The one where points are dropped but hopes are raised?

1: Caleb Wiley impressed me the most in the first half. There are some takes and narratives out there that this club doesn’t develop young players well. While it’s impossible for every young player who comes here to have success, we have been pretty damn consistent in young player development and Caleb is just another example of that. His runs both on and off the ball are dynamic and threatening. He can dribble, he can cross…for me I think he’s going to develop into the full package and become another home grown success story that will be talked about for many years to come. 

 

2: Thinking inside the box. Clearly the message got through to the players. Get inside the box and shoot. We still took our chances outside the 18, and they were all pretty high quality, but it’s good to see us driving with ball towards and into the box. The shots taken tonight had a much higher XG than last week, unfortunately Toronto has quality between the sticks. 

 

3: Toronto is kinda terrible and Sean Johnson is kinda excellent. If Toronto has any success this year it will be due in no small part to him. He will be to Toronto what Matt Turner was to New England. We had excellent shots on goal, they just happened to be against, at least for me, the best keeper in the league right now. No disrespect to our own. 

 

4: Etienne is a real live wire. His impact was immediate and tho we won’t even be credited with the hockey assist, he was the catalyst for the goal. He’s got a little bit of that LGP energy in him tho so he might end up in yellow card jail sooner than later. 

 

5: Last week on the pod we talked about being happy with the win but a little concerned about similarities to 2022. Nothing about tonight’s performance reinforces those fears but, because we didn’t get the full 3 points against a poor team we absolutely should get all 3 from, I don’t think we can say it completely and totally dispelled them either. Still, I can’t be mad at the performance. It’s more of what we’ve come to expect from our team and is well above and beyond the performances of last year.