Thursday saw Toronto FC play the final game of their Turkish trip, against Croatian side Dinamo Zagreb, with the two week training camp ending tomorrow. The other two games they played went well, a 1-1 draw with Partizan Belgrade followed by a 1-0 win over Red Star Belgrade (if I remember the rules of pre-season friendlies correctly, going undefeated against two Serbian teams means we get Serbia's Champions league spot next year? I could be wrong though, maybe it's only the Europa League, who knows?).
Before this game TFC released two trialists, Uruguayan Santiago Gonzalez and Dutch winger and second overall in the 'longest unfulfilled courtship of TFC' stakes (behind the incomparable Paul Dickov), Bas Ent. As those two went, another came in, left back Kevin Westmaas, another graduate of Ajax's academy making sure the Dutch quota was maintained.
That double A means I'll never be able to read his name without thinking of Noddy Holder of Slade yelling iiiit's chriiiiiiiiiistmaaaaaaaaas (at 3:00 of this clip) and it must have seemed like Christmas for Dinamo Zagreb(huh? huh? now THAT'S a segue!) as the young back four of Westmaas, Demetrious Omphroy, Doneil Henry and Ty Harden showed themselves as not ready for prime-time with giveaways that led to goals twice in the first ten minutes. Twitter reports suggested it got better from there and another trialist, Canadian Gianluca Zavarise scored just after half time to make it 2-1 before a late penalty to Dinamo made it 3-1. Alarmingly for a friendly, Zavarise and two Dinamo players were sent off, though both teams were allowed to bring substitutions on so it stayed 11 v 11.
TFC's website's match report is very unconcerned with the Dinamo Zagreb lineup, but I'm going to lazily and stereo-typically assume there was a bunch of players with names ending in ic, which very conveniently leads me to another bit of news since I last posted here, ex-interim coach Nick Dasovic hasn't actually been fully released, but is apparently staying with TFC in a scouting position. Given his coaching ambitions, this smacks of TFC being nice and keeping him around until something comes up elsewhere, which I'm ok with, as long as he stays far enough away from BMO's corridors of power that he can't lead another coup.
The other big news was the looooong awaited release of the full 2011 MLS Schedule. You can see TFC's schedule here A few things stand out, firstly, let's hope we're more prepared to compete at the start of the season than we usually are, as if we don't do well early, we're screwed. 5 of our first 7 games are at home, and our first 3 games are against the two expansion sides and then Chivas, one of the few teams worse than Toronto last year.
That 5 out of the first 7 games stat leads to my next observation, that it's going to be bloody cold. Remember 2010 when despite a generally warm spring, every TFC home game was freezing and or raining? Did you enjoy that? I didn't. Now we're practically guaranteeing ourselves a repeat? Thanks.
That unbalanced schedule gets evened out in July with only 1 of 5 games at home, though with a big gap between Houston away on the 9th and dallas at home on the 20th, expect another meaningless friendly, and as it's not in the season ticket package, expect a big name, with Real Madrid-esque ticket prices.
One good thing is that though the League couldn't shut down for a few weeks while the Gold Cup is going on, it is adhering to the Fifa scheduled international weekends in September and October for World Cup qualifying, so that's definitely a step in the right direction.
The other big change is that the vast majority of saturday games wil be played in the evening rather than the afternoon, which fans seem to be fairly evenly divided on whether it's a good thing or not. Personally I liked the afternoon games better but oh well, it's just good to finally have the fixtures to plan around, I think an August weekend in Chicago is calling me.
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