With time to heal and parent, Wagner finds a silver lining
Kai Wagner hesitates before calling the coronavirus shutdown a positive, understanding its ramifications beyond his world. But there are silver linings that the Philadelphia Union defender can find.
The first to come mind Thursday, on a Zoom call with reporters, was the sudden abundance of time to spend at home with his newborn son, Liam.
“It was a great time just to spend every second with my baby, see how fast he’s growing, how fast he gets all the movements and stuff like that,” Wagner said. “This time couldn’t be better for me with my baby and my injury. And just to see what he is doing every day, he changes every day, he starts to smile and laugh, it’s great for me to be with him.”
Though MLS has been on hiatus for 10 weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wagner’s only been back to full strength for about the last four. He missed all but the first week of preseason training with what was termed a leg injury. It wasn’t until March that the cause of his persistent pain, a fractured bone, was discovered.
Wagner would’ve spent much of the sabbatical rehabbing anyway. So again he can divine a minor positive from the larger tribulations.
But the flipside is a layoff that only gets longer. The
23-year-old hasn’t played a game since the Union’s playoff ouster last Oct. 24 in Atlanta. A long offseason, missed preseason and the MLS hiatus have compounded into more than half a year between games. For a player who emerged last year as one of MLS’s best left backs, that’s an arduous wait, even as the Union return to individual workouts this week at the
76ers Fieldhouse in Wilmington,
Del.
“It’s good for us to be back a little bit on the pitch, to see your teammates,” Wagner said, “but it was a very tough time for me.”
Wagner hailed his teammates’ support during this suspension. He’s particularly close to Sergio Santos, who also has a young child, and the two families have been able to spend time together in person, either via walks around their apartment complex or at dinners, all dutifully documented on Instagram.
COVID-19 hit close to home for the Union with Kacper Przybylko’s diagnosis, announced April 1. The striker remains the only active MLS player confirmed to have contracted the virus and he’s fully recovered, returning to training with the rest of his teammates.
Wagner and Przybylko, with their shared German upbringing, are particularly close. While Przybylko’s illness didn’t turn out to be severe, the news hit Wagner hard.
“I was a little bit nervous the whole time because I just thought hopefully everything goes well, hopefully he will recover very good, not just for Kacper but for his girlfriend,” Wagner said. “For me, I tried to stay in touch, tried to stay positive the whole time and tell him good words. When he said he was fully recovered, I was really happy and my family was really happy. We just kept in touch the whole time.”
Wagner hopes the Union get around three to four weeks of full-team training, which doesn’t count the current workouts, before resuming games. He also acknowledged how difficult it would be for him and teammates to follow through on MLS’s rumored plan to isolate players in one location and play games in a bubble league this summer. That plan was dubbed by Alejandro Bedoya as “a luxurious prison,” during a podcast interview Wednesday.
Wagner, who joined the Union in January 2019 from German third-division club Wurzburger Kickers, has been in contact with friends in Germany, where the Bundesliga returned last week. Though it was with social distancing measures like empty stadiums, the Bundesliga’s return is at the forefront of the effort to return to sporting normalcy, offering hope and a testing ground for strategies.
“I think in Germany it was a little bit easier for the teams because they went back to training in small groups, not like us training alone on the field.” Wagner said. “They said it was hard for them, too. First of all, they have to get tested before they get back to training. But all of them waited the whole time at home to go back to training and go back a little to normal days.”