Giovinco splash latest TFC misplay
In the early days of Toronto FC, a couple of retrograde fellows behind the north-end goal brandished signs reading “Against Modern Football.”
Beyond the notion that TFC wouldn’t even exist without “modern football,” it’d sure be nice to have them around to provide editorial comment to the endless Sebastian Giovinco Show. First via video link, then at the airport, then another press conference — tomorrow actually in training, it goes on and on.
The general rule that the harder the sell, the more desperate the seller applies. A big signing, from a club that has delivered on no promises? Against this modern football, indeed!
For once, it’d be great if this local FC just snuck the latest saviour in through the side door. Let the team go about its business, instead of this sporting version of the dead-cat bounce.
Why the noise? It could be the insecurity that comes with those eight years of unfulfilled expectations, from Mo to no Mo to please, not again. It certainly is that stadi- um reno, ongoing by the lake, along with the fact that they might as well be on a Mars fly-by for these next three months, in training camp then on the road, for the most part out of sight and thus out of mind until the refurbishments are complete and they finally open their new season at home May 10.
Whatever the reason, there’s a whiff of desperation and with Jermain Defoe thus Defaulted to the bright lights of suburban Newcastle, this time it’s all been a little more nakedly mercenary. Instead of cappuccino and biscotti for all, say, Giovinco’s agent provided the iconography, flanking his client throughout and wearing a grin that was 15 per cent real. You can hardly blame him — having negotiated a deal worth tens of millions of dollars for a benchwarmer otherwise headed to a free transfer this summer, this guy’s henceforth the Shrewd of Turin.
Giovinco read his lines faithfully, and seems a nice little chap happy to be out from beneath the rather large shadow cast by Paul Pogba. From this perspective, though, it’s a case of making coffee from yesterday’s grounds. Until one of these pans out — and the bar has never been set lower this coming (no lockout will- ing) MLS season, with its expanded playoff pool — these shows are nothing but a tiny little buzz barely moving the needle, then it’s back to February. The very definition of dead-cat bounce.
And we do know a few things about sporting saviours here in Toronto. Giovinco is only the latest — born, raised and apart from a couple of loan spells having played his entire career in Turin with Juventus, and now anointed as The One in a city six time zones and several universes branded calcio, football, futbol and soccer away. Last Friday was not just the day he took his first breakfast here as Designated Saviour, but also the deadline for “early bird pricing” on season tickets (disclaimer alert: I’m back in, after having been an original from ’07 to ’10), as the push to fill their expanded, renovated stadium continues.
But this is not basketball, where, as in the case of Vince Carter coming to town 17 years ago with a new arena to fill, one player can mean so much. Many forget that those Raptors, while not headed to the same boneyard as the Grizzlies in Vancouver, were out of the novelty years and in danger of entering into the same kind of parlous irrelevance that TFC have called home for a few years now. You wonder, looking worst-case scenario down the line at another busted hand, how many times this particular Pavlovian exercise will work again. That the two are connected, the sporting and the business, is always there, but rarely has it appeared so close as it does now with TFC and their new, bigger house.
Obscured by all the club-generated hype is one important note: TFC’s roster overall has an unprecedented look of balance and there’s an obvious plan at work. Of course, that means nothing when the games start for real, but then again, Giovinco reading out “I’m here to win” in Italian means even less. The bottom line is a different cliché, from a North American brand of modern football: Just win, baby.