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.

Rogers/Bell: Thinking About Afterthoughts

With all the oxygen in the Toronto sports conversation being taken up by upcoming changes in the world of our benevolent corporate overlords I thought I’d chip in with a typical bit of contrarianism.  In the TFC corner of this discussion, beyond trying to parse out what all this means for TFC’s chances of winning in the immediate future, a not insignificant part of the conversation has centred on the unexamined assumption that TFC isn’t really an important part of the deal.  I can’t say with confidence that such an assumption is incorrect, at least in terms of the valuation of MLSE the deal implies, but there’s something that needs to be challenged:

The "afterthought" narrative is being overstated.

The Most Horrible Thing Ever

The following was originally a (typically longwinded) reply on the Voyageur's forum.  I repost here because I think it's something that TFC supporters need to take note of and in some ways its exactly the sort of writing I've always done that was probably more appropriate for a blog:


We're months from the start of the season, there's a lot of time for both teams to change and take shape, TFC is looking better at this point in the off season than they ever have before,* and I hate making explicit predictions but, honestly, from what I've seen from Jesse Marsch Toronto FC fans need to start preparing themselves for something that most can't even imagine: a Montreal team that is competitive in their very first season, capable of finishing ahead of TFC, and possibly even making the playoffs.