TORONTO – Toronto FC returned from Chicago – tails between their legs after a third straight defeat, a 3-2 decision Saturday against the Fire – having been sent a very big message.
Their defense just hasn’t been good enough so far in 2015.
“There are just too many simple mistakes,” TFC head coach Greg Vanney told reporters Wednesday after an intense day of training. “And they’re compounded mistakes. It’s not one mistake that’s giving up the goal; it’s three, four, five mistakes on top of each other that are leading to us giving up goals.”
Toronto have allowed eight goals in four games, second worst in MLS, and it’s gotten increasingly worse after their season-opening, 3-1 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps. A 2-0 loss to Columbus Crew SC on March 14 and a 2-1 loss to Real Salt Lake on March 29 were followed up by their worst defensive performance of the year over the weekend.
“We lose possession in bad places, and when I go back and look at the series of those, I look and see, ‘Does the player have an option? Is he just choosing the wrong option and losing the ball? Does he have a simple out?’” Vanney said. “On a vast majority of them, yes, we have a simple passing option. We choose not to use that option. We turn over the ball instead.”
It could even be worse, if not for goalkeeper Joe Bendik, who is second in the league with 19 saves. And while Bendik said it’s not a statistical category he cares to lead unless his side is taking home three points regularly, Vanney said the TFC ‘keeper and the back four need to be more responsible, too.
“He’s made some good saves, and he’s not made some saves that I think he would be the first one to say he probably should save,” Vanney said. “We’ve allowed too many goals and too many of what I would call fairly easy goals because we’ve had the right number of people around the ball and the play to deal with it, and we haven’t.”
Vanney highlighted Chicago’s game-winning free kick goal, scored by veteran Jeff Larentowicz, as an example of his team failing to properly defend as a unit.
“The free kick goal is, for me, unacceptable,” Vanney said. “Jeff Larentowicz, this is not his first year in this league, and this is not his first free kick. He’s going to hit it as hard as he can. In the shooting range, it doesn’t matter how many guys are marked or not marked. Your first priority is to protect the goal on the shot. We didn’t assume that responsibility. It’s not one error; it’s three or four collective errors that we should know better. That comes with experience in recognizing what’s most important in any given situation.”
TFC will soon be getting an injection of that experience, as Vanney revealed defenders Mark Bloom, Steven Caldwell and Damien Perquis are all set to return from injury over the next few weeks.
“We need to get some players back here,” Bendik said. “We’ve seen that over the course of the last three games; a very young backline has cost us, so we need that extra little bit of leadership in there to get everybody going.”
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Defender Justin Morrow said their slow start won’t define the entire season, citing the tendency of the LA Galaxy, winners of two out of the last three MLS Cups, to start slow before flipping the switch.
“It’s still the beginning of the year,” Morrow said. “We learn from everything right now. I’m not saying that our results have been okay. We’ve had problems, but if we don’t learn from it and let it become a recurring problem we could be in some trouble.”
