It honestly is kind of cliche to be honest.
As I watch the game I'm enjoying the commentary from Jason DeVos and Luke Wileman, as I always do (Jason DeVos is just an amazing soccer mind), and they bring up a really great point.
In 2010 DC United was a horrible team, they were last place overall and over the course of the season they brought in 17 new players and had 18 players leave the team. In a nutshell, it was a mess!
But as of today, they are sitting at 4th in the East and are most likely playoff bound. How did they do this? Simple. They accepted that they needed to stop just bringing players in from around the league and other out of contract pros. They took their draft picks, signed players out of their academy, acquired a star MLS player in Canadian Dwayne DeRosario and, signed Ben Olsen (a retired American star player who understands the game in North America very well) as the head coach all the while keeping Chris Pontius in fold for the experience.
When I compare the evolution of DC United to the.....whatever you call what TFC has done with their roster it makes me very sad. There seems to be no direction, just sign who you can and then drive them out of town when the signing doesn't work out. Yes, 2012 did have injuries to the key players for TFC, Danny Kovermans, Eric Hassli and, Torsten Frings are all injured and the likelyhood is none of them will come back next season. Both Adrian Cann and Stephan Frei were injured for all of last season and both got injured again with season ending injuries this season. It's just a mess!
We do know 1 thing, Paul Mariner will be the coach next year. That's it. So here's is the chance for TFC to just finish last, draft the best player available no matter what position he plays and just build from within the academy. I don't even want to see TFC try to sign a designated player, wait till the club is ready to compete and then look to add a player that would bring the team over the top as a contender for the MLS cup. Oh, and it's time to use the Canadian Championship and CONCAF Champion's League as a way to get playing time for young players and that's it. TFC isn't deep enough to compete seriously in both competitions. Let's start doing this right. It's enough already.
EDIT: Now that DC United has won the game they sit in 2nd in the east.
