Inter Miami counting on key players against tough Union
Andres Reyes, Rodolfo Pizarro, Roman Torres are expected back in the starting lineup as Inter Miami tries again for its first win vs. Philadelphia on Tuesday night.
Inter Miami, which joined Major League Soccer amid much fanfare, is still awaiting its first victory heading into the fourth game of its interrupted inaugural season.
All three games thus far
health and safety of the public, the players and team personnel,” McCarthy said. “We continue to work with the NFL Players Association and our joint medical advisors to mitigate the health risk to everyone associated with the NFL.
“We are developing a comprehensive testing program and have rigorous protocols that call for a shared responsibility from everyone inside our football ecosystem. This is based on the collective guidance of public health officials, including the
White House task force, the CDC, infectious disease experts, and other sports leagues. We will make adjustments as necessary to meet the public health environment as we prepare to play the 2020 season.”
The Dolphins have not practiced since late December, with players widely scattered.
Since then, more than 130,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and Florida has recently experienced an unprecedented surge in cases. State health officials announced Monday
that there have been nearly 29,000 positive tests in the past two days, with Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties hit the hardest.
And unlike the NBA and MLS — which are sequestered in Orlando — the
NFL is not planning to play in a bubble. The league announced earlier this summer that all training camp practices will be held at each team’s respective practice facility; for the Dolphins, that’s on the campus of Nova Southeastern University.
As of Monday afternoon, Nova’s zip code — 33314 — had seen 470 positive cases since the start of the outbreak, according to the state’s COVID-19 dashboard. Things are no better near the team hotel, with 465 positives in that zip code.
Could those figures force a change in plans? That’s unclear.
But one prominent agent believes the entire NFL should hit pause on the season until conditions improve.
“The NFL should move back training camp dates to sometime in September,” the agent said. “We still don’t have a [testing] protocol in place. It’s July 13.”
Yet unless the NFL’s timeline is changed — and fast — the Dolphins have few options but to gather in South Florida beginning next week. Theoretically, they could petition the league to leave the area and practice in a safer place, but that would present an enormous logistical challenge.
And once a testing protocol is in place, it’s all but inconceivable that the Dolphins won’t have positive cases.
The NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, told the Boston Globe recently that the league expects dozens, if not hundreds, of positive player tests when camp begins. So there are two coronavirus threats to the Dolphins’ locker room — the external and the internal.
If there is a silver lining to this crisis, it’s that players are at a low risk of death from coronavirus due to their age — assuming they are not immunocompromised.
Meanwhile, the Dolphins — at least publicly — remain open to the possibility of fans attending games. One longtime season-ticket holder told the Herald that the organization has not informed them yet of its 2020 policy, but if there are fans in the stands, it’ll be at just a fraction of capacity.
Both the Ravens and Jaguars announced that no more than 25 percent of their stadiums will be filled this fall.