As Marvell Wynne accepted the Man of the (Mis)Match trophy a colleague and I discussed how all week Toronto FC trained indoors and then on match day the team looked like it had forgotten how unpredictable the elements in Canada can be come April.
Just coincidence, you say.
All week the Seattle Sounders trained outdoors and on Saturday it handily beat its opponent on a cold, windy afternoon by the lake. Not a stretch from the cold rain the team sloshed around in at BMO on Friday. Or the snow it trained in a week ago in Seattle.
Mere coincidence, TFC has five Canadians in the starting 11, you say.
I asked defender Jim Brennan if the training decisions up to Saturday had anything to do with the fact played like it couldn't wait to get back inside. He looked as though I might have a point before the professional in him took over.
"Yeah you (pause) ... I don't know," Brennan shrugged. "We had problems with the wind today, but so did they. I don't think it had anything to do with training this week. We trained right, we worked hard but today we weren't on form."
Perhaps if the scheduler had selected Los Angeles, Houston or any team not run by Sigi Schmid as the team to visit the BMO-tel in the first week of April the Reds might have got away with no paying attention to Mother Nature.
But instead, it was a Schmid-run (undefeated) team situated in the cold and windy Pacific Northwest that the scheduler chose.
(For the record, Schmid stood me up on Friday after I sloshed through the rain to meet him at BMO Field. I was left to walk back to the train and wonder why Seattle would want to train in this terrible weather anyways.)
"I thought that they adapted to the conditions far better than we did. It just shows you that when there is a gale force wind you can still play football," Carver said in his post-game interview. "Hats off to Sigi, he did that. We didn't. We didn't adapt to it."
Carver quite often mentions the perils of being complacent. In a backwards kind of way, the decision to train in the comforts of the Oakville Soccer Club when it was going to be unsettled on Saturday might just be one of those perils.
