New York Red Bulls will take on Toronto FC on Saturday with a playoff place at stake, and two star strikers hold the fate of the teams in their hands

Three-and-a-half thousand miles separate north London from New Jersey. Thierry Henry is more familiar than most with the journey between the two. But on Saturday the New York Red Bulls striker will not need to fly anywhere to be reminded of his former life at Arsenal. Instead, Jermain Defoe will bring a dose of nostalgia directly to Red Bull Arena.



For three seasons, the two players knew each other as bitter rivals. Henry had already won a pair of Premier League titles with Arsenal before Defoe joined Tottenham in 2004, but in the years that followed the Gunners would be drawn into a fierce battle simply to defend their place in the Champions League against their ambitious neighbours.

In both 2006 and 2007, Spurs finished fifth – missing out on Europe’s top table after finishing one place behind Arsenal on each occasion. It is a scenario which might be on both players’ minds this weekend. Defoe’s Toronto FC team sit sixth in MLS’s Eastern Conference, one spot below the playoff places and four points behind Henry’s Red Bulls (with Columbus Crew wedged in-between them).

The parallels could be taken even further. Just as Tottenham had never qualified for the Champions League back in the mid-2000s, so Toronto have never made it into the MLS’s postseason. Founded in 2006, their best campaign to date came four years ago, when they posted the 11th-best record in what was then a 16-team league.

Defoe’s arrival in January was supposed to herald a bright new era. Unveiled together with USA midfielder Michael Bradley – and the club had already signed another new designated player, Brazilian forward Gilberto, a month earlier – he was hailed by Toronto FC’s media team as a “bloody big deal”.

Three months earlier, Tim Leiweke, CEO of the Maple Leaf Sports Entertainment group who own Toronto FC, had made a bold promise. “Mark it down, write it down, film it … We’re going to turn TFC around and we’re going to make the playoffs next year,” he said. “We know where we’re headed, we know how to get there. We’ve been given the resources of this ownership group and we will get to the right place.”



Those words seemed to be validated by the raft of January signings. Defoe scored twice in a season-opening 2-1 win away to Seattle with Bradley pulling the strings. Since then, though, the Englishman’s fortunes have taken a turn for the worse. A persistent groin injury has restricted his availability, although he has scored 11 goals in 17 appearances, Defoe’s performances have been hit-and-miss.

In part, that is a reflection of poor service from his team-mates, but equally Defoe’s confidence seems to have taken a hit. During a defeat to Houston on Wednesday, he had a penalty saved and blasted a late chance high over the bar after being played into acres of space inside the area.

Already, there is speculation that Defoe may not stay past the end of this season. Leiweke has insisted that no conversations about the player’s future will take place until December, but the fact that the executive himself has announced his plans to quit the club next summer has thrown further fuel on the fire. Toronto already changed manager in August, firing the former Blackburn defender Ryan Nelsen and replacing him with the less high profile figure of Greg Vanney.

Henry, too, might not have many games left in America. The Frenchman’s contract expires at the end of this season, and he is said to be contemplating retirement.

Not that the Red Bulls are in any rush to push him out the door. Henry has once again been among New York’s best players this season, outshone on the scoring front by Bradley Wright-Phillips (who has struck a remarkable 24 times in 29 games), but doing far more than his team-mate to open up opposing defences and create opportunities for others. Henry has 10 goals and 10 assists this season, and was named to the MLS All-Star team in August – just as he has been in each of the last four seasons.

His duel with Defoe is only one of a number of subplots to Saturday’s game, but it certainly is a compelling one. The Englishman has had the better of their two MLS encounters so far, scoring in both a 2-0 home win for Toronto back in May, and a 2-2 draw at Red Bull Arena in June.

But it was Henry who had the better of their rivalry back in London. Most memorably, the Frenchman came off the bench to equalise for Arsenal in a 1-1 draw at White Hart Lane in April 2006.

At the time, the result was seen as a triumph for Tottenham, since it kept them four points clear of their rivals (who had one game in hand). That point would prove crucial to the Gunners, however, as they leapfrogged Spurs after they lost 2-1 to West Ham on the final day of the season.

So perhaps Vanney is right when he argues that Saturday’s head-to-head is not yet a must-win game. He believes that seven points from Toronto’s three remaining fixtures could yet be enough to get them into the playoffs. The Red Bulls, though, will be anxious to win at home, increasing their own chances of skipping the MLS Cup’s Knockout Round and going straight into the Conference Semi-finals.

The neutral, meanwhile, will simply be hoping for something akin to Defoe’s second north London derby, back in 2004. On that day he and Henry each scored tremendous goals in a game that finished 5-4 to Arsenal. “I thought matches like that were long gone,” confessed the then Gunners full-back Ashley Cole at full-time. Seven years later, two stars of the show have a chance to remind the world that they are still very much around.