So, Toronto FC is back at it. The club opened training came today and, as part of that, held the opening day press conference. It was John Herdman’s first as boss and he definitely came at it with a significant amount of johnherdman energy.
You know, leadership groups, and repairing and all that jazz. Herdman likes to fix broken things and TFC is very broken.
Whether he can is the question. The optimist will say that if he could take Canada to a World Cup then anything is possible. A pessimist would counter that a world class talent in Alphonso Davies — surrounded with other elite guys like Johnathon David — is what got Canada past Honduras and Panama.
Belgium, Croatia and Morocco, however, well, Canada finished 29th out of the 30 teams in Qatar. Herdman would have been fired pretty much in every other country in the world. He especially would have been let go after a dismal follow-up year that saw them crash out of the Gold Cup in the quarterfinals and badly lose the Nations League Final after putting all of their eggs in that basket.
Herdman was gone before the disaster against Jamaica, but his fingerprints have to be at least partly on how that turned out. Let’s shelve anxiety on CanMNT until March though. This is about TFC and how it’s Herdman’s problem now.
Although you might not know it’s a problem if you just listened to the press conference today. Herdman came off like he had taken over a team that fell just short of something rather than one that redefined the word “embarrassing” in 2023.
“Nothing to see here. Everything is fine,” was kind of the message.
I suppose you can’t wave a white flag at the season opening press conference, but it would have been nice to get a little acknowledgment of how bad it was and how bleak it looks. This is the Wooden Spoon winners running it back and the closest Herdman came to pointing out how absurd that is was to say that he talked to players who said that it was “less than ideal” that Michael Bradley was playing under his father Bob last year.
That reference seemed to suggest that the one significant change from 2023 — Herdman — could be a defining one. Ok. It’s good to have confidence in your abilities, I guess.
Of course, we don’t know what Herdman is going to look like as a day-to-day head coach since he’s never been in such a role and he didn’t last season either, preferring to stay behind the scenes while Terry Dunfield led the team to a 1-15 record. We now know that Herdman was going through some personal issues — his sister’s death by suicide — so we aren’t going to cast judgment on the choice not to immediately take over, but it does mean that we don’t have anything to measure him against.
Sure, he made the jump from the women’s game to the men’s before, but the learning curve there is nothing compared to an adjustment from the international game to the club game. You’d expect there to be some struggles if taking over a team that was just normally underachieving.
TFC was a trainwreck 2023 and now Herdman has to fix it using the same burned out cars that caused the thing to go off the tracks in the first place.
Do I think he can?
If you look at the results under Bradley in the first third of the season (when they were drawing games rather than losing them) and you insert league-average DP stats into the mix then TFC is a playoff bubble team. If Herdman can get an effort out of the team then, yes, they can be that in 2024. That’s not particularly inspiring, but slightly below average is better than being the laughingstock of the league.
All that said, I have significant doubts that anyone can get league-average DP stats out of the two Italians, but that’s the players this club has decided to hang their hopes on.
So, hope we will.