Friggin soft. They got them there Michael Broadley – Good guy. Lives in Tranna year round – but he can’t be everywhere ya know. They need someone to protect that little European, what’s his name? Geeovinceeo. Little Italian. Reminds me of Bobby Orr…
(10 min diatribe about Bobby Orr edited out for clarity).
Where was I? Oh yeah. Grit.
I knows the MLS doesn’t allow guys to drop their gloves and go – they wouldn’t be all floppin around like some kind of ballerina if ya had a Marty McSorley out there let me tells ya – but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a little sandpaper.
That Jackson fellow has a bit of that – but I don’t know about that one name thing. Proper Canadian lads have two names. I don’t know about these Brazilian types – but you need more.
You need guys that want to get dirty, get pucks in deep and put in a shift.
(Don went on a rant about the 1993 Leafs here, so we cut him off)
Mr. Cherry actually is on to something. TFC was a pretty soft team playing in a league that favours things a little rougher. We saw other sides get chippy with Giovinco all year – hacking his ankles, getting under his skin – but TFC had no ability to counter that.
This isn’t hockey, obviously. You can’t be taking reds just to make a point. However, at least part of the defensive issues come from the fact that TFC is easy to play against. Not easy in the “Holy crap what did Giovinco just do” sense, but easy in a “my talent guys can pretty much operate freely” way. I’ll talk more about this in the next part, but you can’t hang all of TFC’s GA problem on the CBs.
Cheyrou, who everyone loves and who is very talented, is playing in the position that should be providing some of that. I’m not sure he’s that type of player though. TFC had a 1968 Jaguar E-Type doing the work that required a 2015 Ram 1500.
That’s not to say Cheyrou was the problem here, but rather that his role speaks to the overall lack of balance TFC had in 2015.
It’s easy to point to the centre-backs and say “sign better ones. All is fixed,” but the solution to TFC’s defensive issues goes deeper than that. Finding a few “enforcers” is a big part of that overall fix.
We’ll have more on what he overall fix in in What went really wrong…