If Toronto FC's 2009 season was a clock, it would be permanently set at the 11th hour. Everything the Reds did seemed to go down the very last minute -- whether it was battling both the Montreal Impact and the scoreboard in the final game of the Nutrilite Canadian Championship, the constant late-game goals (both for and against) that kept fans watching until the closing whistle and TFC's quest for their first playoff spot that took them to the last game of the regular season.
This postseason quest ultimately came up heartbreakingly short. Though the Reds finished with a club-best 39 points (10-11-9), they still came a point shy of eighth-place Real Salt Lake for the last playoff position.
"There's a lot of things you could point a finger at, but the bottom line is we had opportunities to come close in our division numerous times," said midfielder Dwayne De Rosario. "In one way, we accomplished quite a few things and in other ways we were disappointed."
Though the club's ultimate goal wasn't achieved, TFC did capture its first piece of silverware, set in place some important building blocks for the future and gave its fans hope that 2010 will see the happy ending to the first chapter of the Reds' growth -- their development into an MLS Cup Playoffs participant.
One of 2009's highlights came early, with the MLS SuperDraft on January 15. It was an event that might serve as a highlight not just of this season, but of many to come thanks to the impressive trio of rookies who played important roles for TFC during the year.
Armed with three first-round picks, the Reds first took midfielder Sam Cronin with the No. 2 overall selection. Toronto native O'Brian White was next with the No. 4 pick, though many pundits felt that White might have gone first overall were it not for an ACL injury suffered the previous October by the talented University of Connecticut forward. Finally, at No. 13, TFC selected goalkeeper Stefan Frei, who had top-five talent but fell simply because the teams with earlier picks felt they had more pressing needs to fill than in goal.
It was a banner day of drafting for TFC manager and director of soccer Mo Johnston, and the influx of young talent was a boon to a club that suffered from depth issues in 2008. Head coach John Carver gave every indication that the rookies (apart from White, whose injury would keep him sidelined) would get every chance to play.
"We've now got a situation where players are going to be put under pressure and that wasn't the case a year ago," Carver said. "You need the competition, it's healthy."
The rookies were far from the only new faces in Toronto FC's February training camp. The biggest newcomer was clearly De Rosario, the former four-time MLS Cup champion who was acquired by the Reds in a December trade with Houston.
Bringing the Toronto native home to Canada was a major coup for the Reds, but the team followed it up by dealing for another Toronto-born Canadian international, defender Adrian Serioux, in February. Looking outside the domestic ranks, the club also signed Argentinean forward Pablo Vitti on a loan deal to bolster the strike force.
The new acquisitions looked to help solve the scoring and defending issues that plagued TFC in 2008, and right from First Kick 2009, it seemed as if the team had turned a corner. The Reds defeated Kansas City 3-2 in their opening match, the first time in their three seasons that Toronto had opened a season with a victory.
It was also Toronto's first opportunity to see their new goalkeeper in action. Frei was given the opening assignment after a sterling training camp that saw the rookie beat out incumbent starter Greg Sutton and backup Brian Edwards for the honor. Frei acquitted himself well in his first match, but he still experienced a "welcome to the big leagues" moment.
"[I was] starting my career and playing against a guy like [Claudio] Lopez who I used to watch back in the day in the UEFA Champions League when he played in Spain," Frei said. "I remember my brother telling me, 'you played against a guy we watched in the Champions League,' so that was something that stuck with me."
For a club that had won just four road games in their first two years, to pick up three points away from home in the very first game was a major confidence-builder. That feeling continued into the next match, when TFC went to Columbus to play the defending MLS Cup champions and left Crew Stadium with a 1-1 draw.
Coming back to Toronto, however, the Reds began to struggle. They played one of their worst games of the season in their home opener, an ugly 2-0 loss to the expansion Seattle Sounders FC, and then followed that result up with a 1-1 draw with FC Dallas the next week. The match with FCD was equalized by an 87th-minute goal from Dallas captain Pablo Ricchetti -- unfortunately for TFC, it would not be the last time they would be victimized by late goals.
In fact, another such goal struck in the very next game, a reverse fixture against FCD. This time it was Kenny Cooper who broke a deadlock with an 84th-minute penalty kick goal awarded after a controversial handball call on Toronto defender Marvell Wynne. Cooper's goal led to a 3-2 Dallas win, and it left Carver fuming at what he perceived to be a string of bad calls against his team.
The coach took a self-imposed vacation from the sidelines for TFC's next game, as Carver took to a BMO Field luxury box to watch Toronto deliver a 1-0 victory against previously unbeaten Chivas USA. Carver phoned instructions down to assistant coach Chris Cummins, who was manning the on-field duties for the game, and the tactic seemed to work.
Little did observers know that this game would mark the first of many for Cummins in charge of the Reds bench. Carver surprised both the team and pundits by resigning a day before TFC's April 26 match with Kansas City, leaving management and the players scrambling to make sense of the situation. Cummins and fellow assistant Nick Dasovic were put in charge of the team for the K.C. game, and the two assistants led the Reds to another 1-0 result.
Not wanting to change too much of the team's preseason structure, Johnston decided to stick to continuity and named Cummins as the club's interim head coach (and third overall coach in less than three years). It was a big jump for the 37-year-old native of Watford, England, who had just joined TFC as an assistant the year prior and had never coached a senior team before in his career.
"People say 'he was thrown into it,' but the only way you learn is to be thrown into it," Cummins said. "Mo gave me the opportunity when he probably shouldn't have and I'm sure he had other people in mind when he did give me the opportunity."
The Reds seemed to respond well to Cummins' elevation, reeling off a 3-1-2 record in his first six games as the head coach. Two of those wins came in Nutrilite Canadian Championship play, as TFC got off to a strong start in the national competition with 1-0 wins over Montreal and Vancouver.
Toronto dominated the two games, but the one-goal margins of victory proved to be costly. Vancouver rebounded with a pair of wins over Montreal, thus setting up a big match on June 2 at Swangard Stadium between the Whitecaps and Reds. TFC came out flat in that game and dropped a 2-0 result to their west coast rivals.
This left Toronto in dire straits heading into the last match of the round-robin competition. To overcome Vancouver's edge in goal differential, TFC wouldn't just have to beat the Impact on June 18 -- they would have to beat them by at least four goals. It was a very tall order for a club that had won exactly one game in its short history by a four-goal margin, and was still trying to find consistent success on the road.
The Vancouver loss was sandwiched between league defeats to Houston and Los Angeles, and suddenly the Reds were at a low point in their season. The team's inconsistency was baffling; TFC could look like title contenders in beating New England one week, and then be completely dominated by the Dynamo the next.
One of the major problems facing the Reds was a lack of conversion on their scoring chances. Over that three-game losing streak, TFC scored just one goal from 44 shots, 22 of which were on net.
Attacking midfielders De Rosario and Amado Guevara had had some success in putting the ball in the back of the net, but up front, the strikers were struggling. Forwards Vitti and Chad Barrett were both being consistently snakebitten by hot goalkeepers, goalposts, making one pass too many and just flat-out missing open chances. Club all-time scoring leader Danny Dichio still looked as if he had some touch in his boot, but the banged-up veteran wasn't physically capable of playing a full schedule.
With the scorers not scoring, it left TFC open for tying or game-losing goals that cost the team points. The club made a few moves to try and solve the dual problems, acquiring defender Nick Garcia and the rights to Canadian international forward Ali Gerba in a deal with San Jose in early June.
TFC also released Sutton, as Frei had cemented himself as the new starting 'keeper. Frei and Cronin had been on the field for all but 180 minutes of TFC's games, as both rookies proved themselves to not just be worthy of pushing the veterans, but taking their spots altogether.
"As a young player, the best way to learn is to be in competitive matches and to play as much as possible," Cronin said. "There's a lot of things I can reflect on and hopefully improve on next season, but to get my feet wet, play, and learn things on the go was good."
Cronin was able to mark his development with his first MLS goal on June 13 in a 2-1 win against New York that got Toronto back on the winning track. Vitti scored his first goal in another victory against the Red Bulls just nine days later, but the biggest development of the season occurred in between those two wins.
On June 18, on a rainy night at Stade Saputo, TFC performed what has already gone down in team lore as 'The Miracle In Montreal.' After falling behind 1-0 to the Impact after 24 minutes, Toronto scored six unanswered goals for a 6-1 rout of the Quebec side. The five-goal margin of victory was one more than TFC needed to pip Whitecaps FC for the Nutrilite Canadian Championship, and the Reds had won the first trophy in club history.
It was a huge win for TFC that put them into the CONCACAF Champions League and avenged their loss in the Nutrilite in the previous season. De Rosario led the way by becoming the first Reds player to score a natural hat trick, and he hoped this would be the first of many cup wins for his side.
"We have to look at that as a positive since we had never won the Nutrilite Cup and this year we did that," De Rosario said. "For me, the Canadian Cup is something we should always win given what the situation is. Not taking anything away from Montreal or Vancouver of course, but when you look at the salary cap and the level of the guys in that dressing room compared to the teams we played against in the Canadian Cup, chances are we should always win that."
Between the Cup win and the consecutive victories over New York, the Reds seemed to be back on their feet, but just as quickly, the rollercoaster of form took another nose dive. TFC came up short in a desultory 3-0 loss at Real Salt Lake on June 27, rebounded for a 3-1 win in San Jose (just their second away win of the year) on July 11 and gave up another late goal for a 1-1 tie with Houston at BMO Field on July 18.
After experiencing the momentary peak of their three-game win streak, Toronto was due for another run of bad results, and they came as a particularly unfortunate time for the club. In Columbus on July 25, TFC held a 2-1 lead after 75 minutes as they searched for their first-ever win over their Trillium Cup rivals. But the Crew equalized in the 76th, then kept pressing and eventually went ahead in stoppage time. It was the most bitter defeat yet for a Toronto side that just couldn't avoid those late-game breakdowns.
If that result wasn't frustrating enough, TFC's brief taste of the CONCACAF Champions League ended up being a showcase for their scoring problems. Over the two-legged tie with the Puerto Rico Islanders, the Reds just couldn't figure out goalkeeper William Gaudette. Kendall Jagdeosingh's 67th-minute goal at BMO Field in the first game was all that the Islanders would need to defeat TFC by a 1-0 overall aggregate score.
In the wake of their Champions League disappointment, the Reds got a chance to experience some international football of a different kind. For the third consecutive year, TFC brought some of the world's most noted clubs to BMO Field to participate in friendlies. Argentinean giants River Plate faced off against TFC for the Carlsberg Cup on July 22, but their visit paled in the comparison to the hype and pageantry that accompanied the visit of Real Madrid on August 7.
No expense was spared for the Galacticos' visit -- a temporary grass pitch was even laid down over top of BMO Field's artificial surface to accommodate the requests of the Spanish giants. It was a small price for Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to pay to welcome the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Raul to Toronto.
Real won the exhibition by a 5-1 score, wowing the capacity crowd at BMO Field with a fantastic display of passing and finishing. It was a night that none of the participants in the game will soon forget.
"It was great. We enjoyed playing against the best players in the world and one of the best clubs in the world," said TFC captain Jim Brennan. "It's history. We played against a big club at this stadium and hopefully there will be more to come."
With their friendly and international commitments now past, TFC could focus on the final third of the MLS schedule. After a 2-0 win against D.C. United at home, the Reds faced a stretch of five of six games on the road, including three consecutive games at Western Conference clubs. It would be the biggest test yet of Toronto's road form, and unfortunately for TFC, it was a test they didn't pass.
Of those five road games, Toronto emerged with just two points -- a hard-fought scoreless draw in Seattle and a 2-2 draw in Chicago that the Reds just barely held on to tie. The other three results were all losses, and particularly lackluster ones, to playoff contenders Chivas, Colorado and Los Angeles.
Again and again, TFC kept coming up short in these tense situations on the road. De Rosario thought it might simply have been a lack of experience in such games.
"A champion is based on tough game situations and rising to the occasion in tough games," De Rosario said. "I think we had one or two players who cracked under pressure. When you win something and are part of important games, it maybe means more to you than to someone who hasn't won anything."
While it's true that the Reds were playing with a number of rookies and young players in the lineup due to injuries, international absences and ineffectiveness on the part of some veterans, some of these young players were stepping up in a major way for the club.
In addition to Cronin and Frei, 20-year-old defender Nana Attakora had become a fixture in the starting XI and was delivering big performances on both sides of the ball. White made his season debut in the River Plate game, and scored his first two professional goals in wins against D.C. and Colorado. Even the two youngest members of the TFC senior roster, Gambians Emmanuel Gomez and Amadou Sanyang, were contributing, though in Sanyang's case, he had to wait until his 18th birthday on August 1.
But while these youngsters were turning heads in the Toronto camp, it was the veterans who grabbed the headlines over a busy three-day stretch in September. First, fan favorite Dichio announced his retirement and subsequent move into a new role as an academy coach, assistant with the senior team and team ambassador. The man who notched TFC's first-ever strike suddenly went from battling for loose balls at training to wearing a monogrammed coaches' jacket.
Taking the empty place on the roster was a man who the Reds hope can make an even greater impact on the club than Dichio did. Canadian international Julian de Guzman was signed as Toronto FC's first-ever designated player, and the former La Liga star was immediately thrown into the fire of TFC's playoff chase.
De Guzman had long been a target of Reds management, though the signing meant that TFC's already-crowded midfield now had another major pair of legs going for the ball and pushing for playing time. Given de Guzman's stature, however, Cummins felt the signing was a no-brainer in the long-term.
"If somebody comes up to you and says you have a chance to get this lad, and I turn around and say no, you're talking about Canada's best player in the world," Cummins said. "I'd be wrong. I believe he's an unbelievable talent and I do believe he'll be one of the best players in the league next year."
As it happened, de Guzman ended up finding room when he moved into the defensive midfield slot usually held by Carl Robinson. The veteran Welshman's season came to an unfortunate end in the first week of October when he suffered a fractured cheekbone after an accidental collision during practice.
Heading into their all-important final three games of the season, the Reds were missing Robinson, Marvell Wynne (thigh injury) and Frei, who broke a finger in training and was unable to properly hold onto the ball. It was not an ideal situation for a TFC side that needed a minimum of six points from those three games to get into the playoffs, but with two of those games at home, their chances looked fair.
The first of those games, on October 10 at BMO Field, saw the Reds play host to the San Jose Earthquakes, last in the Western Conference and the owners of just one road win all season long. On paper, it was a game that Toronto should have won, but once again, they came just seconds short of making it a reality.
After Attakora scored early in the second half to put TFC ahead, the Reds simply could not hold up against San Jose's pressure late in the game. After a number of tense minutes, Quakes substitute Cornell Glen knocked home the equalizer in the third minute of stoppage time to cost the Reds a crucial two points.
It was the 15th time that TFC had allowed a goal in the final 15 minutes of a game, and it was the sort of backbreaking score that would have finished off a lesser team. But the Reds came back the next week and this time held a one-goal lead over the closing minutes to cinch a 1-0 win against Real Salt Lake. Goalkeeper Edwards (making just his second start of the year in place of the injured Frei) made nine mostly spectacular saves for the clean sheet, and Brennan achieved what he called his personal highlight of the season when he scored his first-ever BMO Field goal to put TFC ahead.
The win over RSL meant that Toronto's playoff search would come down to their final game of the year, on October 24 against the last-place Red Bulls in what would be the last MLS game ever played at Giants Stadium. Myriad playoff scenarios swirled around the match and TFC didn't control their own fate, but given the number of tiebreakers they held over other teams, the Reds would be in great shape with a victory.
Unfortunately for Toronto FC and its fans, that victory wasn't meant to be. The match was almost a Bizarro version of the Miracle in Montreal -- there was a driving rainstorm and a weak opponent, but this time it was the Reds who were on the wrong side of a monumental loss. The 5-0 result was the largest margin of defeat in team history, and it couldn't have come at a worse time.
"We got spanked and I'm still devastated," Johnston said. "This was one of those games where we had everything on the line in terms of winning the game to make the playoffs. To be honest it wasn't just about [that day]. We've lost numerous points late in games and it just wasn't good enough."
Indeed, all of those late allowances proved to be costly to TFC's season. Had almost any one of those late-game goals been stopped, the Reds would have picked up the one point they needed to reach the MLS Cup Playoffs. Toronto would have finished tied with RSL, D.C. and Colorado at 40 points and won the head-to-head tiebreaker over those other teams.
Much like how those late goals ruined so many good results for TFC, their playoff chase had some to a similarly bitter end. 'Bitter' might have been a literal term, given that almost as soon as the final whistle sounded in New York, rumors began to swirl about problems in the Reds locker room. Cummins and some players (most notably Cronin and De Rosario) were vocal about certain members of the team causing problems behind the scenes and lacking the drive to go all-out for the team.
"That's all about being a pro," De Rosario said. "Whatever your issues are off the field, whenever you cross the line you have to learn to get our your game and perform. ... If you're going to be negative off the field and then play not up to par, you're not doing yourself any justice. Guys who are doing that have to answer for themselves."
De Rosario pledged to work harder himself in 2010 and said it was a "bit of an eye-opener" to deal with these kind of issues after experiencing nothing but harmony amidst four MLS Cup-winning teams during his time in San Jose and Houston. But even though his personal streak of never missing the postseason ended, De Rosario was still happy he came to Toronto.
"[People ask] did you make the right decision, I truly feel like I did," De Rosario said. "This is my hometown, the fans, I look at them like they're my family and I'm going to work as hard as I can to make the team successful."
While team captain Brennan disagreed with Cummins' assessment that there were a few "bad apples" in the TFC locker room, the veteran defender did say that his club didn't have the mental or physical toughness to close out those games, and they paid for it.
"Maybe we don't have that urgency and that bit of desire to make the playoffs," Brennan said. "I'll tell you one thing, we need some players who have grit, who are willing to make that tackle, are willing to make those final passes, score goals and defend at all costs. It wasn't good enough this season. We need more players with a bit more grit."
It remains to be seen what type of new players will be brought into the fold for next season, but we already know what the Reds will need a new head coach. Cummins was not retained for the 2010 season, a mutually-agreed decision between the coach and team that was borne of Cummins' desire to move back to England to be with his wife and five children.
"I was under contract and I wanted to see that out," Cummins said. "It would've been easy for me to go back, but I was always going back at the end of the year, whether we won the MLS Cup or not. The only difference is that I would've been going back with a medal."
2010 promises new players, a new coach and, in what is perhaps the biggest sea change of all for the club, a new playing surface. MLSE, the City of Toronto and provincial and federal officials worked out a deal to install a grass pitch at BMO Field for the start of next season, while the annual "winter bubble" that allowed for year-round play at BMO will now be moved to nearby Lamport Stadium.
While the grass pitch is a much-welcomed boon to the club, its installation removes the last metaphorical obstacle in TFC's path. Now the team has its proper field, its designated player, its core of young talent and its established stars like De Rosario and the World Cup-bound Guevara.
There are no longer any foundational reasons why Toronto shouldn't be playoff-bound in 2010, and if four seasons is the maximum amount of time a new club can be allotted before it makes the playoffs, then it appears as if TFC will be taking things down to the last minute once again.
"I'm very happy with the direction of the club." Cronin said. "Obviously we need to make the playoffs, that was the goal this season and we failed to do so.
"We're not a long way off. There were times during the season when we had good performances and the mentality and results were both good, so it's just the consistency that needs to improve."
Mark Polishuk is a contributor to MLSnet.com
