Toronto FC taking on upstart Nashville

Coach Greg Vanney has a simple message for his players as Toronto FC prepares for a playoff run: just be yourself.

“There’s no need to try to do more because it’s a playoff game,” Vanney said on a video call Monday. “It’s still a soccer game, you still win it the same way.”

What the club has been doing this year has been working.

Toronto finished the regular season with a 13-5-5 record and narrowly missed out on the Supporter’s Shield awarded annually to the team that finishes atop the Major League Soccer standings.

The club struggled slightly to close out the campaign, dropping three of its last four games, but has had nearly two weeks to train and recover since finishing the regular season with a 2-1 loss to the New York Red Bulls.

TFC will open its playoffs against a new foe today, coming up against expansion side Nashville SC.

It will be the first-ever meeting for the two teams, following a regular season that saw repeated matchups between clubs in a bid to reduce travel and potential exposure to COVID-19.

“In some ways, it’s nice. I feel like we’ve played so many teams so many times and then we played a lot of teams not at all,” Vanney said. “So I think it’s a little bit better that there’s a lack of familiarity instead of over familiarity at this point.”

Nashville finished the regular season seventh in the East with a 8-7-8 record, and beat fellow league rookies Inter Miami CF 3-0 on Friday to advance through the play-in round.

It was another clean sheet for a team that gave up just 22 goals in regular-season play.

“(Nashville’s) a good team, a stingy team,” Vanney said.