Inter Toronto gave their playoff hopes a boost on Saturday, as they produced one of their strongest performances of the year to beat first-place Cavalry FC 3-0 at York Lions Stadium.<\/p>\n
Toronto’s first win over Cavalry since last September thus kept them in the fight for the fourth and final postseason berth, pushing them up into fifth place; they’re still six points behind Vancouver FC, but with four games left they’re not out of it.<\/p>\n
It was a dream start on Saturday for Inter Toronto, who knew they would need to be almost perfect to take down the league-leading Cavs.<\/p>\n
Just six minutes in, the hosts burst forward in transition. Ariel Almagro picked up the ball in space on the left, and he flicked a pass toward the top of the box. Sebasti\u00e1n Gonz\u00e1les brought it down with a clever touch, separating himself from Cavalry defender Daan Klomp. Gonz\u00e1les created enough room for himself to curl a shot into the top right corner to give Inter Toronto an early lead.<\/p>\n
Not long after that, Cavalry’s nightmare start became even worse, as Toronto found another early goal in the 12th minute.<\/p>\n
They advanced quickly down the left wing once again, and this time Max Ferrari fed the ball sideways toward the penalty spot. Cavalry’s defenders couldn’t regain control to clear it, and Steffen Yeates arrived on the scene to smash home the second goal for Toronto.<\/p>\n
Stunned by the early deficit, Cavalry were unsurprisingly the aggressors in the rest of the first half, creating several chances (including four corners and a few dangerous free kicks).<\/p>\n
However, a combination of timely defending and missed chances meant that Toronto were able to get to halftime with their 2-0 lead intact.<\/p>\n
That’s perhaps why Cavalry boss Tommy Wheeldon Jr. went to his bench during the break. He injected some experience into his midfield, bringing on Harry Paton in place of 19-year-old James McGlinchey, as Nathaniel Edwards slid back into McGlinchey’s right-back role.<\/p>\n
The change put Cavalry in more of a 4-3-3 formation, after they started the game in a 4-2-3-1, as Tobias Warschewski pushed further forward from his original number 10 position.<\/p>\n
Cavalry remained the more aggressive side in the second half, throwing ball after ball into Toronto’s box trying desperately to get a final touch on it, but the hosts collapsed into a compact shape that made kept the Cavs attackers isolated.<\/p>\n
With the visitors pushing so high up the pitch, Toronto was able to find space behind them to counter-attack. That’s exactly what they did with 2 minutes left to play. Almagro again burst forward, winning a duel with Klomp inside his own half to set up a quick transition for him and Gonz\u00e1les. The pair blazed in on goal, but Cavalry keeper Nathan Ingham made two excellent saves — first on Almagro, then on the rebound attempt from Gonz\u00e1les — but with no Cavalry players able to get back in time, Yeates once again arrived to finish the loose ball and give Toronto a 3-0 advantage.<\/p>\n
Cavalry did claw one back late, as Eryk Kobza got on the end of a corner kick, but that would not ultimately be enough to kickstart a comeback.<\/p>\n
In the end, the Cavs threw 18 shots at Toronto’s goal, but put only five on target.<\/p>\n
This match may not have been one that Inter Toronto were expected\u00a0to win, but one they felt they had to. After losing to Pacific FC last weekend, the club’s playoff hopes were hanging by a thread. Of course, it’d still be hard for them to get into the top four in the last few weeks (there’s a six-point gap to the playoff line still), but a high-energy win like this over the top team in the league can do wonders for confidence.<\/p>\n
“The execution of the game plan was spot on,” coach Mauro Eust\u00e1quio said postmatch. “The guys had a lot of personality, a lot of fight, a lot of togetherness, and we knew that even before we started kicking the ball that had to be key. …<\/p>\n
“We’ve been growing with our performances,” he added. “Results haven’t been there, and we know we kind of have a gun to our head. We need to play these games and we need to win. So today was an important victory for ourselves, for the morale, for the spirit.”<\/p>\n
Cavalry certainly left this match feeling they’d dug their own grave, conceding too easily in the first 15 minutes. Once Toronto took a two-goal lead, they were able to sit very deep and absorb pressure, which naturally made it difficult for the Cavs to find any space in the final third.<\/p>\n
“We beat ourselves today,” Wheeldon Jr. told reporters postmatch. “That’s pretty obvious, because we’re fighting for everything near the end, but you give any team in this league two goals, it’s a tough ask to come back. We did our best, we tried, we took risks knowing that one goal could swing it. … They score on the counter, that’s the risk you play. But these are great lessons. The table doesn’t change, nor does the mission. We know what we need to do in the next three games.”<\/p>\n
The Cavs still have control of the CPL Shield race, but Forge will play twice before they take to the pitch next weekend in Halifax. With a six-point gap, two Forge wins would bring them level heading into the final three weeks of the regular season.<\/p>\n
Wheeldon Jr. did add, of course, that points on the board are better than games in hand; regardless of what Forge do this week, the Cavs will still control their destiny and have two massive home games left on the schedule to secure the CPL Shield.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inter Toronto gave their playoff hopes a boost on Saturday, as they produced one of their strongest performances…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":919500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-919499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=919499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}