It’s a Hot Beginning for Salsa : Soccer: Late flight delivers Toronto team just in time to suffer a 5-0 defeat in Fullerton tenant’s APSL debut.
Professional soccer returned to the area Saturday--again--after very nearly missing its connection.
The Toronto Blizzard, the Salsa’s opening day opponent, screeched to a stop in its van at Titan Stadium five minutes before game time, then went out and got flattened like a tortilla, 5-0, in front of 3,865 in the Salsa’s American Professional Soccer League debut.
The Blizzard (0-2) lost at Vancouver on Friday night and had scheduled itself for a 2 p.m. arrival Saturday at Los Angeles International Airport.
The problem was, the game was scheduled to start at 4.
“We knew they were coming,” Salsa defender Richard Ryerson said. “We thought they were somewhere changing or warming up. When they drove up in their uniforms, we were surprised.”
At 4:08, with a choir awaiting its cue to sing the U.S. and Canadian anthems, the field was vacant.
At 4:15, with the tuxedos and formal red dresses starting to get drenched with perspiration, the field remained empty.
Toronto didn’t make its first on-field appearance until 4:24, and Salsa General Manager Rick Davis didn’t take the midfield microphone to begin opening day festivities until 4:25.
The game began 40 minutes late, and less than a minute into it, the Salsa’s Salvador Coreas deposited a Paul Wright cross pass from the left wing into the nets to score the first goal in club history.
By halftime, the Salsa had rung up a 2-0 lead, and Toronto had failed to get one shot on goal.
The second Salsa goal came at 29:00, when Paulinho was successful on a free kick from outside the penalty area; a third came at 51:00 on another Coreas goal, this time when he put in a deflection off of a Toronto defender; the fourth came at 73:00 when Wright converted a cross pass from Arturo Velasco, and the fifth came at 82:00 when Paulinho scored again on another Wright cross pass.
So a few secrets are out of the bag for Coach Rildo Menezes, who declined earlier this week to single out key players for fear of “hurting the feelings of the other players.”
“I think my team was very good in the second half,” Menezes said. “In the first half, we were not bad, but in the second half, the team passed more quickly, and they created.”
Toronto, meanwhile, got just one shot off during the entire game. And Coach Pedro Kozac didn’t appreciate the quick turnaround from Vancouver, either.
“The schedule is done, but in my opinion, sincerely, why couldn’t we play tomorrow?” he asked. “What was the problem?”
Kozac decided against an early morning flight.
“If you want to come earlier, that means the players can’t sleep,” he said. “And if you don’t eat properly, you can’t play.”
In this case, it could be argued if you do eat properly . . .
As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered if the Blizzard had flown straight home from Vancouver and skipped the Los Angeles trip altogether. Their shots had about as much of a chance of slipping into the net from Canada as they did from most locations on the Titan Stadium field.
“It’s going to be a different story in Toronto,” Kozac promised.
Salsa Notes
The Salsa announced three air dates for its “Salsa/APSL Game of the Week” package with Prime Ticket, the first of which will be at 4 p.m. Monday and will focus on Saturday’s Salsa-Toronto game. The show will also air on Monday, May 10, at 6:30 p.m. and Monday, May 17, at 10:30 p.m. . . . The Salsa plays again next Sunday at Vancouver. The next home game is against Montreal at 8:05 p.m. on May 14.
