After coming back from Turkey over the weekend, Toronto FC returned to their more familiar, more artificial turfy and slightly less exotic Oakville training base, where the media eagerly awaited on Tuesday for interviews and updates.
Dwayne de Rosario's pre-season media training must be paying off, having clearly shaken off the off-season rust that saw his media day press conference range from moody to hostile and end in vague threats of a strike. Today, he mixed well worn cliches with compliments about the new style of play Aron Winter's introducing, and when asked about his never ending contract dispute said that "We're still progressing and things definitely look brighter, so I'm very pleased about that, and I think we all want to get it behind us and focus on the football". Nicely done Dwayne, professional to the point of being dull, that's mid season form right there.
Aron Winter was a lot less cagey in his interview, confirming a report in a Dutch newspaper that TFC have signed three of the triallists from Turkey, Dutch players Javier Martina, Nick Soolsma and Elbekay Bouchiba.
This seems to be becoming a bit of a trend with TFC, letting news just slip out without any kind of big announcement, the new kits have been available online for a while, and are now also available at Real Sports, without any of the promotional hoopla that previous versions have received.
Anyway, back to the new signings, Bouchiba is a defensive midfielder who had a journeyman career in Holland's first division, making 127 appearances over the years, before spending the last 2 years in Qatar. Soolsma is a forward who played in all 3 of our games in Turkey and going by the twitter updates seemed useful, it sounded like he linked up well with Maicon Santos. Martina was probably the player who made the best impression on TFC supporters during those three games, the brief highlights contained plenty of exciting moments from him that suggest he's a very tricky winger who could cause the average MLS full back serious trouble. A lot more detailed info can be found out about these three here at Red Nation Online.
Obviously twitter updates and a few brief highlights aren't the best way to judge any players, especially without salary details, so I'll not get too excited or disappointed yet. At the very least though, they should be comfortable with the Dutch style that Winter wants to play which will be helpful as the squad gets adjusted to that style early on.
Hopefully there will be further signings announced soon, not only to help shake the nagging feeling I'm getting that Winter's big book of international contacts is about as big and diverse as Mo Johnston's was, just with a shiny Orange cover instead of the Union Jack style that Mo rocked, but also, less cynically and more importantly, we've been gifted an easy start to the season, so let's get that squad built soon so we can hit the ground running for a change.
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