TORONTO – Sometimes, a season can be encapsulated by a single night.
Such was the case on Saturday when LAFC came to the home of the defending champions, Toronto FC, and left with a 4-2 victory.
“For me, it’s the same old story,” said Michael Bradley. “Game starts, we do a lot of things pretty well, we’re not quite good enough and sharp enough to take advantage going forward. We can’t get the lead, give up a bad, soft, unfortunate – choose your word – goal, and things compound themselves from there. You run out of things to say.”
Toronto were on the front foot, nearly taking the lead through a spectacular bicycle kick – from the top of the box no less – courtesy of Sebastian Giovinco, only to concede on a twice deflected strike from Carlos Vela shortly thereafter.
“If you give up four goals, you’re going to have a hard time winning games,” said TFC coach Greg Vanney. “The first goal for me was a little unfortunate, until then I thought we had pretty good control of things: created chances and dictated a fair amount of the game.”
“I don’t think that was their concern, having a ton of possession and controlling the game,” he continued. “As teams are playing us right now, they protect themselves by waiting us out; waiting for a mistake. The first goal was misfortune but the three after are plays we have to be able to deal with, there are no two ways about it.”
Diego Rossi scored two minutes after the restart and Lee Nguyen added another two minutes after that, compounding Toronto’s home woes.
Jozy Altidore called that second concession a “huge killer.”
“A little bit of a miscue, but credit to Rossi. It was a fantastic finish,” added Altidore. “When you play against quality, you can’t sleep for a second.”
Altidore would spark some life into his side, scoring a brace in the 74th minute and deep into stoppage-time to set up a potentially nervous ending for the visitors, but Vela found his second a minute later, from an impossible angle to crush any hopes of a comeback.
“It’s been a difficult season,” continued Bradley. “When they were down tonight, lesser teams would have let it fly by, but they kept going and when it got to 3-2 we’ve got to finish it out. It was nice to see Carlos score an incredible goal.”
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