New York City Football club dominated Toronto on Wednesday night in almost every category except the one that counts. Despite creating chance after chance the club could not put the ball in the back of the net and in the end It was Toronto who found the goal off a penalty kick in the waning minutes of the game.
New York City enjoyed fifty nice percent of the possession in the game, controlling the midfield from the very start and frustrating Toronto’s attack. Ronny Deila started with Alexander Ring in the wing position again and left three of the highest goal scorers on the bench with Heber, Ismael Tajouri-Shradi and Alexandru Mitrita looking on. Even with this head scratching move City seemed in control and able to create a number of dangerous chances. They just could not score.
The last twenty minutes of the game found City chasing a goal to avoid a scoreless draw and Delia releasing the firepower on his bench in the seventieth minute, but it would prove too little too late as Nicolas Acevedo would be called for a handball in the box just one minute after being subbed on in the eighty eighth minute. that was all Alejandro Pozuelo needed to slot the ball past Sean Johnson and hand City the loss.
Deila seemed as perplexed as the fans post game. “70 minutes of this game was really, really good. We have to kill teams off when you have those chances we have. They don’t have anything. For me, what I say is the first 70 minutes is something I can be really proud of. We’re meeting one of the best teams and they were struggling with the intensity we played…but right now, we can’t finish things off and then we have to keep a Zero. Today we deserved to keep Zero as well, but you can’t blame anybody [for the handball]…then in the end we lose. The last 20 minutes we lost our intensity, we lost our pressure. We didn’t move the ball. We were more talking about the ref than talking about playing the actual game. They were ready to get killed off the last 20 minutes but we couldn’t manage to do it because we lost our focus and that’s disappointing.”
More disappointing and troubling than the loss was the injury to Heber, City’s star number nine. Late in the game he would go down clutching his knee and crying out in pain. No word has been released yet about the extent of his injury but it will only make it harder to find those elusive goals in the games to come.
City will try to right the ship and put the Toronto loss behind them this Saturday when they take on FC Cincinnati again at home. It will be a game against a team that will park the buss and counterpunch. City will need to score and score early or run the risk of letting another game get away from them.
New York City FC
Toronto FC
