There’s been scant news coming out of Toronto’s BMO Field these past few months, but the latest tidbit emailed to me direct from club management (love the folksy touch) was worth reading. TFC has added fitness coach Paul Winsper to the backroom staff, a man with ten years experience working over there with Newcastle United. Presumably ‘experience’ in part means shaking his fists in the air every few months or so over Michael Owen’s latest mashed leg when he wasn’t overseeing ‘stars’ like Boumsong and Smith.
The addition to the staff is silent acknowledgement that TFC’s first team fitness troubles last year may have shared a common denominator. There were whispers around BMO over the summer, especially in the aftermath of Toronto’s friendly with the Villa which left Danny Dichio and Marvel Wynne out for great swaths of the rest of the season, that Mo Johnson wasn’t training his players properly between matches. Against the convention that a bad manager uses injuries as an excuse for bad performances, the injuries at TFC seemed to have a real impact on the first team; Toronto only ever performed at peak level when all the starting players, Dichio, Cunningham, Wynne, were match fit.
While the role of fitness coach hardly fires the imagination unless said coach is female, blonde, 115 lbs and into Lululemon, the position in the MLS is a hugely important one. Players in this league are either young and straight out the Collegiate system (Maurice Edu) or old and washed up, usually on the last legs of their career (Danny Dichio). Additionally the team rosters in Major League Soccer tend to be small and the season shorter than in Europe, so teams can ill-afford to have any player suffer longer-term knacks. Whether or not this has a big impact on the season obviously remains to be seen, but it does indicate that this winter, someone in the MLSE actually might know what they’re doing.
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