Bradley admits TFC reflecting in 'hard, honest way' after latest letdown

COLUMBUS - During the first half, Michael Bradley seemed to tune out the boos that greeted his every touch at Mapfre Stadium. Liam Fraser was maturely clogging up space in Bradley's usual position of defensive midfield, while Toronto FC's captain calmly selected his passes and marshaled his colleagues from the backline.

But a second-half onslaught from the Columbus Crew saw a 3-0 canter unravel into a 3-3 draw. With only D.C. United absolving Toronto FC from a bottom-placed standing in the Eastern Conference, when does the reigning MLS Cup champion's bad start begin to resemble something more serious?

"We're looking at ourselves in a pretty hard, honest way," Bradley told theScore following Saturday's meeting. "We understand that there's been some things that have been okay, there's things that need to be better to ensure that we start taking the points that we deserve on more days.

"There's still two-thirds of the season to go. There's a reason that they don't pass out any awards or any trophies after 11 or 12 or 13 games. Obviously, it's not been the start that we wanted by any stretch of the imagination. We've got to keep going though because there's still everything to play for."

For many Crew fans before the game, the prospect of facing Bradley as a fill-in center-back was an enticing proposition, and he ended up shouldering some blame for the collapse in Columbus. He was out-jumped by Gyasi Zardes for the Crew's first, his heavy touch bobbled the ball to Alex Crognale - who duly reduced the deficit to one - and then his foul on Zardes allowed Federico Higuain to equalize from the penalty spot.

"We didn't do a good job dealing with some plays at the end of the game and that starts with me," he admitted. "The ability to handle what's being thrown at you at the end of the game, to be able to make sure all the good things you've done over the course of the game count for more at the end. That's our biggest challenge right now."

Jason Hernandez described TFC's disappointing haul of 11 points from 12 MLS outings as "character development," but manager Greg Vanney preferred to blame his team's current inability to adapt to games.

"They get desperate, they start pushing a lot of numbers high, they go to a 3-4-3, they're pressing, they're committing everything, they're getting back in the game, as they should. For me, we don't adjust our mindset when that happens," he surmised.

"When that happens we've got to play forward, we've got to try and get behind, we've got to try and shift the game into the opponent's half of the field. For some reason, we kept trying to play through this massive amount of pressure and we just kept putting ourselves under problems. Really all three goals came the same way."

Vanney referred to his team's run in the CONCACAF Champions League for evidence that it knows how to win matches, but TFC could do with more pragmatism when it comes to seeing out results. Toronto's return from its opening 12 matches is 44 percent of what it had tallied at the same juncture of last season.

"The difference between today and a year ago is we win this game a year ago," he said. "We find a way to dig down and get the result and today we didn't."

He added: "Sometimes the game doesn't have to look beautiful, it has to be effective."