Just looking at the roster, I think the mid-field is getting a bit crowded. Does the acquisition of Julian De Guzman make Carl Robinson obsolete on this team? And can both De Rosario and Guevara be used effectively without pushing DeRo up to play a striker role? I think an interesting set-up for the midfield could include Robinson, De Guzman and Sam Cronin with De Rosario playing just behind the 2 strikers. That would be a pretty solid defensive mid-field to help out the sometimes shaky back line, while still providing some offensive help with De Rosario. Then maybe Guevara could be traded for a proven striker or a central defender.

Just some thoughts at this very early stage. We’ll see how things pan out, but I’m looking forward to see what happens!

Tomorrow MLS will hold the 2009 Expansion Draft so the new Philadelphia Union can select their team for next season. That means they get to select 10 players from the MLS’s 15 teams. Each team gets to protect 11 players and the rest are fair game for the Union to select. Each team can only lose one player in the draft.

So, who did Toronto GM Mo Johnston and new coach Preki decide were worth protection? Well, they got 2 freebies in Stefan Frei and Fuad Ibrahim because they are part of the Generation Adidas Team. So the other 11 players that are safe from the expansion draft are:

Expansion Draft – Protected players:
Nana Attakora
Chad Barrett
Jim Brennan
Sam Cronin
Julian de Guzman
Dwayne De Rosario
Emmanuel Gomez
Amadou Sanyang
Adrian Serioux
O’Brian White
Marvell Wynne

Holy crap, they’re protecting Chad Barrett. And that means these guys are ripe for the pickins’:

Available for Draft:
Brian Edwards
Lesly Fellinga
Nick Garcia
Ali Gerba
Amado Guevara
Carl Robinson
Pablo Vitti
Gabe Gala

Here are my thoughts. I was a little surprised to see Brian Edwards on this list because his performances while Frei was hurt suggested that he is a competent keeper, but it looks like the guys in charge at TFC tried to keep a potential 11-man team protected here, so only 1 goalkeeper. Some of the players available for the draft are not bad, but I guess you can’t protect them all. They appear to have kept a decent mix of young players and experienced guys.

So if we look at the list of safe players, here’s what a potential starting lineup for next season could look like:

GK: Frei
D: Wynne, Attakora, Serioux, Brennan
M:Cronin, De Guzman, De Rosario, Sanyang/Gomez
F: Barrett, White/Ibrahim

I don’t mind that lineup for the most part, but I would prefer Ali Gerba at forward instead of Barrett. I think he could be a good target man up front. Of the other guys who could be drafted, Robinson, Guevara and Edwards stand out as potential tough losses for Toronto. If Amado Guevara gets selected in the draft however, that might actually free up De Rosario to play more as a central attacking midfielder. Hopefully this would lead to more scoring chances being created, while still giving DeRo plenty of opportunities to shoot. De Guzman would be the holding midfielder, with Cronin and maybe Sanyang or Gomez on the wings. All speculation of course, but it will be interesting to see what Preki comes up with.

Of course, only 1 player on the unprotected list will be selected, so there are lots of other possible lineups, but I think this one is not bad (except for one exception previously noted…). If you head over to the Union Offside Blog, you’ll see that maybe no TFC players will get drafted (based on Andrew’s picks). But maybe Philadelphia will help us out and take Nick Garcia off our hands. A guy can dream at least.

Are there any players you would have preferred to protect? How about players you hope to see gone next season?

Preki is expected to demand that the team plays as a cohesive unit, and the players that don’t fit into that unit will quickly lose their place in the squad. It will be interesting to watch during the off-season if he already has ideas on which players don’t belong, as he and Mo Johnston will likely make some roster changes before the next season begins.

If there’s one player they’ll want to keep, its obviously Dwayne De Rosario, who was Toronto’s top scorer and MVP this season, and was recently named to the MLS Best XI for his efforts this year. DeRo is clearly a bright spot on the team’s current roster, and I hope that he plans to stick around for another go next season. After all, BMO field will finally be getting the grass turf that Dwayne asked for as well.

Hopefully the new turf will be another good addition to help improve the quality of the team next year. For now all we can do is wait and see!

Well, it’s too early to start talking about what needs to be done to improve this team for next season, but hopefully there is a massive shakeup during the off-season. It seemed like Toronto had some very good players on the squad, but the possibility of massive breakdowns occurring at any point in a game was always there, and unfortunately this happened many times to cost the team important wins.

Ugh. I don’t want to dwell on this game too much, so I’ll end this here. Good luck to all the teams in the playoffs – hopefully we’ll see you there next year!

Ok, it’s not so much a sacrifice to the football deities, as it is clip of a football deity (in Seattle), but hey, it’s appearing on a Toronto FC page, so that’s the best I can do.

In other news, here is a nice moment with TFC Captain Jim Brennan and coach Chris Cummins:

Cummins says he’ll move on if not asked to continue as head coach next season, but if you ask me in this photo it sure looks like he doesn’t want to let go of TFC! Only time will tell for this one (but a post-season berth would certainly help his case)…

Luckily there are other people out there to crunch the numbers, and this article by Kyle McCarthy at Goal.com sums up all the possibilities.

Here’s how McCarthy breaks it down:

“TFC would take second place in the Eastern Conference in the event of a four-way tie between Chicago (in the event of a loss to Chivas USA), D.C. United and New England. Even if Chicago wins or draws and Colorado wins at Real Salt Lake, the Reds would still stand to benefit if FC Dallas joins D.C. and N.E. in the win column because they would win a similar four-way tiebreaker on 42 points to grab the final playoff spot. TFC could also squeak into the playoffs in a three-way tiebreaker with FCD and either D.C. or New England. TFC would also win any two-way tiebreaker with D.C. or New England because it holds the season series edge over both United and the Revs. The basic scenario: if TFC wins in New York, it wants as many of its 39-point counterparts to win (or lose) as possible (and Colorado to lose or draw) so it doesn’t have to face and lose a head-to-head tiebreaker with FC Dallas.”

Got all that? It sounds like there are quite a few combinations of things that could happen that would benefit TFC, but if they win I’ll be happy. Finishing the season with 2 ties and 2 wins in their last 4 games is not too shabby. But there’s even a possibility that Toronto could finish in 2nd place in the east if the stars align correctly. So here’s hoping for a good showing in New York by Brennan, DeRo and the gang to finish this season on a high note!

This was the final home game of the season, and the Toronto fans gave a nice sending off to fan favorite Danny Dichio before the match with a huge “Thank You” banner across the south end of the stadium.

As I’m writing this, I see that Chicago Fire tied New England Revolution, so Toronto and New England both have 39 points, but Toronto edges them out by goal differential for 8th place. However both DC United and FC Dallas still have games underway. If both win, we could have 4 teams tied with 39 points and 1 game left!

As for today’s TFC game, this one felt very similar to last week’s game against San Jose. No score after a fairly even first half, followed by an early TFC goal in the second half. Toronto had a few more scoring chances that were botched, but pretty much were content to defend the 1 goal lead. At 75 minutes I started to get stressed that this could lead to a repeat of last week. When the ref added 4 minutes of injury time (same as last week), I got pretty concerned that Salt Lake would score with 2 minutes left, but this time Toronto was able to hang on! I must give a lot of credit to goalkeeper Brian Edwards for this one though, as he made at least 3 or 4 keys saves during the match to keep the clean sheet.

So now we sit back and wait for the rest of the results to come in, and then prepare for next week. It looks like this playoff race will be a photo finish!

Of course, after tonight I have to relinquish my Red Bull fandom because Toronto FC will be traveling to New York to play them for the final game on October 24. Oh how fickle the soccer fan can be. TFC fans also have to be wary about New England Revolution, FC Dallas and DC United, so I guess that means we need to become temporary fans of Chicago Fire, Columbus Crew and Colorado Rapids as well. Just until the weekend is over of course. Then we can pick the remaining teams to root for if it still matters.

It’s funny how soccer can make you actually root for teams that otherwise you have no interest in. Not that those teams are meaningless, but when you can get something out of the match that will help your team, it can make even the most boring result interesting. For example, I am one of the many poor Bundesliga fans in Toronto that really only have the option to watch the games on Gol TV every weekend. Given the sometimes less-than-stellar selection of matches on Gol TV, many times I’m left watching teams other than my favourite club, Hamburger SV, so I’m always trying to figure out what results to hope for out of the games that are televised. I can even find some excitement rooting for a 0-0 draw between Dortmund and Schalke if it means that my team will gain 2 points on both of them!

Anyway, so this is the type of attitude I will take over the next couple of weeks as the MLS season runs down. I might even try to catch a few of the other MLS matches if I can find them. Gol TV is showing the Red Bull / Real Salt Lake match tonight, so once more I will say, “Let’s go Red Bulls!” *

*(only until next weekend)

This was a real heartbreaker and a big dent to their playoff hopes, but I think there were some positives to the game. Let’s recap:

4 regulars were out of the game for this one including Marvell Wynne, Carl Robinson and Stefan Frei due to injuries, and Amado Guevara who was away with the Honduran national team for a World Cup qualifier. But for the most part, the team looked pretty good and mainly controlled the play over San Jose, especially in the 2nd half when they had an early goal and some other good scoring chances.

I was impressed by a few players in this one: Lesly Fellinga got a start at left midfield, and I thought he looked comfortable and may be a good addition now that Robinson is out for the season. O’Brien White also got the start at striker. He didn’t score, but was in the play a lot and looked good. I think the best striker combo that TFC has right now would be White and Ali Gerba. Let’s end the Chad Barrett experiment please!!! Gerba can be the big target man in the middle, waiting for crosses into the box, and White can run around and make things happen. Barrett can do that as well, but unfortunately he will always miss the target when he gets a chance. I think White knows where to shoot at least.

I also think that Julian de Guzman is starting the shake off his off-season rust. There were a couple bits of fancy footwork near the end of the match (also by Pablo Vitti I noticed), and I think he is getting a feel for the MLS style of soccer. It’s unfortunate if his hard work comes a few games too late.

So what is going on with this team then? They have good talent and never appear to be dominated by any other team, they can fill in the gaps in the roster when starting players are injured without too much problem, and they have great fan support, especially at home where every game is a sellout and there are several rowdy supporter clubs pumping up the crowd.

The only solution I can think of is that the coach needs to convince the players that the match is 105 minutes long instead of 90. That way they can avoid the final 15 minutes where they always give up the tying or winning goal, because by that time the other team will already have hit the showers! TFC can even stay out there by themselves and play a bit longer, as long as when the 90th minute rolls around they think that they have another 15 minutes to defend.

OK that sounds a bit crazy, but you can’t deny that Toronto have serious problems hanging on at the end of the game, so its time for Chris Cummins to break out some crazy ideas to fix this team. Remarkably, we can still cling to the playoff dream for another week, since New England lost on Saturday and TFC are only 2 points out of the 8th playoff spot with 2 games left. I think we’ll be biting our nails until the last game to find out what happens. Until then, anyone else have some thoughts on how to hold onto the lead until the whistle blows?

The last time BMO field boasted a shiny grass field was when Real Madrid came to town to thoroughly trounce TFC. That was only for one game of course, but now that we’ll be getting a real field, hopefully we can look forward to many more international trouncings (and hopefully some TFC playoff appearances too!)

Installation for the new field is supposed to begin at the end of this season, which should mean that Mo Johnston will have plenty of time to try to lure some new players to Toronto for next season. No more complaints about Field Turf being too hard on the players. Sounds good to me! This should also mean that Dwayne DeRosario will decide to stick around, which is good news for TFC considering his importance to the team. As long as he doesn’t have any bitterness towards the new designated player, Julian De Guzman. Check out this interview with Dwayne and see what you think:

Hmm…let’s hope that all the post-season talks with DeRo go well. But for time being, the players can now concentrate on pulling out all the stops to go on a win streak and get into the playoffs. Toronto have the weekend off, so I’ll check in next week to see how the points race is stacking up ahead of the next game.

Keep it real! (grass that is)