What "Better Than Expected!" Might Really Mean

Well... there's hope.

My take:

Early, early days and that was nothing like the finished article for either side but, so long as disaster doesn't strike, we might be in the mix for 5th or 6th last (overall).  If things go magical we might even hang around in range of the last playoff spot into late summer.  There's some potential there.

That said, this game has turned out to be a trap for TFC fans.  Like usual, they'll have watched it in isolation from what happened in the rest of the league.  In that context, TFC didn't look too bad.

Consider how it looked if you were a neutral looking in though.  I'll suggest it looked a lot more like two pretty bad teams not really able to do very much.  That looks worse on Vancouver considering expectations in each respective city.

Great Expectations

The expectation around much of the rest of Canada, maybe even among Montreal supporters, is probably that the new 2012 Montreal Impact will be terrible simply because they’re an expansion team.  Toronto and Vancouver being the two worst expansion teams since Chivas and RSL stank it up in 2005 probably deforms the expectations of a great number of Canadian soccer fans.

But expansion teams don't have to be terrible.