TORONTO – Three days after his first ejection as a head coach, Toronto FC gaffer Ryan Nelsen still isn’t sure what he did wrong or why he is now suspended along with assistant coach Fran O'Leary for TFC's next match, coming up Saturday against D.C. United.
The first-year manager was ejected along with O’Leary at the tail end of Toronto’s 2-1 loss to Sporting Kansas City on Saturday afternoon and he still contends that he actually took a multitude of missed calls by the officials in a respectful manner.
“I didn’t really know what I had done [when I was ejected] and I still don’t to tell you the truth,” Nelsen told MLSsoccer.com. “I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. In saying that, it comes down to you not minding if they get one or two decisions wrong, but when there are four or five that all went against us, that is what is frustrating for all of us.
“We were playing one of the best teams in the league and we should have had quite a few of those decision go our way,” Nelsen added. “It would have changed the game completely. Of course I have to take responsibility, but it wasn’t like it was anything wrong, such as me waving my hands or swearing or saying anything abusive so anybody could hear it.”
Nelsen admitted that he is now weighing whether or not he will appeal the automatic one game suspension that he and O’Leary received due to their ejections from the Sporting Kansas City match.
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“I’m not sure [if we will appeal our suspensions],” Nelsen said. “We’ll see. Obviously when you look at all the decisions that were made, we were on the wrong end of a lot of them and frustration kind of boiled over, but I don’t think both of us made a scene or anything like that.
“I think the linesman was under a huge amount of pressure because he was right in front of a couple of really bad mistakes and he knows it and he probably didn’t handle that pressure very well. He’ll have to learn from that, just like we need to learn from it on the sideline as well.”
