Bradley rails over TFC’s sinking season
And now, they wait.
For two agonizing weeks, the Toronto FC organization — not nearly good enough this year from the top all the way on down, in the words of team captain Michael Bradley — has to ponder all that’s gone wrong, just one year after everything went right.
They’ll watch rivals try to rise further above them in the MLS standings.
D.C. United beat Atlanta 3-1 on Sunday and plays two more times before TFC’s next match. Montreal and New England are both in front of TFC, too, with one spot up for grabs.
“Everybody is included. We haven’t had enough people who understood how hard it was going to be, what it was going to take, to navigate through another season where we had to play every week like our lives depended on it,” Bradley said after a 4-2 loss to LAFC on Saturday at BMO Field.
“We had a year last year, where from the very first game until the very last game, the mentality was that we were relentless and we weren’t going to let anything stop us. And we knew it was going to be hard, but we were ready to be harder. And this year, when you win everything in the way that we did last year, you have to know that the next year, it’s going to be exponentially more difficult, and across the board, every single person in this club has come up short in understanding what those challenges were going to be, so that part is disappointing,” Bradley said.
“We’ve got two weeks now to see if we can regroup for the hundredth time this year and try to go after seven more games and see if we can really tilt the bar in our favour. See if in a moment where everything seems lost and everybody thinks we’re dead, to win a game, win another game, create a little bit of momentum, and see if we can drag ourselves out of this and go into the last few games still with a real chance.”
TFC’s chances of making the playoffs are down to 1.7 per cent, according to sportsclubstats.com.