Oprah Winfrey once said, “I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”
It may seem odd to connect Oprah to the beautiful game but with Toronto FC players and coach Aron Winter talking about luck so much her point seems applicable.
Following Toronto’s 1-0 loss to Chivas USA, its fifth straight defeat to start the MLS season, Winter was once again ruing his team’s bad luck. Looking back on TFC’s missed chances in the second half he may be right to feel that way but at some point there has to be more to the team’s struggles than just bad luck. With Ryan Johnson and Danny Koevermans both missing on two quality chances each, Toronto had more than enough threat in the final third to feel that they could have at least earned a point.
When asked Saturday about the club’s lack of scoring (they have two goals in five league games) Winter replied, “I think we are in a period of bad luck and you can see it. It’s amazing if you watch the whole game we gave away almost nothing, on the corner we weren’t sharp and they got a goal but we had so many opportunities as well.” It was a refrain that was echoed by Johnson: “This is probably the most unlucky I’ve been in my whole career.”
So the question then is can you really just put this all down to bad luck? I would say that if you do then things are not going to get any better until you start getting lucky breaks. If Oprah is right then TFC really should not be complaining about their luck because in their last three games the opportunity has been there but it is the final product that has been lacking and that comes down to preparation.
If you take Johnson’s game as an example he may have been unlucky that his point blank shot hit Chivas ‘keeper Dan Kennedy without him knowing anything about it> But on the other hand you cannot blame luck for the fact that the Jamaican international missed a wide open header. Johnson found himself unmarked in the box and was able to get a clean connection on the ball but instead of planting it into the side of the goal he pushed it wide of the post. That is not bad luck at all — that is a failure to take advantage of the opportunity in front of you.
It is when chances like that one go begging that fans are within their right to wonder if there is more at play here than just luck. There will always be a degree of luck involved in sports but the majority of the time the result of a game is decided by the skill and effort of the players involved. So blaming defeat on bad luck time after time fails to see the deeper problems.
The fifth straight loss and the lack of scoring from the team have many fans starting to question Winter and his future with the club. To suggest that the coach should be sacked is premature at this stage as the club has given him a three year contract to try and rebuild the squad. This is only year two of that deal. Add to that the fact that TFC are only six points out of the playoff spots in the Eastern Conference and this season is far from lost.
The question for this week is what can TFC do to create some luck for itself and finally get some goals and some points on the board? At some point the team, starting with their coach, will need to get a bit more introspective and look at what they can do differently to bring this run of bad luck to an end. That will mean actually admitting that there might be things that they could do differently to play better and grind out a result.
They say that you create your own luck so now it is time for Toronto FC to put in the work to make sure that when they take to the field against the Chicago Fire next weekend there is no need to talk about luck or sharpness once the 90 minutes are over.
David Rowaan is a Toronto-based writer and key contributor to Waking the Red, a blog about Toronto FC and Canadian soccer. Follow Waking the Red on Twitter.