A change in leadership at Waking the Red

As you may have guessed from the lack of action on the blog over the past couple of weeks, a new year means a new look for Waking the Red.

I’m very happy to announce that Charlie O’Connor-Clarke will be succeeding me as editor and site manager for 2018. Regular readers will be familiar with Charlie having been a contributor for the past 18 months or so, and he’ll be (re-)introducing himself in the coming days. As someone with a knowledge of the blog and its community and no shortage of talent, I’m really excited to see him expand his role and lead Waking the Red into the new season.

As for myself, I’ll be around here and there for a little while to help out where needed as Charlie gets comfortable. Beyond that, though, I have decided to move on after nearly a year-and-a-half as the site’s manager.

I stumbled into this role as someone who had moved to Canada from the UK less than a year earlier and what has followed has been the most enjoyable period of my short career writing about soccer so far. It’s no exaggeration to say that the opportunities I’ve been lucky enough to fall into thanks to Waking the Red have played a significant part in helping me to settle into and become a permanent resident of a new country. This little corner of the internet will always be a special place for me as a result.

I owe many people a huge debt of gratitude - none more so than my co-writers and editors Mitchell Tierney and James Grossi, who could not have been more helpful since day one. I am lucky to have had the pleasure of getting to know them, as well as several others in the Toronto FC press box, in person and can’t wait to get started again in late February.

Charlie has led an outstanding team of contributors that has also included Allan Singh, Tej Sahota, Ben Fenech, Max Pacheco and several others too numerous to list as well as our photographers and graphic designers Tagwa Moyo, Julian Dodaro and Chris Blanchette. My thanks to all of them for their tireless efforts in 2017.

Lastly, thank you to everyone who has read our work and chatted with us in the comment section and on social media. This is a site for TFC fans above all else and it’s the community you create that has made - and will continue to make - Waking the Red a unique outlet through which to follow the club.

I had the privilege of being at all but one home game from the opener against Sporting Kansas City to the final against the Seattle Sounders last season, and I’m proud of the coverage that, together, we were able to provide. I hope it added in some way to your enjoyment of an incredible season.

You won’t be getting rid of me completely (sorry, one last bit of self-promotion coming up): I’m planning to continue covering TFC this year in a slightly different way, and hope to have news on that front at the start of February. You can follow me on Twitter if you’d like to hear more about that when the time comes.

For now: thank you. I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year and 2018 brings more success for the (now-woken) Reds and the wider Canadian soccer landscape.