Arsenalist

Pardon the creative title but that’s the only excitement I got out of today’s slaughter of our beloved Toronto FC at the hands of the lowly Chicago Fire which dealt a serious blow to our playoff hopes. A return to the friendly and very reddish confines of BMO Field didn’t help much and there was nothing U-Sector or the Red Patch Boys (join those two already) could do to prevent a drubbing that brought back memories of Ali knocking down Sonny Liston and then staring at him while he was down. TFC being Liston of course.

Now that I’ve had a chance to stomach this loss I can get a better perspective of why we lost and the reasons are quite simple. We played bad. It sounds trivial enough but those words are entrenched with profound meaning and do the best to describe our efforts. But there was one bright spot, two really. Srdjan Djankovic didn’t play which meant we might’ve had a chance to win this game but neither did Jeff Cunningham, Ronnie O’Brien, Sam Reynolds and the enigmatic Marvelle Wynne. So that was that. But we got to see U-20 Canadian goalie David Monsalve come in and do his best to stop a Chicago attack that was only being helped by the TFC defense’s tendency not to defend and just kinda wave at the ball as it goes past them. Monslave was impressive early but the Fire attack wore him and our defense down where letting in only three goals was a good thing.

But the news gets worse, Cunningham and O’Brien are probably going to have surgery and will be out 4-6 weeks which means say goodbye to our playoff chances. This probably starts the phase of the season where you at least start looking forward to next year. To quote Kramer, Stick a fork in me Jerry, I’m done. Even so, despite the missing players it was surprising to see the lack of tenacity shown by TFC in what was a six-point game against the team directly below us in the standings.

Best not to think about this game anymore. I’ll just say that it was really sad to see Ivan Guerrero outrun Chris Pozniak so easily for the first goal. Let’s look ahead to David Beckham’s debut in the MLS which is scheduled to happen this Sunday at BMO Field.

Thanks for reading.