The threat of a looming NFL lockout is apparently of little concern to crazy Cincinnati receiver Chad Ochocino. He’s making plans to give up the gridiron and play proper football instead. Number 85, a noted soccer fan who played the game in his youth, has signed on for a four-day trial with Sporting Kansas City. Hachi Go will hit the pitch next Tuesday, hoping to fulfill what he calls “a childhood dream.”
If you follow Chad on Twitter, you’ll know already that he’s a serious footy fan: he travelled to Europe to meet top players and attend both matches and training. But trying to win a spot with Sporting KC, and not a top team across the pond, means Ochocinco is falling short of the plan he proposed for his footy career a couple of years back, when he mused about a stint in Serie A.
At The Rails would like to wish Johnson/Ochocinco the best of luck with his trial. Rejects from the EPL aren’t likely to put bums in the seats, but if Chad hangs in KC, he might bring more attention to the middling league than David Beckham ever could.
A rather prominent member of the U-Sector, with close ties to the hierarchy of Toronto FC, told me before the MLS Cup Final last year that a tide was turning at the club, and that those moaning in the various other supporter clubs were acting like spoiled children. I agreed with him on the latter viewpoint: we certainly have a boisterous, opinionated set of fans.
But it was the second point I couldn’t agree with. Only the Sunday before I had watched Columbus’ ‘keeper equalize in the dying minutes as the woeful TFC defence played musical statues. Add that to the recent fan protests that made continental news and the tide-turning seemed little more than evaporation.
That was until I took a few days off and watched various pre-season games in Turkey and at Disneyland (that still makes me cringe). Gone was the apparent feeling of cluelessness, and in came a new, improved vigour, confidence and free-flowing football. If the much-publicized Dutch style Mr. Winter has been adding has shown us one thing, it’s this: we have players who will run with the damn ball.
Last year, even on the hottest of summer days, the ball spent so much time in the air it had snow on it. It was frustrating, demoralizing football that drained the crowd and added to their venting. As of late, the ball rarely goes above knee-height, like you were always taught as a kid, and players are encouraged to express themselves and look for the short, snappy pass.
Fancy, perhaps. The right way, arguably yes. It doesn’t come overnight though, in fact maybe not even this season, but it will. The younger players I saw on the pre-season tour are the best I’ve seen in TFC colours, way better than last season’s crop.
So instead of supporter groups showing disharmony and painting a picture of doom and gloom, they need to realize that football teams don’t change overnight, and given time, this really is a team that will grow to be Canada’s finest.
The pride of Essex took a pounding this week, not just when a bunch of visiting Yanks better known as the San Jose Earthquakes (which is a bloody stupid name, if you ask me) put a 3-0 whupping on my hometown XI, Colchester United. No, the worst of it was that the press release sent out by the visiting MLS team got the name of their English opponent wrong, alleging that the California tourists had posted a triumph over Colchesterville United. Whoops. That wouldn’t have gone down well with the Barside lads at Layer Road.
At The Rails feels it has to stand up for the little clubs like Col. U. After all, we’ve got a bunch of U’s fans whooping up a promotion-clinching victory up there on our banner at the top of the page. And among that Where’s Waldo of Escort-driving Essex lads and lasses are two of my cousins, including one who’s contributed to this site. So, stuff your corrected press-release, San Jose. I don’t even care that you’ve got a partnership with Tottenham and played this warm-up match at the Spurs Lodge in my home county. We of Colchester (and Colchesterville) all say sod off to Leicesterland, or wherever your next match is, and don’t come back.
Well, so much for the MLS SuperDraft reviving the hopes of the Toronto FC faithful. On a day when clubs are expected to get better, the Reds appear to have gone in the opposite direction – trading away a potential double-digit scorer in Chad Barrett while bringing in a prospect with an interesting bill of health and Ecuadorian soccer Smurf Joao Plata.
The diminutive playmaker promises goals, but until he can prove it the mantle of secondary scoring falls to Maicon and his 2010 tally of three.
So, if the ad men who operate out of 170 Princes Boulevard are able to come up with a plan to sell its wares to the growing group of south end malcontents, I suggest AtTheRails acknowledge the impossible with a first-annual Don Draper Award.
With that in mind, ATR is here to help with a few suggestions on how to sell the Reds in Season No. 5.
(Disclaimer: If any of the ideas listed below are adopted in any shape or form, ATR is entitled to one set of tickets to a Toronto FC playoff game of its choice. Said playoff tickets can also be written into any will.)
Winter year-round
Has anyone mentioned to coach No. 5 that his surname is a Canadian marketer’s dream? That said, for Reds’ marketing purposes the idea of Winter all year is a positive, for it means there will be just one coach instead of the token two fans have come to expect.
Season F-I’ve seen better
In Season Four the Reds cleverly (no, not Tom Cleverley) took the ‘our’ from ‘four’ and made it theirs. Fail. So in Season Five why not take the ‘I’ve’ from ‘Five’ and market better days, like when the team won 10 games and missed the playoffs on the last day. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
At Least Our Guys Are Eligible
Sometimes the best way to build yourself up is to tear down those around you. With that in mind, remember that with the first overall selection, the expansion Whitecaps FC chose 17-year-old striker Omar Salgado. Due to his age and FIFA transfer rules, Salgado likely won’t be able to play a game for Vancouver until he turns 18 in September.
Of course, this marketing campaign would only be good for one season. By summer 2012, I fully expect Salgado will single-handedly win the undercontested Nutrilite Canadian Championship.
Now for a bit of Prem chatter, with a side of pub-bashing.
This is where Rafael goes, "Lalalala, I can't hear you..."
The best part about Sunday’s goalless draw at White Hart Lane was that it confirmed my local is no longer a reliable place to watch a match. While the breakfast fare is fine and the Caesars are spicy, the suggestion that volume is not necessary and may bother the other patrons sealed the deal.
Anyhow, my audio-free observations of the stalemate are that as long as the Premier League continues to be hotly contested this season, goals will remain at a premium. There is far too much at stake for the big clubs to play the football fans want to see.
Biased Man of the Match: Nemanja Vidic. The captain’s partnership with Rio is arguably the only reason United remain unbeaten.
The inappropriately-named MLS Super Draft is a tough place to generate super results, especially when all your picks are outside the top 25. With that in mind, Sportsnet.ca’s RJ will weigh in Sunday with his thoughts on TFC’s draft day activity…I believe the working title for his piece is is “Rejected TFC Marketing Slogans for 2011.” At least the local XI are getting DeRo back from bonnie Scotland.
For now, our friend Paul Attfield of the Globe & Mail did a nice job documenting TFC’s picks today:
Highlight #1: Multitple sclerosis cost newly-drafted defender Demetrius Omphroy a contract in Portugal, but after returning to the US and playing college soccer at Cal, he hopes he has the disease under control.
Highlight #2: Late pick Joao Plata of Ecuador stands just 5’2″ and was the leading scorer at the MLS scouting combine with three goals. I’d say that’s no small achievement, except it is. But the man I’m dubbing The Wee Assassin seems to have a nose for the goal.
Vancouver used the top pick on Omar Salgado, even though they need FIFA permission for a full transfer before his 18th birthday on Sept. 10, ruling him out for nearly all their debut MLS season. The Whitecaps like Salgado and know him: he trained with the team last year. And they didn’t want to get the Steve Francis treatment from Darlington Nagbe, who went second to Portland and had made noises about not wanting to leave the United State. Because Vancouver and Toronto are such foreign, scary, evil, ugly places. What a doofus. He deserves to get booed in both cities this summer.
Englishman John Rooney doesn’t mind going abroad for a game of footy – he went to the New York Red Bulls in the second round. Henry and Rooney on the same team, they can’t lose.
Back in Blighty, big brother Wayne and his Man. Utd teammates will take on Tottenham this Sunday…RJ’s team against mine. He’s promised to deliver a reasoned, rational, FOXNews-esque account of the EPL encounter. Don’t miss it.
Paul the Octopus is dead. Long live Willy! Or Flipper! Or whatever they call the dolphin who’ll be predicting the first pick at Thursday’s MLS Super Draft in Baltimore.
Anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows that dolphins are at least the second-most intelligent species on the planet, so you know the fellow with flippers be taking all the angles into account before deciding who the expansion Vancouver Whitecaps should select with the top selection. Plus, if he picks wrong, the team will send him to The Cove.
Toronto FC doesn’t have a dolphin, or even a first-round pick, in this year’s draft. The Reds have one second-round selection and two third-rounders, the 26th, 43rd and 44th picks overall. Expect our man Ryan to check back with an update on their selections in the next couple of days.
When they weren’t in training at this week’s MLS combine in Florida, some of Thursday’s potential picks were out in the Everglades looking for alligators. Among that boatload of hopefuls was John Rooney, younger brother of Wayne, who’s over here looking for a job, and generating a bit of buzz. No idea whether they saw any dolphins down there.
In Florida, of course, the Dolphins and Gators generally play their football on the gridiron, not the soccer pitch. Despite a huge population of South and Central Americans, the state has had two failed MLS franchises and won’t be getting another until they can prove things will work out better, as commish Don Garber told a disappointed audience in Miami this week.
From strange animals in Florida to strange decisions in London, where Tottenham say they’d demolish most of the Olympic Stadium if they move there after the 2012 games. Spurs seem determined not to meet the requirements for moving into the venue, but would rather bolt the borough and save some cash by working with an existing site. Hard to see how the Olympic Park Legacy people won’t rule in favour of West Ham when they make their decision on January 28th. Even a dolphin would pick the Hammers for this one.
A big welcome this weekend to a new voice for At The Rails. Ryan Johnston has done plenty of TFC coverage and other soccer reporting for Sportsnet.ca in recent years. He’s here to blog about Toronto’s Reds, his beloved Red Devils of Manchester, and other stories from the footy world. In his debut, Ryan says playoff-poor TFC was smart not to hire big names for its management vacancies.
Dan Gargan at wing back? Don't make me laugh.
Enough with the total football references; Dan Gargan at wingback will never work.
That said, and as odd as it may seem, the best thing supporters can sing in the wake of Toronto FC (finally) hiring a new management team is, ’Who are ya?‘
The fifth year MLS club with a first-year resume made the right decision to take the path less chosen and opt for a set of names known to very few outside of the aforementioned Total Football circles.
In are Aron Winter, Bob de Klerk and Paul Mariner, out is the adage that only the best will do.
Sure, the soccer intelligentsia are familiar with Toronto’s new triumvirate, but consider the following: TFC fans have spent the past few months being regaled with names of the well-known: Roberto Donadoni, Iain Dowie and Carlos Quieroz. It reeked of redundancy, because ever since this red rag-tag of names and numbers took the field for the first time in 2007, every big name available in soccer has been linked for a trial or tryout.
So exhalations of here we go again were excused when the type-A (Mo) Johnston was sacked and succeeded by someone just his type in Juergen (Klinsmann, whose SoccerSolutions firm was brought in to consult). But when the fickle former German player and manager admitted his time with TFC was akin to a hobby, not a full-time habit, supporters exhaled once again.
But this time it was with relief.
And so it goes that the German great stayed silent as the Reds’ rumour mill noisily churned out big name after big name. Then just as ‘cause for concern’ was being typed in to keyboards country-wide, Klinsmann quietly delivered.
As rumoured for most of the week, Winter is here at Toronto FC.
After four fruitless seasons under four five failed head coaches, the Klinsmann plan was enacted today with the hiring of former Ajax and Inter midfielder Aron Winter as head coach and Bob De Klerk as his assistant. Winter, a former Dutch international, and De Klerk come to Toronto from Amsterdam, where they were working with Ajax’s academy and assisting the first team. Paul Mariner will serve as director of player development.
Winter wants TFC to play with three up front in a 4-3-3 formation. But he’s never seen this collection of chumps play, and he’s already got to deal with news that designated player Julian De Guzman has “shredded” his meniscus and needs to go under the knife.
Mariner, formerly Steve Nicol’s sidekick when the New England Revolution were good, is back on this side of the Atlantic after 15 TFC-esque months with Plymouth Argyle. In his day, the former England international was a prolific scorer for Plymouth and Ipswich.
Over at The Globe & Mail, our man Paul Attfield says he likes the moves. Here at At The Rails, we’re waiting for new blogger Ryan Johnston to make his debut with a breakdown of the hirings. He’s a little busy with his day job right now, but has promised to weigh in this weekend. Stay tuned.
Besides the fact that Tottenham can apparently defend as well with 10 men as they can with 11, the strangest story in football this week has to be Dwayne De Rosario’s dalliance with Celtic, and how little Toronto FC claim to know about it. As surprise announcements go, it’s a saga with far more grips, twists and turns than Newcastle’s Jose Enrique’s taking to the Twitterverse to spread news of an injury.
DeRo, who you might remember from his “show me the money” cheque-signing celebration after a superb goal this season, also caught his team off guard, or so they’d have us think, when news broke that he was to have a one-week trial with the Glaswegians. TFC first denied the story, but having their player get off a plane in Scotland made that look foolish, so they claimed it was news to them, too.
De Rosario is under contract for two more years, but his brother insists TFC was aware of the move, and happily made it sound as though the Scarborough-born Canadian international could make a long-term move to the SPL. “If it’s long-term for a loan or he comes back has yet to be determined,” Mark De Rosario told the Toronto Star. “If it works out, fine, we’ll work on the particulars (between TFC and Celtic) later.”
Someone is full of shit here, maybe both sides, and it stinks pretty bad. Expect this one to get weirder before it makes sense. It’s hard to blame De Rosario for wanting to bail on the rudderless ship that is Toronto FC, still listing along without a coach or full-time GM. But while fans may wish the somewhat mercurial DeRo the best, they should be sharpening their knives for the stuffed-shirt stooges who run the team.
I’m at the MLS Cup in Toronto, covering the game for the Associated Press. We got some news from The Don of MLS, aka Commissioner Don Garber, before the match. Here’s what he had to say:
Major League Soccer will add two playoff teams next season, expanding its postseason field to 10, and will investigate switching its schedule to align with the international calendar.
Commissioner Don Garber made the announcement at Sunday’s 15th MLS Cup game in Toronto between the Colorado Rapids and FC Dallas.
Next year’s playoff format has yet to be determined, Garber said, but the goal is to avoid a repeat of this season, when two Western Conference teams (Colorado and San Jose) met in the Eastern Conference championship. Six of the eight playoff qualifiers this year came from the West.
The league will grow to 18 teams next season when expansion franchises in Portland, Ore. and Vancouver, Canada, begin play. The season will increase from 30 to 34 games and teams will play a balanced schedule with the same number of games against each opponent.
The addition of two western teams will require moving one existing team from the Western Conference into the East. Garber said no final decision has been reached on who that will be.
A 19th team, Montreal, is set to join the league in 2012.
Aligning with the international calendar would help avoid MLS teams losing players to national team duty during breaks for World Cup qualifiers and other exhibition matches. The league suspended play for two weeks during the group stage of last summer’s World Cup in South Africa.
Garber offered few details about how MLS, whose season currently runs from March to November, could better match the global schedule, which typically runs from August to April.
“It’s way too premature for us to go into any details of what it could look like,” Garber said. “What we’re basically saying is we’re going to do the research. We’re going to do a study, we’re going to take the time to get it right. There’s no rushing.
“The bottom line is we’re telling the world we’re going to begin taking a very serious look at this whole issue and what kinds of things we need to do to determine if it makes sense for us.”
With so many teams in northern climates, Garber conceded a winter break would be necessary to avoid playing games in frigid, snowy conditions. He said Sunday’s final, one degree warmer than the coldest final in league history, was “a pretty good test” for playing later into the fall.
The threat of a looming NFL lockout is apparently of little concern to crazy Cincinnati receiver Chad Ochocino. He’s making plans to give up the gridiron and play proper football instead. Number 85, a noted soccer fan who played the game in his youth, has signed on for a four-day trial with Sporting Kansas City. Hachi Go will hit the pitch next Tuesday, hoping to fulfill what he calls “a childhood dream.”
