By Ben Knight

 

He’s got some rascal in him, this one.

Thursday’s BMO Field presser announcing details of the 2010 Voyageurs Cup tournament was the first chance I’ve had to study Toronto FC’s new coach eyeball-to-eyeball.

Preki – new to the whole thing, lurching back and forth between loosey-goosey and tentative – put on an intriguing show.

While his fellow coaches (Marc Dos Santos of the Montreal Impact, Teitur Thordarson of the Vancouver Whitecaps) sat obediently and somewhat nervously behind their respective microphones, Preki lounged/sprawled way back in his chair, making occasional whispered jokes, clearly enjoying himself.

Asked to speak of the Canadian competition’s importance, he shrugged off his total inexperience with the tournament, noting he has already seen that the V-Cup generates far more excitement in Canada than its American counterpart – the U.S. Open Cup – does Stateside.

He was prepared for that one.  The intriguing part, for me, was watching this sharp, calculating, Mercurial man when caught a little bit off-guard.

Comes a good question (Lee Godfrey, GOL-TV) about the relative importance of league and V-Cup matches.  Thordarson fields it, saying the Voyageurs Cup is very important to the Whitecaps, and that his team is looking forward to giving its all in what he expects will be some entertaining, high-quality matches.

Preki, deeply reclined, suddenly realizes everyone is looking at him.  He straightens, wondering aloud if he was supposed to answer the question too.  No one says “no.”  Now he’s improvising.  And, interestingly, he tells the truth.

The TFC coach rambles on for a good minute or more, stating beyond any doubt that MLS matches are far more important.  His main goal is to win in the league, therefore league games have to take priority.  Perhaps sensing the cup-happy room has suddenly gone a bit quiet, Preki adds a slightly awkward tag line that cup matches are great, too.

I’ve seen lots of coaches get caught off-guard in many different ways.  Some get flustered; some go all quiet.  Some crank up the used-car-salesman routine, deflecting the question to offer you power wiper blades on the way by.

Preki, there to bolster the cup, emphatically thudded on about the Canadian competition’s relative unimportance.

This opens an intriguing possibility.  There may be real profit for the TFC journo crowd in asking Preki vague questions.  It seems as though, when he’s not completely clear on what he’s been asked, he answers all the possibilities at once – straight from the heart, gut and truth.

Hmm.

Whatever strategic shortcomings former TFC bench bosses John Carver and Chris Cummings possessed, they were blessedly frank and straight-forward talkers.  Preki is clearly a man of many layers, and it won’t be nearly so easy now to deduce the spot-on from the spin.

The trick may be – and I’ll let you know how it goes – to concoct a sufficiently vague question.

This is going to be fun, folks.

Onward!