Inter Toronto FC

Charlie O'Connor-Clark with Mitchell Tierney after four more Canadian Premier League matches, including one right at the top of the table between Forge and Cavalry, which didn't really change much in the CPL Shield race, but that's where we're actually going to go second because we want to start this week on the East Coast, the Halifax Wanderers.

looked, you know, about as good as they've looked in months, I think, in this big 4-1 win over Inter-Toronto, despite falling behind early with an absolutely outrageous goal from Raul Lopez.

Other than that, all Halifax, Mitch, how How nice is it for the Wanderers to kind of bring that winning feeling back to Halifax?

I mean, obviously very nice, especially when you can do it like that, scoring three first half goals, I think, for the first time in club history, which is obviously pretty impressive and a great way to start, especially when you allow a goal early.

And, you know, it's kind of funny, I was thinking to the parallels of Inter-Toronto's last game and obviously that Luka Acetola goal where You know, when a team scores a goal like that, like Martin Nash says, sometimes you have to just tip your cap.

But what Halifax did was, you know, they didn't allow that to define the game.

They went out and what was it like seven minutes later, their back level and then Caligari scores to take them ahead.

Yeah, okay.

what has become a very close race for fourth spot now.

They'll jump up to 25 points all the way up to fifth place above Halifax and Inter-Toronto.

Yeah, they'll be swimming the...

This ends in Supra's favor.

It's still a big mountain to climb.

Inter-Toronto did beat Vancouver today, so we remain seven points back at Vancouver, which is who we have to catch.

Toronto is... losing a tie break to us at the moment but they still have two games in hand and supra are one point behind us with one game in hand so it's very tight in there i think other teams maybe have a slight edge in terms of who they've got for remaining games so i noticed that both Vancouver and Supra play Toronto twice.

We only play them once, which means between those three teams, one or the other of them is going to be getting some points, which means one or the other of them is going to be gaining ground on us, which is unfortunate.

Yeah, I think it's the right approach to take.

I mean, this has to be game at a time.

Like, everything you can do to get ready for that Inter-Toronto game next week, like, basically, yeah, it sucks to say it.

Every game's a playoff game, but, like, that old nugget.

I spent basically the whole week, uh, in northern Toronto and, and at York Lions Stadium, which was a lot of fun.

Um, and that's actually where we're gonna start this week, right, because, uh, I think the cleanest way to, to get into this is just jump in with Inter Toronto and their, their week, which we went into a little bit last week and talked about how it was, it was basically crunch time for them.

Yeah.

Uh, they had the three games in, I guess, what, sev- eight days, I think, because they went, uh, they went Saturday to, to Sunday.

The draw in Hamilton, draw with Pacific FC on Wednesday night.

Finally, a big win for them, though, against Vancouver on Sunday.

Mitch, how, how do we maybe... how do we look at this after those results? Because I think you come out of Sunday, and then it's a really big must-win game that they got against Vancouver FC, but is it enough for Inter Toronto after, after what we talked about as, as such a huge week for them?

I mean, I guess it was do or die this week, and it was do.

This is perfect.

Cities like Toronto would dream of, and clubs like Inter-Toronto would absolutely dream of having a location like this, and yet Halifax is kind of squandering it with just a bunch of petty politicking, unfortunately, so...

My two cents, I think that there's, it doesn't feel like there's the appetite at the minute.

I know if Derek kind of comes along and what you guys are saying that he's gonna be able to probably fund it.

hopefully like, I mean, obviously they've got the event Monday night and hopefully that kind of gets people excited about the stadium concept again and gets people motivated.

There's another point I wanted to kind of circle back to about the matches.

Like if you're looking for excitement in a match, I've got to ask one question, which is why were we playing Cavs this weekend and not Toronto? Four of the last five years in the Labor Day Classic, we have played York, Inter-Toronto, whatever they're called now.

And it's always been an entertaining match.

Yeah, you know, listen, it's, you know, we sat through a year of Diego Mejia last year that, you know, said some controversial things, some things that, you know, the teams around the league raised their eyebrow at and thought, oh, okay, yeah, there's, you know, there's possibly a language issue or maybe he's just trying to, say things to rile up his team, fire up his team and, you know, put a wee dig in the opposition.

But he came out last night and, you know, made the comment about Inter Toronto with an exact quote was, with all due respect, there are not many Inter Toronto players who would get into our team.

And we should

keep in mind, this is a Pacific team that went...

I mean, we like a lot of the coaches in the league.

We get to talk to them after games and before games as well.

And we know Mauro Eustachiu, who is the coach of Inter Toronto.

Of course, his brother's Stephanie Eustachiu.

Uh, big game for Supra.

Uh, up next we wanna go to kind of something that I think we've seen across the league, uh, over the last couple of weeks, but zeroing in a little bit on Inter Toronto and Forge.

Uh, the 905 Derby one-one, uh, I think we'd say this is probably a much better result for Inter Toronto in the, in the grand scheme of things.

We'll talk a little bit more about their situation in a sec.

But I just wanna talk about the kind of youth movement that we're seeing in these last couple of months in the Canadian Premier League, right? It's, it's the business end of the season.

It's the hardest part of the year where, where guys are tired and, and there's a lot of teams that are trusting their youth, and they're really young guys on development contracts to, to fill roles and play important.

Ty Clarke, 18-year-old for, for Inter Toronto, his first start, he scores.

Massive goal.