If you were to guess who Cristian Roldan would prefer to be bunkering with during this period of social distancing, most would probably say Jordan Morris, considering the Seattle Sounders' teammates well-documented off-the-field friendship they struck up when Morris joined the club in 2016.
As it turns out, though, Roldan says he already has his ideal quarantine buddy in the form of his brother Alex, who was already his roommate. Speaking to hosts Steve Zakuani and Brad Evans on the "Wingin' it with Zak and Brad" podcast in a Saturday interview, Roldan said it's no slight on his buddy Morris, but rather a compliment to the perks of living with his little brother.
“Honestly, I think I have my guy that lives with me, Alex Roldan, because he makes me food, he watches Narcos with me, he watches all these things, he’s interested in the same things I’m interested in," Roldan said. "He doesn’t take naps, while Jordan does, and that would be time away from him. So, I think I have it pretty good living with my little brother.”
To pass the time on their hands, Cristian said the Roldans haven taken to much the same activities as anyone else, whether it be copious amounts of Netflix and video games or doing puzzles.
"I’ve been cleaner than ever, I’ll tell you that much," Roldan said. "I have so much time to do laundry, to make the bed, to keep things in order in the house. I like to play a lot of video games, I’ll spend a couple hours there throughout my day, watch movies. Something my house that we’ve been getting into is puzzles – just something to pass time by and keep us engaged in something. That’s usually what the day is looking like.
“I’m playing a lot of Fortnite right now. A lot of people are in that Call of Duty stage because it just came out, but I’m sticking to Fornite. I just got decent at it, so I can’t stop now, I’ve gotta continue to grind.”
Other than that, it's just about doing what they can to maintain their fitness during the layoff -- something that's especially challenging given that the players were just approaching their peak fitness levels two games into the season prior to the league suspension.
"It’s interesting because we played our second regular season game," Roldan said. "It’s not like we were three-quarters of the way through our season, we were just 90 minutes fit and really getting to our peak fitness. So to have this delay, to have this pause in our season is really interesting."
"The Sounders do a good job with giving us guidance. They gave us all the plans on what we should do, but there’s nothing like practice. You can’t be sharp on the ball if you only have one person training with you. Everybody I think misses training, being out there, goofing off and hopefully we can get back to that and have a period where we train before games because that’ll put ourselves at risk to injury if we just right into it again."
