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“I don’t know much about it. I know a lot of the big teams in Europe are going with it,” said TFC defender Drew Moor. “But it’s another sign that this club just does absolutely everything it can to give ourselves an advantage, to be professional. The firmer it can be, probably the better it is for us in terms of the way we play and for our bodies as well. We like a nice firm field and we’re looking forward to it.

“That’s our game. We don’t want the ball in the air. We want it fast because we want the tempo of the game, when we have possession, to be high,” added coach Greg Vanney. “We’re trying to create what we call time edges, which is time advantage when we have possession, where we penetrate the defensive team. The faster the ball can move, the more you can create these little advantages. When the game is slow, it benefits the defending team. And we want to be a good attacking team.

“When you like to have the ball on the ground, like to play fast and try to manipulate the opposition through ball movement and player movement and things like that, everybody wants the surface to be as pristine as possible,” Vanney added. “Pep’s (manager Pep Guardiola) got a very specific criteria for his field in Man City, that it has to be that (certain) way. You want the guys to be not worried about whether the ball’s going to bounce or not, only worry about how to execute the next action so that they’re not thinking about (the field). The ball needs to arrive in a predictable state as quickly as possible to the guy who then has to be confident to make the next action. And then the tempo can really start to increase and you can start to create those little advantages around the field.”