Toronto FC ponders ‘what could have been’

Greg Vanney’s Toronto FC side may not have won the CONCACAF Champions League on Wednesday night in Mexico, but he believes the soccer team has nonetheless proven it’s one of the best teams on the continent.

“What I would say is that our team has proven that we can play with anybody in Mexico, through the course of this,” the coach told reporters in Mexico follow the Reds’ penalty shootout loss to Chivas de Guadalajara. “That’s the only thing that I can say that I can say with a ton of confidence.”

The question of whether Major League Soccer has finally caught up to Liga MX is one that has loomed over the entire tournament, following Toronto around in particular. The Reds did, after all, pull off the best single season in Major League Soccer history last year. And, while TFC was the third MLS team in history to reach the final of this particular tournament, they were the only squad to head into the decisive series as favourites.

It is the “what could have been” that will disappoint the Reds the most. A surprise 2-1 loss to Chivas in the first leg at BMO Field put Toronto in a hole heading into Mexico, where the team had never won before. A 2-1 win for the Reds in Guadalajara — only the fourth time in 54 attempts that an MLS team won a Champions League game in Mexico — forced penalties, but Jonathan Osorio and Michael Bradley missed their attempts in the 4-2 shootout loss.

“It’s been a couple of shootouts over the last couple of years that haven’t done us very kind but there wasn’t a whole lot more,” Vanney said about his team’s chances, referencing Toronto’s shootout loss in the 2016 MLS Cup final.

“We had one opportunity there at the very end that could have been the difference but I would also go back to Toronto; we can’t give away two goals in Toronto and that’s the difference in the series. It wasn’t the soccer that was the difference in the series; it was a couple of goals that we shouldn’t have allowed.”