Kansas City Current head coach Vlatko Andonovski didn’t hold back after the team’s 1-1 draw against Houston Dash that took six hours to complete. After playing in Los Angeles to close out the month of April, the team kicked off a new month in Houston and the weather impacted the length of the match, to say the least. The Current held a one-goal lead into halftime, and with storms in the area, a 15-minute half reset turned into a four-hour rain delay for both teams.
“The worst part is like you cannot really organize anything because the delay is not ‘four hours and we’re gonna start.’ It’s 20 minutes. It’s 15 minutes. 30 minutes. It’s 40 minutes. It’s 10 minutes. You’re constantly on the move. You’re constantly ready to go, and it’s a little bit a little bit exhausting to be quite honest,” Andonovski said after the game about navigating a long delay.
“But it is what it is. The league wanted us to get this game done [on Sunday], and here we are. We finished the game, hopefully everybody [is] healthy … the main goal for us is to walk out of this game healthy because yeah, it was a little bit hard, not just for our players, for the opponent as well.
Houston rallied for a come-from-behind draw, but have a quick turnaround of their own for a mid-week match they’re set to host against reigning NWSL Champions NJ/NY Gotham FC. The league welcomed the return of regular season midweek matches this year, and clubs are getting their first test at managing the fixture load. No one can predict the weather, but the long weather interruption has already affected Kansas City’s next game according to Andonovski.
“We’re supposed to be on a flight to Seattle 40 minutes from now. Obviously, we missed the flight. So we gotta we gotta figure [that] out now. We don’t have a hotel. We gotta figure out our hotel. We don’t have flights for tomorrow. We gotta figure out flights. We had trainings for some players that we believe needed training time to be able to perform on Wednesday.
“There’s so many things on the training scheduled in Seattle, so we’re not going to be able to do that. Obviously, we lost the whole day of opportunity to recover. So the schedule, like I said, it’s already challenging to start off with. We have by far the worst schedule in the league, and this just made it even worse.”
Kansas City will face Seattle Reign FC on Wednesday at Lumen Field, then return to CPKC Stadium on Sunday and host North Carolina Courage.
