As most of my loyal readers will know, I grew up near Edmonton, Alberta. While I grew up there I was a great hockey fan, and in particular a great fan of my home-town team, the St. Albert Saints. Playing in the Alberta Junior Hockey League, the Saints came low on the totem pole but were one of the most biggest fish in their small pond; not quite the Manchester United of the AJHL but certainly the Tottenham Hotspur. They won some provincial titles in my day and did pretty well for themselves. Then, the year before I moved to Victoria, greedy ownership and a short-sighted city council combined to move the Saints to nearby Spruce Grove. I moved out and transferred my allegiance to the BCHL’s Victoria Grizzlies.

Unfortunately, I still maintained affection for the transplanted Saints. I was that most diabolical of creatures: the sports bigamist. Last year, Victoria played host to the Canadian tier II junior hockey championship, the Royal Bank Cup. Teams from across Canada were present, including the Grizzlies. And the Spruce Grove Saints, who had languished in mid-table oblivion for years, picked that season to go on a tear and establish themselves as the best team in Alberta. For most of the winter, it seemed possible – nay, likely! – that my new love and my old love would play each other in the national title tournament.

Agony! Visions of going to a hockey rink and feeling a constant pit of misery in the bottom of my stomach as the great team of my formative years and the nearly-as-great team of my young adulthood waged hockey war kept me up nights. Who would I cheer for? Who could I cheer for? The Saints were there first, but, then, they had also switched cities. The Grizzlies were my new hometown team, but was that sufficient excuse to abandon old loyalties? I was saved only by the Saints failing in the AJHL final to those fuckers the Grande Prairie Storm, allowing me to cheer for the Grizzlies with a clear conscience.

I thought I’d learned my lesson. For years it has been a form response for me to reply to “what’s your favourite soccer team?” with “the Edmonton Aviators” even though they, strictly speaking, no longer existed. Implicit in that statement was the idea that my loyalty was to soccer in the city of Edmonton, the soccer community in which I had grown up and played every one of my competitive matches. Why would I throw myself on the mercy of the Impact or the Whitecaps or the FC? Sure, it would be fun to cheer for somebody again, but really, one must be constant and not sleep with every team in the country just because your old love stopped existing for a bit.

Then, with ideas of a team in Edmonton being relegated to the dreams of cranks like me while supporters of current teams cheered all around me, the temptation was too much. I hurled myself into the Whitecaps corner earlier this season and have lived there happily ever since, until it came out that the new NASL was resurrecting the Edmonton Drillers and Edmonton would, in all likelihood, compete with the Whitecaps for the Voyageurs Cup.

That was 500 words long but I can sum it up in two: fuck me.

When the Whitecaps and Drillers face off, I may just end up tearing my own face off. For I do believe that the MLS Whitecaps and NASL Drillers will be playing against each other, and just like in the old days of the Copa Del Rey when Real Madrid or Barcelona’s ‘B’ team got a chance to teach papa bear a lesson, I believe the Drillers will come to play. As Toronto FC could tell you, the gulf between North America’s ostensible first and second divisions isn’t all that wide. Truly, I will be torn in conflict, with an Edmonton victory over Vancouver having the potential to be either the best or the worst moment of my footballing life.

Implicit in all of this concern is my conviction that the Drillers will be a success. For once – for once - Edmonton’s soccer community is doing it the right way. The Whitecaps will provide both organizational and financial support and make sure the team is a success on the pitch. The team has experienced ownership, for once, and they’re not playing in Commonwealth Stadium, which is worth a dump truck full of karma on its own. The venue is still an open question, and unless the Whitecaps want to splash an awful lot of cash the Drillers will probably be stuck at Foote Field on the University of Alberta campus, capacity 3,500 on the larger pitch, but expandable to Swangard-esque proportions.

I’ve heard a few folks murmur about the Drillers taking advantage of TELUS Field, the baseball diamond in downtown Edmonton, capacity for baseball 10,000. In the old days of John Ducey Park, the earlier Drillers played some games there sharing space with the Trappers. But TELUS Field is used by a full-time baseball tenant, the Edmonton Capitals, which would make conversion difficult. Even better, the field has a bizarre arrangement of an artificial turf infield and a natural grass outfield. This is, supposedly, odd to play baseball on. I don’t even want to imagine playing soccer on it.

Of course, Commonwealth Stadium is available for the Big Games. So when we play in the final of the CONCACAF Champions League, we’ll be loaded for bear.

(Dammit. I just said “we”, didn’t I? This is going to be even harder than I thought.)

You must have heard of it. Playing an obscure match, Canada has been dogged by a match-fixing scandal. What began as a simple conspiracy of big Asian bettors spiraled out of control to include four prominent members of the Canadian men’s national team, including its best midfielder and its best striker. In fact…

No, no, get off the phone to Ali Gerba. I’m not talking about the Macedonia – Canada friendly that put the fix in fixture. That appears to just have been some small-time stuff by a standard corrupt FIFA referee. Oh, no, I’m going into the vault of history. I’m talking about the 1986 Merlion Cup.

You’ve forgotten about it? Yeah, that’s not news. It was twenty-three years ago, after all, but it destroyed the Canadian national team. Canada had come off their first qualification to the FIFA World Cup earlier in the year and were favoured to win the tournament in Singapore, which took place against a few minor nations and ‘B’-level national teams. Only a narrow 1-0 loss to China August 31 prevented Canada from owning the round robin stage: the goal by Ma Lin was the only time Canada conceded while they scored ten times. The semi-final, however, would be a tense affair, with Canada taking on the North Koreans after mustering only a 0-0 draw in the round robin.

Who knows what the truth is in incidents like this, when all parties are of course looking out for themselves? Some of the players have admitted their guilt to a greater or lesser degree in the decades since, but at the time only one even murmured about taking a bribe: midfielder Paul James, Globe and Mail soccer writer and winner of forty-seven national caps. James said that he was playing cards with four fellow members of the national team when they approached him with the scheme. The five would divide a bribe worth a total of $100,000. In exchange, Canada would throw the semi-final against the North Koreans, which they were favoured to win.

Canada, who had conceded one goal to the Chinese so far in the tournament, lost 2-0. But Paul James was not involved. His conscience had gotten the better of him. James had given his share back to the other four and, more than that, had reported the affair to friend, teammate, and eventually fellow Canadian Soccer Hall of Famer Randy Regan. A nervous Regan, rather than going to his manager or the Canadian Soccer Association, asked Bruce Wilson for advice. Wilson had just retired from international football after fifty-one caps and captaining the 1986 World Cup team and, perhaps because he was out of the dressing room and now had nothing to fear, it was Wilson who finally reported up the chain. He told manager Tony Waiters and soon the Canadian Soccer Association was involved. The scandal was on.

Paul James would soon escape the cloud that lingered over him thanks to his obvious act of integrity. The other four would not be so lucky.

Chris Chueden, a striker, was twenty-five years old and a nobody on the international stage. A former player for the Montreal Manic, Chueden made his debut at the Merlion Cup and made all six of his caps in that tournament, scoring his only national goal against Indonesia. His reviews at the tournament were not terrific but certainly not bad until the North Korea match, where he (and many of the other Canadians). Worse players than Chueden have made careers with Canada, and striker would be a position of weakness for Canada until the years of Paul Peschisolido and Carlo Corazzin.

Burnaby native Hector Marinaro was another Merlion Cup debutante. He had made his first three international appearances in Singapore in 1986, including the North Korean game. A mediocre player, Marinaro roamed North American football for over a decade, playing for enough teams to make Ali Gerba blush.

Dave Norman was the first veteran to be tainted by the scandal. He had debuted for Canada in 1983 at the age of twenty-one and played in the World Cup, scoring his only goal in a 2-1 victory over Ghana in 1985. A hard-nosed defensive midfielder of some repute, Norman was a success domestically as well, being omnipresent for the first incarnation of the Vancouver Whitecaps as well as the later Vancouver 86ers, not to mention a go-round with the legendary Winnipeg Fury in 1987. But he came clean, in time, and was not the greatest casualty of the scandal.

The true loss from all this, the man who Canadian soccer has mourned ever since, ought to have been a white knight, somebody whose name could go down in legend. For he was not only one of the few Canadians to be playing professional outdoor soccer in 1986, he was doing so in the very good Belgian first division. He was Canada’s top striker by far. And he had scored the greatest goal in the history of Canadian soccer, getting a knee to a ball off the frozen pitch in St. John’s, Newfoundland, one fateful night in September 1985, pushing it past a Honduran goalkeeper, and sending Canada to the World Cup. He scored twelve times for his country and remains to this day the sixth-leading goalscorer in Canadian national history.

His name was Igor Vrablic, and at the time of the Merlion Cup he was twenty years old.

Some of the other players, you could see why. The North American Soccer League had recently collapsed. The Canadian Soccer League had not yet risen to replace it. Canadians had to play for whatever money they could get and in whatever cities would have them. Most of the 1986 World Cup team played indoor soccer, for that was the only way they could get a paycheque. But Vrablic! He was a success in Europe and was bringing in larger paycheques than most of his teammates at a far younger age. The future of Canadian soccer as a sport was hazy, but Vrablic, almost alone on that 1986 team, could look forward to his future.

He was a patriot, too. Born abroad to Slovak immigrants, he was eligible for Czechoslovakia and they certainly would have had him, but he chose Canada. He had played his heart out for his country in a day when love was the only reason to do so; when there was no motivation for flying across an ocean to stamp on a frozen pitch and try to send your homeland to the World Cup except the sheer joy of doing so. But for a share of $100,000, he threw it all away.

Twenty-one years old. Smarter people have done stupider things at that age, but not many. It ended his Canadian career in a heartbeat. The European leagues, then sensitive to match-fixing rumours after the Italian Totonero scandals earlier in the decade, wouldn’t have pissed on Vrablic if he was on fire. Unable to catch on in Europe, he eventually returned to Canada where, at last report, he works in Ontario keeping a low profile and avoiding soccer.

So excuse me if I don’t get excited about a referee rigging a meaningless friendly. Because this is match fixing.

What’s that, the new North American Soccer League? You’re expanding to Edmonton for the 2011 season? And the Vancouver Whitecaps are prominently involved? And you’re not crazy enough to play every game in Commonwealth Stadium this time?

Where do I sign up?

Terry “The Only Reporter in Edmonton Who Cares About Soccer” Jones’s article was like manna from the heavens. It was conclusive in almost every way that counted. It named names. It listed the backers and where they were coming from. It mentioned the Whitecaps and Bob Lenarduzzi specifically. Some of the details looked like Jones had an awfully long and awfully good conversation with Mel Kowalchuk himself. It was amazingly, unbelievably concrete considering that before November 30, the first we’d heard of professional outdoor soccer in Edmonton was USL blueskying a series of nameless, imaginary investors supposedly wanting to put some sort of team in at some point.

Edmonton’s troubled history with professional soccer is well-known. The original Edmonton Drillers played in the original NASL, owned by a fellow you may have heard of named Peter Pocklington who bought the money-losing Connecticut Bicentennials (no wonder, with a name like that) and threw them into then-state of the art Commonwealth Stadium. At the time Commonwealth Stadium seated over 42,000, and in their best season the Drillers averaged just under 11,000 per game. The crowds were sufficiently miserly for the Drillers to move into not-at-all-state of the art Clarke Stadium, teaching a lesson about Commonwealth that Edmonton’s soccer establishment took decades to learn.

The Drillers probably lost money every year of their existence, but Peter Pocklington was an accomplished loser of money and so the Drillers clung on for three not-entirely-unsuccessful seasons. They won the 1980-81 indoor season,  made the outdoor playoffs a couple times, and brought in some players you might have heard of such as Ross Ongaro and Kai Haaskivi, who made twelve caps and three goals for Finland. Many of their most successful players came from abroad, a strategy that was a complete failure. The later Edmonton Aviators would try to save money by developing cheap local talent and Rick Titus, a strategy that was also a complete failure, so it was a difficult situation.

While the first Drillers were taking their steps onto Commonwealth Stadium’s hallowed pitch, Warren Moon and the Edmonton Eskimos were banging out Grey Cups like it was their birthright in the same stadium. About a half-hour’s walk away, the greatest hockey team in the history of the sport was just coming into its own. One indoor championship and a couple playoff appearances stood pretty pale in the City of Champions in those days, and the European journeymen the Drillers trotted out were no match for the legends already playing in the city. Pocklington, meanwhile, treated the Drillers as an accessory, a team he owned so he could say that he owned it. Promotion was nil, media support was nil, and while the cheques usually cleared that was all ownership ever provided.

Their complete economic failure, even after three outdoor and indoor campaigns which saw their attendance rise not an iota, meant that Peter Pocklington took a bath on the Drillers before they were taken behind the barn and shot. His losses were severe and before the decade was out financial pressure would force Pocklington (who also owned the Edmonton Oilers) to sell Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings, so, really, the Edmonton Drillers were responsible for the most heartbreaking moment in the history of Canadian sport. It was not an auspicious beginning, as these things go.

Edmonton Drillers II: Electric Boogaloo were formed in 1996 as part of the National Professional Soccer League, which in spite of its name was international, only arguably professional with many players holding other jobs, and played that indoor game which is called “soccer” only because “foot hockey” was already taken. That infandous Pocklington was the wallet once again, famously calling a shabby press conference at the TELUS Field baseball diamond to announce Edmonton’s third professional soccer team only because he’d recently wrested control of Edmonton Coliseum from Northlands (owned by the City of Edmonton) and was looking to fill up the schedule with the team that had once been the Chicago Power. He already had the Oilers, who were good for forty-one nights a year plus playoffs, but the Drillers would let him sell more popcorn and parking spaces and that was all he needed.

There was also an element of spite in Pocklington’s rush to secure an indoor team. Edmonton had recently been granted a Western Hockey League franchise, the Edmonton Ice. The Western Hockey League brass, who were smarter than any of us gave them credit for at the time, hated Pocklington’s guts and refused to give him the WHL expansion team he had sought since the late 1980s. The Ice went to a non-Pocklington consortium headed by former commissioner Ed Chynoweth, but Pocklington controlled the only decent hockey rink in town. With the Drillers and Oilers sharing the schedule, Pocklington could quite reasonably if transparently say “sorry, all booked up” and condemn the Ice to hockey hell. They wound up playing in the nearby Northlands Agricom, which is a convention hall and probably the worst venue I’ve ever attended a hockey game at.

It was another auspicious beginning: a club forged in the fires of spite and plunged into the fray that was semi-professional indoor soccer.

I attended a few Driller games in my time; they were my first taste of watching somebody get paid to play soccer. I never actually bought a ticket, mind you.  Getting free Drillers tickets (and good tickets) was a matter of playing in a local minor soccer league and ringing the league office, or calling somebody who worked for the club, or calling somebody who worked for the Coliseum, or calling somebody who worked for the Oilers, or walking up to the ticket booth before game time and saying “so, any free tickets lying around?” The head coach was Ross Ongaro, and one of his assistants, Sean Fleming, currently works in the Canadian national youth setup.

The Drillers were crummy but they ran out some surprisingly decent players. Nick De Santis and Pat Onstad played that first year. Rick Titus, the chicken pox of Canadian soccer (everybody’s had him once) also played indoor in Edmonton. As a Whitecaps fan, I remember Martin Nash, Geordie Lyall, and Jeff Clarke in Edmonton with fondness. In the days before he got his big break in Europe, Lars Hirschfeld also kept goal for the Drillers. The late Domenic Mobilio was probably Edmonton’s greatest player, very nearly striking a career century in Edmonton before being traded for the return of Rick Titus, a player so ill-disposed towards the Drillers front office that he had walked out on the team and seemingly burned every bridge behind him.

In 1998 Pocklington, now well and truly broke, divested himself of his sports interests. The Edmonton Trappers were sold to the city-owned Edmonton Eskimos, who in turn sold the team to an American consortium which moved the Trappers to Round Rock, Texas. The Edmonton Oilers, after a long shadow dance involving shady Swiss bankers who didn’t actually exist and potential relocation, were sold to a group of area businessmen. The Drillers were sold to the tastefully named Wojtek Wojcicki at a knockdown price. The price was important as, in common with most Edmonton soccer investors over the years, Wojcicki had no damned money.

Wojcicki was quintessentially Edmonton. A good guy by all accounts, a community-minded man and a good Samaritan, somebody who’s been involved in area sports from the grassroots level. An advertising maven who made his bones as owner of the In House Advertising Group, Wojcicki wasn’t your typical egotistical multimillionaire sports team owner. He was just some local businessman like every city has who wanted to take a crack at owning a professional sports team.

The deck was stacked against Wojcicki, however. He reckoned the team needed eight thousand fans a night but they never came close. Even a ten-fold increase in season ticket sales wasn’t enough. Control of Edmonton Coliseum – by then Skyreach Centre, after a local heavy equipment company – had reverted to Northlands and the City of Edmonton, and the Drillers did not play on generous terms. Rents were reasonable but concessions and parking fees were hoarded by Northlands rather than partially turned over to the team as was the case with the Oilers. The Edmonton Sun estimated that Wojcicki was out $396,000 per year on concessions alone; a fortune in the NPSL.

The Drillers didn’t die without a fight. A “Save Our Soccer” movement took hold, but Edmonton was worn out after the recent life-or-death struggle to save the Oilers. Wojcicki thought he had an agreement to bring in some partners who could have saved the situation, but the deal fell through. Northlands refused to give the Drillers more favourable terms shortly after all but surrendering themselves to the Oilers. Eventually, on Wednesday, November 15, 2000, the black day for soccer in Edmonton, the payroll didn’t come through. It was the end. The players, financed by the league for two paycheques, kept playing while the NPSL tried to find new ownership. Good luck. Wojcicki had much more at stake and had been unable to find help. In Wichita, the Drillers players got the news that it was over. The players were dispersed throughout the league (though many did not report), and the Drillers faded into tortured oblivion.

Tortured not least because, at last, the Drillers were pretty good. When they finished the year they were 6-3, best in the league despite a tough schedule that included a back-to-back against the defending champions. The previous two years they had lost in the conference finals by the narrowest of margins. It was money, the great enemy of the Canadian game, that killed the second incarnation of the Drillers and soon the NPSL itself, which disbanded the following year.

The Drillers were not finished, however. In 2007 a barnstorming tour of hastily-assembled indoor soccer teams from around Canada was formed. The “Showcase Season”, as it was known, was the product of the newly-formed Canadian Major Indoor Soccer League. There were four teams from the Canadian prairies, with names ranging from the predictable (Calgary United FC) to the preposterous (Saskatoon Accelerators). And in the middle was a little slice of history: the Edmonton Drillers, then based in the NPSL team’s old home now known as Rexall Place but later playing in my old home town of St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton, in the new Servus Credit Union Place.

Four days of doubleheaders between two teams were held. The schedule was unbalanced: Edmonton played six games while Saskatoon played only two, both wins against Winnipeg. Attendance varied between 1,850 at the Stampede Corral in Calgary to 7,727 in Winnipeg for the first professional soccer game there since the CSL’s Fury rode into the sunset. The Drillers, in their double header at Rexall Place, drew a crummy 2,102 from soccer fans who, in the intervening years, had been scalded yet again by the A-League’s Aviators.

Good enough.

An all-Canadian soccer league playing indoor on the prairies? Folly, surely, but they made it work in the 2008 season. There were only four teams. Attendance was as often as not in three digits, although it improved as the season went on. Winnipeg had drawn tremendously during the Showcase Season but scheduling conflict meant that Winnipeg played all ten of their games on the road (probably good news for Winnipeg fans: they lost every one). On March 14, the Drillers beat Calgary in a single-leg playoff in St. Albert. Attendance was described as “sparse”. What matter? For the first time in twenty-six years, the Drillers were on top again. The natural order had been restored.

That’s not even the most remarkable thing about these new Drillers, playing in a crappy regional Canadian indoor league that can’t get its schedules straight. The most remarkable thing is that they’re still going. The CMISL affiliated itself with the American Professional Arena Soccer League, and the two played a combined season in 2009, with Edmonton beating Calgary again for the indoor title and getting to the semi-finals of the North American championship. All indications so far are that they’ll play in 2010 as well. So the obvious question is “if the new NASL team is going to be the Drillers as well, what the hell?”

Then again, “what the hell?” is a question Drillers fans have asked a lot in their history.

Of course the widespread rumours of the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts wanting to play at BMO Field are unwelcome. Of course. These are the same Toronto Argonauts who put the future of the Youth World Cup in jeopardy by backing out of a stadium at York University at the last minute (costing the taxpayers of Ontario $15 million in lost finance from the school), who previously dithered over a soccer-football stadium at Varsity Stadium until it was killed, and who contributed zero cents to the construction of BMO Field. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment put their money where their mouth was and financed much of the stadium’s construction. They also paid for the grass pitch being installed. In short, they did their job. As a result, the Argonauts will get to destroy that lovely grass pitch being installed at such expense.

Bluntly, the Argonauts can go fuck themselves, and I don’t even like Toronto FC.

Now, a few folks such as Onward’s Ben Knight are taking the logical approach: the Argonauts will never play at BMO Field and here’s why. Most of the reasons centre around the fact that BMO Field would be a truly awful CFL venue and the league would need to bend over backwards to approve the Argonauts playing there. Unfortunately, this argument misses one key fact: we’re not talking about the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, we’re talking about the Toronto Argonauts. The CFL’s Marquee Franchise, in spite of the fact that they’re miserable off the field and worse on it and probably have the smallest following of any CFL franchise. The Argonauts are a classic example of the Toronto-centrism that we in the rest of Canada rail against so ineffectively, in that the CFL has always been willing to grab its ankles and spread ‘em when the Argos come calling.

Besides, the sanctity of CFL field dimensions has always been up for discussion. As an Edmonton Eskimos fan, I can tell you in vivid detail about the truncated corners at Commonwealth Stadium and the touchdowns that haven’t counted when a receiver ran a route onto the running track; the corners at Percival Molson Stadium in Montreal share this defect. The ill-fated CFL USA experiment (I believe it is constitutionally mandated that it be referred to as “the ill-fated CFL USA experiment”)  saw absolutely everybody except the San Antonio Texans playing on non-regulation field sizes. Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, home of the Memphis Mad Dogs, had nine-yard end zones.

Would the Argonauts be going as far as petitioning the government if they didn’t have some assurance from the CFL they’d be able to play there? Government lobbying is neither cheap nor effortless. Either somebody at CFL HQ has told the Argonauts that they’ll make BMO Field work or they’re using BMO Field as leverage. But leverage for what? The Argonauts are up for sale, of course, but they have a buyer in BC Lions owner David Braley. Their rent deal at SkyDome is as favourable as physically possible, and SkyDome’s significantly higher capacity means less of a cap on Argonaut revenues (their average attendance is higher than BMO Field’s capacity). Ben Knight suggests that the Argonauts are trying to bait Rogers, owners of SkyDome and the Toronto Blue Jays, into buying the team. But given the lack of funding and enthusiasm Rogers has shown to their existing sports empire since Ted Rogers’s death, there is a certain quixotic air over such a quest.

Being a cynic, I think that the Argonauts’ desire to move into BMO Field is sincere. They want to play on grass (only Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton has a natural grass surface among current CFL venues). They’re hoping for a Molson Stadium effect, where the Montreal Alouettes moved from cavernous Olympic Stadium to a small university stadium and increased both atmosphere and profit. Although they pay no rent at SkyDome, they’d prefer to avoid the inevitable overhead costs of playing there because they’re losing a million billion dollars every year.

As a general rule, I hate publicly funded stadia, but BMO Field was done as properly as possible. Private enterprise (Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment) kicked in much of the construction and maintenance costs. The field was set aside for community use, and when grass was required and community use was no longer possible the government forced MLSE to construct an adequate replacement.  The government retains ownership of BMO Field rather than just making it a gift to the mighty teachers’ pension plan. Plus, it was of course built in part for our Canadian national teams, a public enterprise if ever there was one. Now, though, we see the inevitable downside: Toronto FC is not master of its own domain. It operates at the sufferance of bodies that have little stake in its success. The euphoric joy at being allowed to pay for a decent playing surface can quickly be overwhelmed by the horror of political masters helping out one of their other interests. Until Toronto FC plays in a stadium paid for and owned by the club (current estimate: never), its mere operation will always be lingeringly uncertain, and its success will always come with the lingering chance of betrayal.

If life was fair, the only way the Toronto Argonauts would get into BMO Field would be with tickets. But life, and more particularly government, is not fair, and the joy of “grass at BMO!” will be replaced by the deadening pain of all that money spent and a surface that is still completely unsuitable for world-class football, while a less successful franchise frolics through the stadium they tried to destroy.

Other perspectives: Ben Knight’s article linked above, Duane Rollins, squizz the Some Canadian Guy, and Duane Rollins again.

According to somebody who’d know on the Voyageurs board, there was a Middlesborough scout in Macedonia on Saturday watching Canada get turned into goop by the Balkaners. This Middlesborough scout was absolutely agog at the sight of Simeon Jackson getting the start for Canada. Why, this scout asked, would Canada ever start a League One striker however productive over somebody successful in the 1.Bundesliga?

My question to that Middlesborough scout is, why would you play the Bundesliger at all?

I’m not saying that Rob Friend is an all-round lousy footballer. His production in the 1.Bundesliga speaks for itself. No Canadian striker, anywhere in the world, is playing in a better league, but Friend is not only surviving but thriving despite a series of injuries slowing his production. You don’t score like Friend has for Borussia Monchengladbach if you are an incapable player. In terms of pure talent, he may be the best striker we have. He has played tough games against first-rate opposition and not been found wanting. Domestically, Friend is a rare Canadian success story, the only striker we’ve had who was both first division and first class since Tomasz Radzinski was the hero of Everton.

But if we accept the facts of his domestic talents, we must also accept his failings internationally. Friend is twenty-eight. He has won his share of caps, often in a starting or featured role. Yet his production for Canada is impotent. Unlike many of his contemporaries he has not been blunted by being used on the wing. He has benefited from a better ball-distributing midfield than most Canadian strikers. Every game he has played he has been up front as the target man, ready to bang in quality chances, and in almost every game he has been found wanting. He has only two goals to his credit.

The figures almost defy belief. Friend is, by far, the worst regular striker in the Canadian national pool in terms of goals per game. Among those who play striker at all he ranks ahead of Iain Hume, Issey Nakajima-Ferran, and Andrzej Ornoch. The first two have spent almost the entirety of their Canadian careers in midfield, and Ornoch has made only four caps. Friend, of course, ranks a million miles behind his contemporary Ali Gerba. He ranks a million miles behind Ali Gerba when Gerba (long accused of poaching goals against CONCACAF minnows, as if that’s a crime) is compared only to CONCACAF teams that made the last stage of CONCACAF World Cup Qualifying this season (Friend has never scored against a hex team). He ranks far behind Radzinski, who is old and played most of his international career as an attacking midfield. He ranks behind Kevin McKenna, who was only briefly a striker in the late Holger Osieck and Frank Yallop eras. He scores less frequently than Paul Stalteri.

Even Olivier Occean, who must have slept with somebody’s wife and has been condemned to exile from the national team like Moses wandering the desert, who hasn’t scored since Iceland, has a better strike rate than Rob Friend. In the Cyprus friendly earlier this season Stephen Hart called for Tosaint Ricketts over Olivier Occean, and Occean still has a better strike rate than Rob Friend. If we took Ben Rycroft out of the “It’s Called Football” studio, put a red shirt on him, and gave him twenty-four caps, odds are he’d have a better strike rate than Rob Friend.

Yet the only thing more remarkable than Friend’s international ineptitude are the lengths some people will go to defend him. The most common refrain is that he “isn’t getting service”, which is a peculiar thing to say when all of our strikers are scoring except for him. The most effective striker, by rate, in Canadian history is the same age as Friend and is a fat footballing vagabond who shambles around the pitch like an orangutan on quaaludes before slamming home a goal with the precision of Marco Van Basten. Ali Gerba could no more create his own opportunities than he could create his own diet plan, yet he thrives on the same service as poor Rob Friend.

The next argument is that Friend “isn’t being used properly”. Solutions to Friend’s not being used properly, however, seem to involve taking the rest of the Canadian national team and not using it properly. Tomasz Radzinski, when he wasn’t being used properly by Yallop, scored anyway. Iain Hume, when he wasn’t being used properly by Dale Mitchell, was at least a constant spark plug. Rob Friend, when he supposedly isn’t being used properly, essentially takes Canada down to ten men he’s so useless. Julian De Guzman is a born holding midfielder who’s been forced into an attacking role because nobody else can do it and he’s been able to adjust. Forcing our players who can actually produce to give way to a player who can’t because poor Robby isn’t being treated right is an insult to the concept of a team. Better ten Canadians playing well than one striker grinning and happily thundering headers into the crossbar.

The only possible defense of Rob Friend’s international career is made on the basis of what he does in Germany, but CONCACAF is not the 1.Bundesliga. Different players thrive in different environments. This isn’t news, but apply it to Rob Friend, so good abroad and so historically inept at home, and you will hear about it.

There are no questions of sample size, or youth, or Friend having been played as a goalkeeper for the first half of his career. He’s gotten the best opportunity of any Canadian striker of his generation and he has utterly squandered it. Bring on Fat Ali. He may eat bacon with every meal and he may bounce between clubs, but put a Canada shirt on him and the man scores. Everything else is details.

Do you remember the year 1999? There was that Y2K bug thing, I remember that. We all had mullets and wore jean jackets and called each other “Zap”, but that may have just been in Alberta. And that summer, a plucky bunch of youngsters led by tykes like Richard Hastings and Paul Stalteri were gearing up for something called the “Gold Cup”.

Well, they were gearing up for something called qualifying for the Gold Cup, for those were the dark days when Canada was expected to join the likes of Haiti and Cuba in the ritual of earning the right to play for our continental championship. Among those kids was a long-forgotten Poznań-born immigrant named Thomas Radsunski or something. Once the second-best striker for the North York Astros, that 26-year-old had somehow caught on with Anderlecht in Belgium and was piling up goals like they were missed CSL paycheques. Canada’s then-undisputed national soccer kaiser, Holger Osieck, had called upon Rudnuzsky or whatever his name was to join Paul Peschisolido and Carlo Corazzin as the best strike force Canada had seen since Bunbury and Mitchell.

Rasputzki accepted Osieck’s callup and then the day came and he was laying in bed in Anderlecht and the young man came to a fateful decision which could be summed up as follows: fuck this shit. Rather than head to the goddamned airport and fly across a goddamned ocean to play El Goddamned Salvador, he decided that he’d keep on kicking it in Belgium. He didn’t, however, think to inform anyone at the Canadian Soccer Association of this, which meant that some poor wino dragooned into being a chauffeur probably had to stand at an airport for six hours holding a piece of cardboard with “TOMMY RADNESKY” written on it. It also pissed off Holger Osieck something awful, and if there’s one thing living in Belgium should have taught young Tomas, it was never piss off the Germans.

Well, that was it for that young striker, whatever his name was. Osieck absolutely went spare. When Canada eventually qualified for the Gold Cup, Osieck did not invite him to join the full team. When Canada eventually won the Gold Cup, its first title of any kind since 1986, Osieck had the last laugh. Holger’s Heroes were as much national icons as any Canadian soccer team had been since 1986. Craig Forrest was a celebrity. Richard Hastings, he of the winning goal that put Mexico (fucking Mexico!) out of the tournament in what was very nearly their home ground of San Diego, had won himself a place in football Valhalla. That Polish immigrant who could, well, his international career was over. The Canadian team was more successful than ever even without that particular prima donna. Sure enough, Tomasz Radzinski never played in the Gold Cup again.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity. Holger Osieck never quite forgave Radzinski, but the sheer paucity of depth for Canada in the first half of the decade meant that he eventually picked up the phone again. Radzinski returned in 2001 for a friendly in Malta because who the hell wants to play a friendly in Malta? Six months later, Osieck again summoned Radzinski, this time to Switzerland, where he potted a brace just because he could. They were his first goals for his country in six years.

He kept showing up. He skipped the Gold Cups – perhaps El Goddamned Salvador still weighed on his mind – but throw a European friendly or World Cup qualifying match and he was there. From 2002 to 2008, Radzinski scored at least one goal for his country every year except 2005, when a 32-year-old Radzinski, seemingly long past his best-before date, played only two friendlies and against Spain and Portugal.

The glory dimmed for Radzinski. He went from Everton, where he scored in quantity, to Fulham, where he didn’t. His next stop was in Greece, where aging strikers go to die, and though he produced once more he left after accusing his teammates of match fixing. Now he toils in the Belgian second division, and is possibly the best striker there.

But, as his club career dimmed, internationally the hits kept on coming. Frank Yallop hated Radzinski like he hated all his players with flair and personality; a then-Premier League star was thrown out onto the wing and told to try and get Kevin McKenna the ball so the fucking centreback could head it somewhere like where the net was. It was Dale Mitchell, of all people, who finally clued in that maybe his natural goalscorer should be in a position to score some goals. In 2008 World Cup qualifying, Radzinski seemed (not for the first time) like a man reborn. He tore up and down the wing like he was belatedly calling upon all the talent we Canada fans were robbed of in 2000. In Edmonton, we were witness to the best individual performance by any Canadian player since Craig Forrest hung up the spikes. Radzinski roared against the best midfield and defense in CONCACAF. His goal was a sublime bit of finishing, his balls into the box were deadly. Father Time had that game off, for it was Canada’s old men who came to play: who will forget Paul Stalteri blasting up the right wing and thundering a ball from forty feet that we belatedly realized had been really well-struck, ricocheting off the crossbar as the crowd went from resignation to near-orgasm in the flash of a second.

But it was Radzinski. Radzinski. Always Radzinski. When he ran to the corner of Commonwealth Stadium to celebrate a 2-2 draw with the Voyageurs, he was showered with love. And gifts. A plaque commissioned by Victoria Voyageur Geoff Wallace, honouring his commitment to the national team. A Voyageurs scarf, which was hard to come by at the time. It wasn’t the most graceful award presentation of all time since the plaque was very nearly thrown at him (it was that sort of celebration), but he got it anyway. Then somebody tossed him a black “Sack the CSA” shirt. Radzinski held up the shirt for an instant and looked at it thoughtfully. He took his jersey off and threw it into the crowd (it eventually got to the Voyageur who purchased the plaque). He put the “Sack the CSA” shirt on. The crowd erupted. The Voyageurs thundered to the rail. I was already there and found myself being jostled on all sides by those eager to salute the old hero. Through the chaos, I managed to snap a picture of Radzinski putting the shirt on, another of him walking away, and a lot of pictures of people’s elbows.

It was official. Radzinski was forgiven for his sin of nearly a decade ago. The prodigal son had been sent off into the sunset with a fanfare fit for kings.

Yet, you know what? For all the plaques and salutes and the glorious exits, Tomasz Radzinski never actually came out and said he was done. On the contrary, he kept plugging along. Scoring goals. Telling a Voyageur interviewing him that “I have been approached by the CSA to see where my future lies with the national team but right now I really don’t know.” Not coming to the Gold Cup but that’s hardly news. When Poland was announced as Canada’s second November friendly, Voyageurs like me started clamouring for Radzinski to get the call to Poland, the country in which he had been born but never played a professional game. Then he did, to the extent that Stephen Hart actually allowed Radzinski to miss the Macedonia match to ensure his presence in Poland.

Here we are again. Another would-be sending off. Another chance for Radzinski to possibly ride off into the sunset. Jonathan de Guzman and Dani Fernandes should take note: time and loyalty, however belated, truly does heal all wounds. Yet has Radzinski said he’s done? Not within my earshot. He is dominating the Belgium second division, and playing at a higher level than any of our strikers aside from Rob Friend and Simeon Jackson. It’s easy to say that he’ll be forty years old by the 2014 World Cup, but Radzinski has never given a damn about Father Time’s opinion before so why should he start now?

Is this actually a Canada – Poland preview? Not really. Poland’s sending a young team and if we play our best we should beat them. But it is an axiom that in friendlies it is not the result that matters but the effort. And if we’re talking effort, it is only fitting that we talk Radzinski.

I’m sitting here, at 12:42 in the Pacific morning, with a bottle of Wiser’s in me, watching New Zealand lead Bahrain 1-0.

You know what? In four years, that’ll be us.

Come back with me to 2006. The Gold Cup triumph is two yaers in our past. Holger Osieck has officially failed. The Frankallop Yalop era is a hideous miasma of favouritism and failure. There are no youth academies, no professional sides above USL-1 level and the three we have there are strictly local in outlook and ambition. The national team is a punchline. The Canadian Soccer Association? A land of infighting and provincial politics.

Today, we have Toronto FC, the great professional success story. We have the Vancouver Whitecaps academy system creating genuine prospects from whole cloth and both Toronto and the Impact moving to emulate them. The national team has fewer superstars but more depth than it has ever imagined, and instead of the big names with small price tags we’ve brought back the era of foreign-born managers with ambitious minds and the respect of the players. The CSA is scheduling friendlies and building the game, and even if there is that provincial infighting Peter Montopouli is perhaps the single best thing ever to happen to Canadian soccer.

Huge strides in three years! We are light years ahead, from top to bottom, of where we were. And the process is acceleration. We were unlucky to do as badly as we did in this qualification cycle,  but fofr the 2014 cycle I firmly believe that will reverse itself.

Call me an optimist. But watching New Zealand this morning, it’s hard not to be one.

Calling friendlies is hard.

The Macedonian and Canadian teams have a lot in common, after all. Both call most of their players from the world’s second-tier leagues, with a few stars checking in here and there. Both finished fourth in their World Cup qualifying groups, although admittedly the context is a bit different. They both have weird damned goaltenders: Macedonia’s probable starter is 27-year-old Tome Pacovski of Germinal Beerschot in the Belgian first division. Pacovski is Belgium’s usual second choice goalkeeper and only recently caught on with Beerschot after a domestic career in Macedonia and some time wandering the wilds on trial after trial.

Canada, meanwhile, will probably counter with Lars Hirschfeld, dragged out of the wooden case in which he is kept between Canadian internationals, proud owner of a single glorious club appearance this year with his new club Energie Cottbus. The idea was that Hirschfeld would replace Cottbus’s veteran Gerhardt Tremmel when Tremmel was inevitably transferred out after Cottbus’s relegation to the 2.Bundesliga last season. However, Tremmel has shown an annoying inability to agree to a transfer elsewhere and so Cottbus quite sensibly plays their superior goalkeeper as it appears he will be in for the long haul. Such is the life of Lars Hirschfeld, our Littlest Football Hobo: maybe tomorrow he’ll want to settle down, until tomorrow he’ll just keep moving on.

Both lineups, too, are stocked with an odd mixture of veteran journeymen plying their trades all around the footballing world. Macedonia’s leading cap getter is defender Goce Sedloski, who could make his ninety-sixth appearance for his country tomorrow.  Sedloski plays for SV Mattersburg in the Austrian first division after a career that’s sent him bouncing through several of Europe’s not-quite-first-rate divisions. Another defender, Igor Mitreski, is allegedly a teammate of Hirschfeld’s at Cottbus but is currently on loan to Germinal Beerschot where he instead plays with the other starting goalkeeper in this game. It’s that sort of roster. The Macedonian league contributes five players, all under twenty-five, to this roster, while only Toronto FC’s Julian De Guzman represents Canada domestically.

It’s not as bad as it looks, really. Stephen Hart has repeatedly stated that he wanted a European-based squad. He took De Guzman because he was training in Europe anyway (you hear that, Jonathan?), and he took Dejan Jakovic out of DC United because he had no centrebacks. Had Hart been more ambitious, he would certainly have added Ali Gerba and Dwayne De Rosario and possibly Nana Attakora. Had Macedonia boss Mirsad Jonuz been more ambitious, he might not have taken any of the youths from his own league, none of whom have more than four caps and two of whom haven’t even debuted yet. Canada’s only débutante is defensive midfielder-cum-reserve goalkeeper Jonathan Bourgault.

On paper, Macedonia and Canada are fairly well-matched except for one factor. The Macedonians have Goran Pandev, and we don’t.

Pandev is on the outs from Serie A club Lazio and may not be in game shape, but he’s still the sort of supremely talented European player that Canadians just don’t face. There’s nobody anything like Pandev anywhere in the world except the elite leagues of Europe. Trying to contain Jeff Cunningham on the plastic of BMO Field is a far cry from trying to hold down a man with Pandev’s deadly combination of speed and perfect touch. Paul Stalteri has faced those players before, when he was in the Premier League and very occasionally in the 1.Bundesliga but that was a long time ago. Julian De Guzman, of course, had extensive experience in his La Liga days. Kevin McKenna, to the extent that FC Koln gives him the opportunity to face those sorts of players. Who else on this roster has seen strikers like that except on television?

Okay, so Pandev’s a little doughy thanks to his standoff with Lazio, who have pulled a John Carver and confined Pandev to training with the reserves. He’s also got a need to prove himself again after the Lazio brass referred to him as a “rebel” and condemned him to the rubbish tip, and he’s always played his heart out for his country in any event. And Canadians simply don’t know how to handle a player of his talent. Even a fat Pandev might end up running riot on the inexperienced Canadians. What chance, really, would Jonathan Bourgault or the husk of a player that used to be Richard Hastings have against Pandev storming down the centre?

If we contain Pandev, we can win. But even if he plays half an hour and has a beer belly, he might still light us up.

My prediction: Macedonia 2, Canada 1

With the seemingly inevitable announcement that Stephen Hart will be made permanent head coach of the Canadian men’s national team, it is time to sort something out once and for all: the two competing nicknames for the Canadian team under Stephen Hart, both of which saw use in the Gold Cup from those of us with nothing else to do:

• Hart’s Army: recalls a crappy American 2002 movie named “Hart’s War” starring crappy American Bruce Willis in which a bunch of crappy Americans do a bunch of crappy things. Almost unanimously disliked.
• The Hart Foundation: a legendary Canadian wrestling stable starring great Canadian even-people-who-hate-wrestling-have-heard-of-him Bret Hart, a man so secure in his masculinity that he not only spent decades rolling around on a mat with well-built men but wore pink tights while he was doing it. Revered by people who revere such things.

Done and done. The Hart Foundation it is.

Of course, this is all assuming that Stephen Hart’s first act isn’t to make Ben Knight’s day by bringing in Port Vale’s backroom staff to assist him, or we’ll have to call it the Hart and Stoke Foundation.

…indifference, treason, and greed…

This is Jacob Lensky, wearing a look taken straight from the “guy you warn the flight attendant about” collection. Never has the term “mug shot” been more appropriate. From the time I saw it, I always thought that this picture made him look like he was in the dock for touching little boys or something. Then again, the Canadian Soccer Association has been known for many things but “a creative and skilled media department” has never been one of them.

Yes, this picture was taken from the CSA’s website. I suspect it might soon become a collector’s item because – in the biggest twist since the last one – Jacob Lensky, a man who has raised changing his mind to an art form, declined an invitation from Stephen Hart to our central European friendlies in favour of playing with the Czech U-21 team. Yes, he declined an invitation to a pair of full internationals in exchange for playing youth football.

Like Canada, the Czech Republic failed to qualify for the forthcoming World Cup in South Africa. They’re better than we are, of course, but the margin isn’t as considerable as it was in the past and the Czechs are getting older rather than younger. There was even a rumour that the Czechs would be playing us in one of our November friendlies that ended up going to Poland, which is surely a sign that you’re starting to slip down the table. However, Jacob Lensky has allegedly looked at them and said that “you know what? That U-21 team sounds good!” Now, in fairness, the Czech U-21s are going to the World Cup, whereas ours are not, but that’s still a pretty ridiculous decision, particularly since the bizarre weightings given to each confederation in U-21 World Cup qualifying means that it’s a much looser test of a nation’s relative skill.

No, I’m not here to make any snide remarks about the “treason scale” or to say that Jacob Lensky is now worse than Hitler. The only reason I thought that Lensky would be true to the Canadians was that I didn’t think the Czechs would want him. Apparently his strong showing at left back with FC Utrecht in the Eredivisie has opened some eyes in Europe, and he’s probably won a spot fair and square. He’s starting for a surprisingly strong team in a vastly underrated league and doing well there; why wouldn’t the Czechs want to give him a look?

Let’s just remember the reason why Lensky is on FC Utrecht in the first place. “Feyenoord is saddened by the player’s departure, given that his footballing qualities were unquestionable,” in the words of Feyenoord’s then-director of football Peter Bosz, after the Dutch giants courteously released Lensky to return to Vancouver after he retired from football and declared his intention to never ever strap on a set of studs again. Almost exactly a year later he returned to the Eredivisie after training with the Vancouver Whitecaps, signing on with Feyenoord’s rivals in Utrecht. Feyenoord, having given Lensky his release under what turned out to be false pretense, didn’t receive a transfer fee in exchange for serving a promising youngster up to a rival on a silver platter.

That’s without even getting into his earlier youth career, where he played for almost every halfway decent academy in Europe before leaving, not because of a lack of skill but because his family had some problem with this or he wasn’t adjusting well to that or in general being a grotesque prima donna entirely out of proportion to his admittedly considerable talent. To quote Lensky in a rather ill-headlined interview with Red Nation Online:

People enjoy talking about me, my brother and father like it’s some pity story, but people don’t know what they’re talking about so those keyhole theories just need to stop.

Well, your father yanked you across the universe to satisfy his own ego to have a son playing as a superstar in professional football, and his pressure drove your supposedly older brother out of the game entirely. I’m not making these things up; talk to the guys who witnessed it. And now you’re taking a big risk and throwing away your Canadian eligibility so you can play for the youth time of your father’s homeland? Where’s the keyhole theory, Jacob? It is a pity story. And what a shame you’ve taken the only country that hasn’t rejected you so far and turned that pity into anger.

I’d say that I wished Jacob the best but I don’t, of course. Well, maybe I do. I hope that he puts the bravado, bluster, and pressure behind him and finds an occupation that he really loves, rather than football which his own interview indicates he sees as a mercenary, merely a means to an end. I wish him nothing but ill on the pitch, but maybe what’s best for Jacob Lensky the athlete isn’t what’s best for Jacob Lensky the man.