FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – The returns of winger Dylan Borrero and defender DeJuan Jones in recent weeks have provided invaluable boosts to a New England Revolution team that, for a number of reasons, has struggled to maintain a consistent starting XI throughout the year. Now, as the season rolls into the summer months and the halfway point of the campaign comes within view, head coach Caleb Porter is expecting that another couple of important returns are not too far around the bend.

The first of these is defender Brandon Bye, who was a full participant in Tuesday’s team training, a major step in his recovery from the torn right ACL he sustained last August. The team was excited to welcome him back at the start of their training session, but Porter said afterward that he was not going to risk rushing the outside back along the road to full fitness.

“He’s full-out in training,” Porter said of Bye. “It’s going to be a couple of weeks before he’s able to play in games … With Brandon, again, he’s been out a long time, so it’ll be three or four weeks, but he’s definitely, in the second half of the year, going to factor in and play a role.”

Porter did add that the quality of Nick Lima in recent weeks has stood out to him, along with each of his players, whether they are typically starters or are being made to deputize for unavailable players.

“Nick Lima is playing really well right now,” he said. “I thought we got good performances across the board from everybody [against Nashville SC]. I loved the end of the game when I rewatched it. Obviously, I had the picture in my mind live of our guys just putting everything on the line to win the game. Kind of that ‘refuse to lose’ [mentality]. Guys just knocking balls off their chest, their legs, their faces. That’s what it takes to win games in this league. You can see the fight and we’re going to need it every single game from here on out.”

Another welcome return on the horizon is that of Peyton Miller, who has yet to feature this year following a foot injury in preseason. Like with Bye, Porter doesn’t want to bring Miller back too quickly, but said the young defender/midfielder could see some action with the second team soon as he works his way back to full strength.

“Peyton Miller, as well, is back in [training] and full-out,” Porter said. “Same thing, we’re hoping to get him some minutes with Revs II, possibly next week, so he can start to build his fitness up.”

But, at the same time that these players work their way back into the team, Porter and the Revs unfortunately still have to manage key absences.

In the short term, winger Esmir Bajraktarević will be unavailable for this weekend’s match against the New York Red Bulls, as he is participating with the United States Men’s Olympic Team’s training camp in Kansas City. Bajraktarević demonstrated against Nashville just why he’s been getting called up over and over again, scoring his first career MLS goal and putting in a strong all-around performance, but his absence does provide Porter with a challenge in a position that is already thin. Similarly, midfielder Noel Buck is off with the England Men’s Elite Squad for the week.

“Yeah, it’s tough,” Porter said. “Again, it’s another game where we just can’t play the same group. We’ve had to, for different reasons – suspensions, injuries, and sickness – we’ve had to at least move one or two guys in because of those reasons. So, it’s another game where we have to make a change, at least, and we’re very thin on the wing, as well. We had been playing Noel a little bit on the wing, so we lose both those guys. Nacho [Gil] is obviously out. Tomás [Chancalay] is out. So, we don’t have a ton of options.

“We have a few ideas of what we’re going to do, and we’ll take a look at those things in the next several days. We want to keep continuity as much as we can, because we’re finally getting some continuity in our understanding. That’s going to breed more and more consistency in our play. So, we’ll keep continuity as much as we can, but we have a couple of ideas on what we’re going to do with Esmir being gone.”

The coach also expanded on Chancalay’s status, saying he didn’t expect to have any significant updates on the winger this week.

“We’ll know next Monday,” Porter said. “[The team doctors are] going to be reevaluating it, re-MRI’ing him, and making a decision on what the next steps for him [are]. So, we just don’t know. Like I said, it could be minor, it could be major. Ultimately, they wanted a couple weeks to let the swelling go down and wanted to re-MRI it after that and see how he was progressing over two weeks.”

In order to help manage the team’s shortage on the wing, the Revolution recalled Jack Panayotou from his loan to USL Championship side Rhode Island FC this week, after he put in a number of promising performances since joining in May.

“Yeah, we’re thin on the wing,” Porter said when asked about recalling Panayotou. “That’s kind of the idea of loaning a guy out, is they go, they get some confidence. In some cases, it’s kind of a new environment. He had been doing well. We need guys that can play on the wing this game. We don’t have a ton of depth right now. He has definitely played some league games on the wing and I would expect him to be available for us to play him. Whether he starts or comes off the bench, we just have to see how he looks this week, but at a minimum, he’s an option off the bench.”

However the lineup shakes out this weekend, Porter will be confident in his team building on their win against the Boys in Gold this past Saturday.

“I always want to win, that’s it,” he said. “I never try to put out a lineup to lose.”