TFC return home for the second leg of their Canadian Championship semi-final against Ottawa. The biggest question for me is what line up Vanney will field. Typically TFC sends out a pretty strong line up for the home game. A 2-0 away win in Ottawa last week, however, opens the door to sending out a less powerful line up and reserving some players who would otherwise play for league matches. Total attendance for this year's expanded version of the tournament is currently about 8500 below the best ever (114 360 back in 2016). Some fan in Toronto on Wednesday will likely be the person who breaks that record.
One would think, but there's been very little promotion of the Ottawa match. It wasn't even in the ticket book this year, and until about a week ago, wasn't even listed in the schedule on the website. I bet a lot of people who hold tickets to the game, don't even realize they have tickets to the game! There's huge availability on the resale market. I'm expecting it will perhaps the emptiest we've ever seen BMO Field for a TFC cup match, when weather hasn't been an issue.
TFC used a similar line up to game one (albeit with more firepower waiting on the bench should it be needed) to beat Ottawa handily and win the series. This game was never in doubt. Hopefully DeLeon can take some of that play to the league matches. The crowd of 12 683 was considerably smaller than normal for this type of match but not the smallest ever. I suspect the crowd will be bigger when Montreal comes to town in the final.
The crowd was a bit better than I expected. Perhaps saved by being such a beautiful evening - almost perfect weather. There's been some ugly weather a few years ago ... though I can't recall too many Voyageurs Cups games that low - though perhaps the abandoned May 2011 match against Vancouver ... though I'm not sure that counts - and there were 18K out for the replay in July.