D.C. United may have to face the Union on Saturday without Tai Baribo, their most dangerous early-season finisher. René Weiler said Wednesday night that he was not sure whether Baribo would be ready to play this weekend, leaving his status unclear for the 7:30 p.m. match at Subaru Park.
Baribo has missed D.C. United's last two games with a thigh injury, and his absence would remove a player who has scored three goals in six games since arriving. One of those goals came against his old team, another was a goal-mouth cleanup in a match D.C. trailed 2-0 before losing 2-1, and another came from the penalty spot.
That makes the injury more than a routine setback for a D.C. side that has started the season 2-4-1 and sits ninth in the Eastern Conference. The Union, meanwhile, are scheduled to host the match on Apple TV and are trying to build on their first league win of the year while also chasing their first MLS home win of the campaign after three losses at Subaru Park.
The weekend trip is also being framed as a possible reunion if Baribo is cleared to return to Chester, which would turn an ordinary early-season game into a sharper test of how much D.C. United can lean on him. The timing matters because the visitors are coming off a bruising Wednesday night, when they lost at home in the U.S. Open Cup to One Knoxville SC in a penalty kick shootout after a 3-3 tie.
On Thursday afternoon, Bradley Carnell said he hoped the injury was nothing serious and spoke as if the Union were preparing for every version of the matchup. “We always want to face the best opponents, and D.C. with Tai Baribo is certainly a force to be reckoned with. We’re preparing and planning accordingly, and we can’t control what we cannot control,” he said.
Carnell also put the result in plain terms after his side’s recent work. “I mean, it’s three points,” he said, before adding that the group has set a high standard for itself and is still not playing at the level it wants, even while he praised the players for fighting to get a result in Montreal. For D.C., the question is simpler and more immediate: whether Baribo can get back on the field before a stretch of games starts to define how far this early surge can carry them.
