he picked up a yellow card at Dallas.
Miami (5-13-2, 17 points) is still waiting to finalize the expected signing of World Cup-winning star Lionel Messi, as well as his former Barcelona teammates Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba.
Incoming coach Gerardo “Tata” Martino is also still awaiting his immigration paperwork, as Javier Morales serves in an interim role following the firing of Phil Neville.
But after seven consecutive defeats, the performances have improved of late with consecutive home draws.
In Tuesday’s 2-2 result against Columbus, the Herons came back twice from a goal down. Leonardo Campana started and scored his fourth of the season, then assisted as substitute Josef Martinez scored his team-leading sixth of the campaign in the 90th minute.
Morales says the battle for starting minutes at forward remains open, but also indicated with a condensed schedule both could get more minutes as a matter of managing workload.
“There’s a fair competition between Leo and Josef, and believe me, it’s not easy to pick one or the other every single time,” Morales said postgame. “And Josef played 90 minutes on Saturday and Leo was fresh, that was the reason that we decided to put (in) Leo.”
–Field Level Media
