By: Michael Crampton
Two and a half months agos, when the Reds first met the Impact in MLS play, supporters of Toronto FC were coming down from the high of a two season spanning and record making Champions League run. Sure, the team had started their 2012 league campaign with three consecutive defeats but a much anticipated first ever weekend road trip to Montreal to face the Impact was an event. TFC had always won in Montreal before and facing an expansion team, who were having a tough opening to their own inaugural MLS campaign, presented as good of an opportunity as any to get the season turned around before too much damage was done. The Impact won that match and, in the time since, it would not be unfair for a neutral observer to question which side is the expansion team.
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The story in Toronto since that time doesn’t need repeating; every Reds fan is certainly intimately familiar with what has happened. In Montreal however the Impact have been continuing to find their legs in MLS. Jessie March’s team may have had a disappointing exit to TFC in the semi-final round of the Voyageur’s Cup but in the league they’ve won a further four games to improve their record to 5W-3D-8L. Most impressive has been the teams the Impact have been beating: wins over Sporting Kansas City and the Seattle Sounders show that Montreal can compete with teams expected to make the playoffs. Practically no one considers the Impact a true contender but moving to the fringes of the Eastern Conference playoff positions in their first season seems to have validated March’s ambition of building an MLS ready team in their first season. Coming off back to back home wins, sandwiched around a loss away to Chivas, in which they scored four goals in each game and presumably set to debut their first ever Designated Player, Italian international forward Marco Di Vaio, the Impact will be high on confidence.
Neither side has a significant travel or rest advantage as each has played the same number of games since the international break and the Impact played Chivas USA on the west coast in mid-week last week. With Toronto evidently already struggling to deal with another consistent two game a week stretch in their schedule where Montreal will enjoy an advantage is in the depth of their squad. Paul Mariner’s attempt to manage his team’s fitness over the early part of this run by withdrawing veteran midfielders Torsten Frings and Julian De Guzman in the second half of the game against New England was met with howls of outrage from the TFC fan base when the Reds subsequently conceded an equalizing goal.
Further, Mariner’s move to a two forward system has resulted in more goals but stretched the club’s already thin roster at that position. Danny Koevermans and Ryan Johnson have been forced to play a virtually full 90 minutes – Koevermans was subbed off in the dying seconds of the game in Houston – for three consecutive games with no opportunity to bring on fresh legs to keep pressing from the front when the Reds were holding a lead. With Joao Plata still listed as unavailable due to a hamstring strain, Mariner has virtually no options though, he has acknowledged that Nick Soolsma has trained with the team since his arrest and is available for selection. Short of playing an attacking midfielder underneath one of the strikers in a 4-4-1-1 arrangement expect to see a lot of Koevermans and Johnson again in Montreal.
In comparison, Marsch enjoys a bountiful wealth of options both at forward and midfield. In the clubs’ April meeting he was able to drop captain Davy Arnaud and Canadian international Patrice Bernier from the starting line-up and still field a team that comfortably out possessed Toronto while taking a two goal lead. Over their last three games, before Di Vaio’s availability, the Impact have handed two starts to rookie forward Andrew Wenger but also had the option of calling on Sanna Nyassi, Eduardo Sebrango, and Bernardo Corradi at the position while keeping Justin Braun in reserve. In midfield, Marsch seems to have settled on playing Felipe as an attacking mid in front of Bernier and Collen Warner with Arnaud and Justin Mapp on the flanks. Whether he sticks with that on Wednesday evening, or once again surprises by rotating in regular subs Lamar Neagle or Sinisa Ubiparipovic from the beginning, remains to be seen.