The excellent Richard Whittall wrote a piece on The Score’s Footy Blog dissecting the Toronto FC collapse against the Chicago Fire at BMO Field on Saturday night. He mentioned the effort put into the match by Jacob Peterson, to which I commented that Peterson may be the most improved TFC player from last year to this and that the ridiculously heavy schedule may have been one cause of the draw. With Peterson felled by an apparent hamstring injury in the first half of Wednesday’s match in Vancouver when he tried to accelerate to reach a pass and Tony Tchani also hampered by a leg injury minutes later when his foot seemed to get stuck in the pitch, I can’t help but wonder why these matches are allowed to be played on artificial surfaces.
Peterson has been a work horse for Toronto this season, filling in nicely in the midfield, covering the entire pitch and filling in wherever necessary. His loss for any significant amount of time, during such a busy stretch of the season would be a major issue for TFC. No professional footballer, soccerer doesn’t sound right, likes to play on turf, they would much rather play on natural grass. If injuries keep occurring on these unforgiving grounds surely to protect the players rules must be brought in to remove them from top level matches.
Second half is about to kick off, back to the match.
You can find Mr. Whittall’s work at the aforementioned Footy Blog, as well as at Canadian Soccer News and his personal blog, A More Splendid Life.
Update - Back from the second half, a word on the referee, Mr. Silviu Petrescu, if I may. Being one of the few Canadian MLS officials I’ve always found the Mr. Petrescu has a tendency to try so hard to not appear to be biased towards the home team, be it Toronto or Vancouver that he ends up missing what should be pretty straightforward calls. A sort of reverse bias, in an attempt at being unbiased he makes the wrong decision, if you see what I mean. Tonight he let TFC off the hook on several occasions, the Cann tackle on Camilo at the start of the second half was clearly a penalty, while the potential handball by Eckersley would have been tough to call but has been made, not to mention the possible back pass by Dan Gargan, though I still contend, as I vainly attempted to make a joke of on twitter, that without a clear kicking motion it could not be considered so….
Anyways, an entertaining match all in, two top class goals, the Whitecaps dominated much of the play, but forgot to lock the back door and TFC snuck a cheeky one in, next week’s finale is teed up to be a classic, on a knife edge, I’ll be there, will you?
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