On Wednesday night, Toronto FC played a man down for more than an hour, defended its home turf, and defeated the Montreal Impact 2-0. The win — the crew’s first in nearly two months — has them marching into the final of the Amway Canadian Championship. They will meet a Vancouver squad they defeated last year, a victory that gave TFC a berth in the 2011-2012 CONCACAF Champions League. In that tournament, they reached the knockout stage, defeated the Los Angeles Galaxy, and drew a match with Mexican powerhouse Santos Laguna in the first leg of the semifinal before succumbing .
For those keeping score at home, that’s 0 wins in Major League Soccer, a semifinal appearance in the best tournament in the region, and a second-straight trip to the Canadian national championship.
This team is great. Has any team ever had more success internationally and domestically while being so horrible in MLS? (For the record, TFC finished 16th in MLS last season with a league-worst -23 goal differential.)
Next question: When will TFC win an MLS game? Um… the 16th in D.C., a match squeezed in between the two-leg Amway final? Doubtful. At home against Philadelphia on the 26th? It better be then, because June starts with trips to Kansas City and Houston.
My money? 6/23 at home against New England. That’s more than three months after First Kick.
(As for the Impact, well, they’ll be running in practice. Manager Jesse Marsch was, shall we say, less than pleased with the loss to TFC: “I saw 11 guys that weren’t ready for a real game. And if you show up to play like that, I don’t care who it is, I don’t care where you’re going — especially in a cup match, it’s an elimination game — you’re going to get your ass whupped and that’s what happened to us tonight. We were second on every single play. In the end, we just got outcompeted.”)
