Toronto FC beat down

It was made abundantly clear that when Toronto FC took on new management under Aron Winter that the club were going to be undertaking a rebuild and that fans would need to be patient through what was looking like another season of hardships.  Winter joined the club having enjoyed a very successful career playing for Ajax and several other top European clubs.  His resume as a manager might have been a bit lacking but his experience as a player at the highest levels seemed to be enough to convince TFC that he would be the man to finally get the job done for the club.  Winter promised to grow the club from the ground up by investing in young talent and developing players in a fashion similar to what made Ajax into one of the top clubs in Europe.

His first season at the helm has seen the club make a few big changes including shipping off star player and perennial leading scorer Dwayne De Rosario to the already star powered New York Red Bulls.  His departure made it clear that the club were going to give up success this season to ensure the long term plan would pay off.  It has led to a season of struggles and ups and downs so far but on the whole it has been pretty much par for the course compared to recent seasons.  The club are now sitting 7th in the east with 12 points but the main concern is that they only have collected 2 wins so far.  The 6 draws are nice but fans are sure to be getting impatient for the club to get a few more wins under their belt.  Things are only made worse for the fans when you consider that the club has only managed to score 13 goals in 13 matches while conceding a terrible 23 goals.  Sure a rebuilding team is supposed to struggle but it has to be getting hard on the fans who keep going to the games just hoping to see an exciting display from TFC.  Besides Maicon Santos who has scored 5 goals in the league so far the team has struggled to get any sort of consistent scoring with the next best total sitting on 2.  The one positive for the fans is that both wins have come at home where the club has only lost twice in 8 matches.

This weekend though the fans patience was put to a real test as the home team took a serious beat down at the hand of the Eastern conference leading Philadelphia Union.  Coming in to the weekend game the Union had been having success thanks to their defence which had only conceded 7 times in the first 10 matches.  On the other hand though they had only scored 8 goals in league action.  At BMO field though they discovered their scoring touch and it took them barely more the 10 minutes to get ahead 2-0.  Toronto did try and put up a fight at the start of the second half where a good spell of play allowed them to close to gap down to 3-2 but having gone down so far early in the match TFC were forced to open up and push forward in hopes of salvaging the match but that just left them exposed at the back and when all was said and done the Union managed to put 6 into their net and leave with a resounding 6-2 win.  The 4 goal margin of defeat was the worst MLS beating that TFC has received in 5 seasons and was sure to have left many fans with a bad taste in their mouth.

It is never easy to get beat down so badly but it has to be even harder on the players when it takes place at home and in front of your own fans.  Toronto FC have never conceded 6 goals in the league before so this result would have been a shock to the fans and a very hard one to watch. Many of the players were very apologetic for the performance and you could see that they were honestly embarrassed to have put in such a poor showing for the home fans. Toni Tchani tweeted "What a disaster that was!!!We r really embarrassed about what happened today n especially myself. Thanks for ur support n we need it" and he seemed honestly interested in what the fans had to say about how things could have gone so wrong for them on the field and was genuinely appreciative for the support that he received from fans.  He is just one example of players searching for answers and hoping to use the defeat as something to motivate them to be that much better going forward to ensure there is no repeat of the performance.

I do not expect Toronto to get beat like this again any time soon but the fact of the matter is that this match shows how far away they still are from being among the top sides in the east.  The team have been in various stages of building and rebuilding since they came to the MLS but at some point fans might start to get sick of waiting for the team to deliver on 5 years of promises.  I hope that Winter is the made to finally live up to what he has said and build the team in to one that can compete for the MLS crown but it is clear that he still has a long ways to go and it will be important to get things turned around fast so that the fans and players don't begin to lose faith in the team or themselves.  

Next up for TFC will be a replay of the rained out Nutrilite second leg which will give TFC a chance to win a trophy which will at the very least be a positive in a hard season and give the fans something to be happy about.  To win the game though they will have to play much better then they did against the Union and also better then they did in the first half of the rain cancelled match.