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Saturday is our last game of the season. We play New England. It won’t be our last work day. Far from it. A sports team is a 12-month endeavour. I might take a few days off later in the week, but then it will be back to work. There is plenty of soccer being played, here, in the English Premiership, in Brazil. We will have Maurice Edu on Saturday. He is back from playing for the U.S team. We have Carl Robinson available as well as Andrew Boyens, but he took 12 stitches in the head. It’s just been one of those years. I think Saturday’s game will be wonderful. People have been so proud of this team. They won’t see the team for several months and it’s important to us that we give them a good show. The highlight, for me, was the first goal we scored. When Danny Dichio scored, all those seat covers flew in the air. The footage was aired all over the world, in China, Japan, and Scotland. It put TFC on the map. All year, people have been coming up and telling me how much they enjoyed watching our team play. So much of the credit for that goes to the front office, which made BMO Field such a great place to watch a game. There have been e-mails, people talk to you if you do personal appearances. The fans love every minute of it. We have the foundation, the roots are very strong, now we have to add the extra ingredient of depth to our squad. I hope people come back next year with different expectations. We’re not a start-up team. I don’t think we ever were. You can’t be when you have 20-odd thousand coming to watch your games every week. That part has been tremendous. When you look at our squad, it’s fairly strong. It just didn’t show after July, after the Aston Villa game when we saw all the injuries. We won 20 points in May, June and July, that was setting us on a standard to make the playoffs and then, of course, everything spiraled from there. For me, not making the playoffs was the biggest disappointment. Everything else was great, it was the injuries. We’ve looked at it, we’ve looked at it very closely -- doctors, physio, coaches, players. It’s been definite things, broken noses, broken bones; it has just been a wild season. It ends Saturday. Then the real hard work starts.
We play in Los Angeles in Saturday and as I look up at the big board in my office I see 10 players missing due to injury or national team commitments. The latest was Maurice Edu leaving to play for the American side. At first glance, it doesn’t look too good, but we will soldier on. We will probably insert Tyler Hemming and Gabe Gala into the lineup. Maybe Joey Melo as well. I don’t think we will see David Beckham who has been injured but if he does play we’ll do what you do with players of his caliber. We will keep someone close to him the whole time, probably Todd Dunivant. We look forward to getting Maurice back for the final game of the season against the New England Revolution. It’s tough when you have no midfielders left but we’ll be fine. It means the young guys can look forward to playing and hopefully we can sneak some points out of the match. Got to fly...
Sometimes I am asked how long until TFC is competing for a title. I think five years is a realistic target. I understand that we are growing and growing slowly. We are getting the nucleus of a good team. We need depth. It’s just a matter of picking up a certain six or seven guys and making ourselves stronger by adding players regularly. But a championship trophy is not the only goal I have in mind. I believe we have a need for a soccer academy here in Toronto. I believe we will see a system where 15, 16 and 17 year-old players stay within the structure and eventually live their dreams by playing with TFC. I think the grassroots, TFC and the international arena should be connected. The stories of Atiba Hutchinson and Owen Hargreaves leaving the country and going on to bigger and better things needs a different ending. I understand they are going to play in the Premiership but why not let it happen here first, and then go overseas? That’s what we would like to see: bring players through here, they become bigger and better players and then play in the Premiership. Ultimately, you want them to play here for as long as they can because we owe it to our fans to bring the best. At the grassroots, I see people with TFC shirts on, people with scarfs on, all over the city. I see a younger generation that plays soccer. I think there’s more kids playing soccer than hockey. That bodes well for soccer in Canada. It’s going to take some work. There’s not a great deal of help for the men’s team and only a certain number of camps. This has to change. Not through me personally but I would love to be an ambassador to help change. At the end of the day. I want to be here for a long time. I love Canada. I love Toronto. Our most pressing need is to make sure the fans are happy and they stay here in the stadium. The fans will change the whole dimensions of Canadian soccer. They’ll put Canada on the map. Make no bones about it. The day they threw their seat covers, that was a monumental change in Canadian soccer. I don’t think people realize how much publicity came out of that. It was eyecatching, it was on TV on Japan, China, all over Britain, all over the U.S. They’d never seen anything like it. Hopefully there will be many more days like that. Hopefully there will be a championship. That would be wonderful.
I’ve been asked a lot about our goalless streak and what I plan to do about it. My answer is, plenty…in the long run. I’m looking at adding another two or three strikers for next season. We’ve got a couple of good ones in Jeff Cunningham and Danny Dichio, but I’m talking about adding more scoring strength. As a player, I never went through a period where I didn’t score for a long time. I might have gone four or five games without scoring, but that was the longest. I remember when I was in my first year with Glasgow Rangers and hadn’t scored for about four or five games. We were getting penalty kicks and I wouldn’t take them. I said “don’t worry, it’ll come.” Next game against Aberdeen, 80th or 90th minute, boom, I scored the winner. After that, I was fine again. I’m not going to get down on our players. You have to remember that we’ve lost so many players to injury or national team commitments. No expansion team could live with the number of players we’ve had out of the lineup. We are going to adding another six or seven quality players next season. It’s not about starting from scratch and adding 28 guys, It’s seven or eight guys coming in and us saying to some of the guys here now, “sorry, it’s not been good enough.” Then we have to move on and use the salary cap wisely. What I feel most badly about is that we’ve had to use some kids too much. It’s just unfortunate that we’ve had to throw Andrea Lombardo in there constantly. I feel sorry for him, he’s a 19-year-old kid. He needs time. He works hard every day. The fans like him. He’s not scoring but at the end of the day, he’ll come through strong. I won’t be disappointed in him because I know his heart is in the right place. I have been asked if I had snapped or lost control during our goalless streak. The answer is no. I know there’s a massive upside. |
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Posted by: Coach
