World Cup Over – Back to Reality

Time for the summer to start! The World Cup really takes away a whole month of the summer. Trying not to find out the scores before I got home from work, watching up to 4 games per day (its easier if you have a PVR to fast forward!), cheering on your national team of choice and ultimately being disappointed in the end (unless you go for Spain of course) – what a crazy month! Well, I for one am spent. Hence the lack of TFC blogging as of late too. It was really hard to get too excited about the TFC games with the tournament in South Africa going on. Especially when they have struggled to score even 1 goal per game lately.

As for the World Cup, how did you enjoy it? Were you rooting for your national team, or for players from the club teams you like, or maybe the USA and Landon Donovan to show your support of the MLS? I was going for Germany, and my pre-tournament prediction of a Netherlands-Germany final obviously didn’t come true, but it wasn’t too far off! Who would have thought those teams would knock off Brazil, England and Argentina? And then there’s Paul the Octopus, whose 100% prediction record to me was much more interesting than the 1-0 victory for Spain over the Netherlands yesterday. Not a very fun game to watch, but Spain has been dominant since at least 2008, so I guess it makes sense for them to grab the World Cup title in their prime.

But, it’s back to Toronto now to discuss the Reds. They managed to pull off a 1-0 win on Saturday over Colorado on a very hot afternoon in Toronto. They’ve also recently picked up a couple of new forwards in “Mista”, formerly a team-mate of Julian De Guzman in Spain, and Maicon Santos, a Brazilian who played for Preki last season on Chivas USA. So a couple of connections being renewed here. We’ll see how Preki chooses to use these new guys and whether Barrett or White will get the shaft, but I think there will be a bit of rotation going on until hopefully 2 guys emerge as the dominant preferred strikers on the team. Seeing as the team have been keeping a lot of clean sheets lately and for the most part playing solid defence, it was looking like the right time to try to get some offence as well. After all, De Rosario can’t score all the goals!

Anyway, we can be happy with the win over Colorado right now and that the unbeaten home streak is still going strong. Also, TFC have pretty firmly cemented 3rd place in the Eastern Conference right now, 5 points ahead of Chicago. In fact, only 4 teams in the league have more points than Toronto, which I think is pretty good. Next week they travel to Philadelphia to play the expansion Union, which could be another opportunity to pick up 3 points and keep the momentum going. I’ll catch up with you then.

Category: Player News, Team News, Toronto FC