Until last night, the Whitecaps had not lost in their last ten matches and not lost at home for the entire 2010 season. It’s easy to forget with their completely horrifying scoring totals but the Whitecaps aren’t a bad team. One of the three or four best in the USSF D2, certainly, and a side that ought to make some noise come playoff time.

But Portland? God, it had to be Portland.

It all started out so well. We had history in our corner, with Portland going winless at Swangard Stadium since May of 2004. The team was playing well whereas the Timbers were no longer the lead pipe cinch as “best team in the second division”. Oh, sure, they have Ryan Pore, who is so far and away the league’s most valuable player they’re probably saving time and engraving his name on the trophy right now. But that’s one man against the best defense in the division. I was quietly confident as I sat down to watch the webcast on my dinky little laptop.

(Okay, that’s a lie. I was terrified. I’m always terrified when we play the Timbers, particularly of late, because they’re better than we are. It’s not the same as playing the Impact or Toronto FC, but the Timbers were for years the whipping boys of the Cascadia Cup and to see them incarnate as a USSF D2 powerhouse makes me quiver in fear.)

Teitur Thordarson was continuing his odd “we don’t need no stinking strikers” experiment and, with Randy Edwini-Bonsu on the limp due to a minor leg injury, took it even further than usual. Cornelius “All Smoke No Fire” Stewart was the only true striker in the lineup, getting the start up front with converted midfielder Nizar Khalfan. The bench was equally offense-deficient with not a single striker at Thordarson’s disposal. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to see Ethan Gage recalled from exile, and Alex Semenets is a fine Residency midfielder with some finishing chops, but Teitur had apparently decided to win this one 0 – -1.

For the first fifty minutes, Vancouver and Portland just traded body blows. Even on a little laptop screen in Edmonton it was something to watch. It’s an axiom that the players never take a rivalry as seriously as the fans, but I can’t remember ever seeing Vancouver and Portland face each other and play any way other than their best. Portland, as you’d expect, had more possession but did less with it than Vancouver, which was able to penetrate the Timbers defense slightly more easily.

Although why I criticized Teitur’s selection I don’t know, because Khalfan was a dynamo. He brings pace and power, if nothing else, and that’s a pretty formidable conversation. Philippe Davies was playing on the right wing and had another of his increasing number of terrific games, but his most important play was rather a limp one. He tried a cross, probably to Stewart, but misplayed it and it skipped rather weakly to Khalfan. No problem, though. Nizar buried it. 1-0 Whitecaps, and one more goal for Vancouver than I thought they were going to get.

In the end, it was a feat of individual talent which swung things. Ryan Pore, that devilish son of a bitch, caught a nice through ball and went for a run. Greg Janicki has been one of Vancouver’s most reliable defenders all season but he was caught flat-footed on this one and was well behind Pore as he streaked in on a breakaway. Desperate, Janicki dove out and tripped Pore from behind, leaving the Timbers star to fall ass over teakettle and leaving referee Michael Edmunds no option but to call for a penalty and send Janicki off.

The only thing worse than a red card offense is a clear red card offense. Dammit, Greg, you couldn’t have given us some controversy? But no. Pore took the penalty, of course, and scored, of course, and it was 1-1.

Down to ten men, the Whitecaps kept their spirits up. Once again the game started to ebb and flow between the two goals, with the Timbers trying to press their advantage and Vancouver giving them everything they could handle. Vancouver played a slightly more chippy style, with Davies picking up a yellow card and very nearly grabbing another soon after (an astute Thordarson replacing the young Canadian midfielder with another young Canadian midfielder Alex Elliott), and conceded more free kicks than any of us would like to see. Ryan Pore took one of them in the seventy-first minute, lobbing a little ball into the area, easy enough for the defenders to deal with, and no! Jay Nolly! Get back in your goal! What are you doooooiiiiiiiiing? and it was 1-2.

Seeing Jay Nolly screw up, and screw up so egregiously, was a shock to the senses. Pore’s ball was uncharacteristically tame, from him, but Nolly had come thundering off his line to try and grab it. He never came close, never could have come close, and the ball kicked off a Whitecaps defender towards Portland centre back Mamadou “Futty” Danso. With some surprising power and precision for a player at his position Danso slammed it into the Whitecaps goal with Nolly out of the picture, and the Timbers had it won.

Oh, there were some last formalities, of course. The Whitecaps seemed to have had a bucket of cold water dumped on their heads and played their balls out looking for an equalizer. Nizar Khalfan (again) had the best chance, forcing a remarkable save out of Steve Cronin on a hard-struck low-driven ball. But here is where Teitur’s defense-heavy bench burned him. When Stewart was flagging, as he always does late in matches, there was no possible way to get more offense on. Thordarson ended up bringing in guys like Justin Moose and Takashi Hirano, players with some knowledge of how to move the ball up but none whatsoever on how to finish it off. It wasn’t enough.

So the Timbers won, again. They retain the Cascadia Cup, which they won last year under similarly heart-breaking circumstances. It’ll almost be a relief to get to MLS next season and have Seattle re-join the competition, because that way if Portland whips us again we might be able to blame a third club for the standings turning out badly, Montreal Impact-style. Because there’s no silver lining here. We lost because we do stupid things sometimes, and the mortal enemy got to keep his silverware in his last appearance on our home grass.

Soccer sucks.

Edit: well-traveled Canadian soccer journalist Duane Rollins informs me via Twitter that the stutter-step Barbara took – where he hesitated rather than came to a complete stop – is still legal. The irony of criticising a referee for not knowing a rule when I may not have known the rule myself is not lost on me.

I’ve got a confession to make. I didn’t actually watch the first half of the match between the Whitecaps and the Carolina Railhawks. You see, the game was being played simultaneously with the third period of Philadelphia – Chicago, Stanley Cup finals, game six, and there is still enough hockey-lover in me that I wanted to see the Stanley Cup awarded (which eventually it was). When the first few Blackhawks had finished skating around with their prizes I flipped on the live feed of the Whitecaps game just in time to see the ball placed at centre for the start of the second half. And the two teams battled it out for forty-five minutes, and nobody scored, and the Whitecaps, who draw more than Bob Ross, picked up another single point for their growing collection.

There was some second-half excitement. Doudou Toure got in about five minutes of very exciting action before being substituted out after an unfortunate clash of heads. Marcus Haber did not score but finally began to look useful, which is a case of awkward timing given that this was the last home match in his loan stint as the Whitecaps now embark on the road for five (!) matches and Haber will return to West Bromwich Albion at the end of June. Martin Nash played a whale of a game defensively and probably left his feet more often in that half than I’ve seen him all season. It wasn’t bad, really, but not much went on.

Which is a pity because all the action was in the first half. Ansu Toure’s second goal of the season, for example, built off of a splendid passing play and tapped into the back of the goal, the sort of play that the overly-fancy Whitecaps have attempted all season and actually pulled off maybe once. Or Carolina’s goal, which is drizzled in a simply stunning amount of controversy. In stoppage time at the end of the first half, Zurab Tsiskaridze was rocked going up for a ball at centre and spent some time down in a heap without drawing a foul as the Railhawks attacked the other way. The ball was worked into the area by Etienne Barbara of Carolina, who had it out with Nelson Akwari in a running battle through the area. At length, Barbara went down and referee David Barrie pointed to the spot, as they say, without hesitation.

The fans thought that Tsiskaridze had been fouled. The fans thought that Barbara hadn’t. So imagine their hooting and derision as Barbara stepped up to take the spot kick, and imagine the derision that turned into disbelief and open horror as Barbara performed the infamous paradinha, the stutter-step penalty move that has been popularized by South American footballers but spread around the globe. It is sometimes effective but frequently considered unsporting and against the spirit of the game. But lots of things are unsporting and against the spirit of the game; what’s important is that the paradinha has also been illegal since May. It wasn’t exactly a headline-grabbing rule change but one hopes that, oh, I don’t know, a professional referee would have been aware of it.

Personally, watching the replays, I think that Tsiskaridze had the misfortune to be hurt on a fifty-fifty ball and wasn’t fouled (he returned to play in the second half and seemed no worse for wear), and that Akwari was grabbing Barbara enough that a penalty was a realistic, if a slightly soft, call. But the botched paradinha stuns me. The rulebook says that, if a player attempts the stutter-step, he should receive a yellow card and the kick should be retaken. Not exactly the end of the world. Etienne Barbara is a professional striker, one of the best players on quite a good Carolina team, and a Maltese international. If given the chance he probably could have converted a second penalty and he doesn’t play rough enough for a yellow to be a serious issue. This game probably winds up a 1-1 draw all the same.

But oh my god. David Barrie gets paid cash money to officiate soccer games and he doesn’t stay up-to-date on changes to the rules of soccer. Screaming about second division refereeing is an extremely popular pastime (and one in which I have indulged from time to time) and this is one of the reasons why. Too many of the referees seem less like professionals and more like enthusiastic amateurs – “oh, you want me to come ref a game Wednesday? Cool! I’ll hose off my cleats!” One can almost picture the referee and his assistants at half sharing orange slices like six-year-olds in a youth league, such is the amateurism. I will miss a great deal about the second division when Vancouver moves up to MLS – the stadium, the fans, the atmosphere, the exclusivity and snob value of cheering for a club most of the city doesn’t care about – but one thing I will not miss is the refereeing. Yes, the jump to Major League Soccer and, with it, major league officiating will doubtless ease many a worried mind…

…oh, crap.

Okay. So, while “does not know the rules” is a fairly major complaint, it turns out every soccer fan in the continent has something to hate about their referees. Actually, it’s more like every soccer fan in the world, and I can think of a few Irish fans who were shouting obscenities at their monitors every time I bitched about a referee not knowing what the rules are. Benito Archundia may be the worst referee in the world but he’s also good enough to serve at approximately one hundred million World Cups. Bad refereeing is a universal problem, it seems. One from which there is no escape.

Seriously, though. The paradinha has been illegal for three weeks. You’ll let me have my irrational bitterness on this one, won’t you? Pretty please?

It’s simple. It’s annoyingly “representative”: the mountains I can see, but the bits of the water are supposed to be waves? It looks like two Umbro logos tipped on their sides like Coke machines in a high school. The colours are weird, and it’s hard to imagine how it’ll look on an actual uniform. It is such a huge departure from anything the Whitecaps or 86ers have ever had that it forfeits twenty-four years of iconographic legacy.

I think it’s terrific. Look at that thing! The trend in North American soccer lately appears to be towards simple, unambitious logos: witness AC St. Louis, the Philadelphia Union, etc. I think this is the greatest trend of all time. If Real Salt Lake changed their name, MLS would actually look and sound classier than half the leagues in Europe.

In truth, I like it better than the current logo. I feared I’d be alone in this because it’s such a radical departure, but the reaction on the Southsiders forum is almost universally in favour and even the Twittersphere is approving. The old spit-curl-wave logo wasn’t particularly beloved among the fandom (the point of the shield was off-center! You have no idea how much that has fucked me up over the years!) and by disclaiming ambition and shoving-in-every-possible-symbol disease, this logo attains a certain timeless elegance.

If I could change one thing, I might scrub the ‘Vancouver’ and the ‘FC’. It’s the ‘FC’ I particularly dislike – we know you’re a football club, guys; no hockey team could pull off a logo like that. And you’d have to kill the ‘Vancouver’ in the name of balance. Just ‘WHITECAPS’ in big white letters. Yessss. Although that would run the risk of making it look like the icon for a construction company.

Speaking of construction companies, and on an entirely unrelated note, FC Edmonton unveiled their full slate of ticket prices today. The domestic friendly prices are unchanged from what I previously reported, and an end-zone seat at Commonwealth for the premiere international friendlies will set you back $25. Have you ever watched a soccer game from the end-zones at Commonwealth? I cannot physically describe to you how much I don’t recommend it. For a seat you can actually watch a soccer game from, you’re laying out $35. That’s a lot of pie.

They’re setting major-league prices for what is, so far, minor-league talent getting stomped into the FieldTurf by more illustrious adversaries. It would be nice to see Portsmouth or Colo-Colo, of course, if you were a soccer-starved Edmontonian. But if the fan pays $35 to see the famous team, watches the famous team win 6-0 over an overwhelmed FC Edmonton, and then is asked to shell out for season tickets the next year… that can’t be a good start, can it?

This is one of those nights where it hardly seems to be worth talking about the game.

The match was utterly dire, a bore of a scoreless draw between two clubs that could not possibly have cared less. The Whitecaps, playing predominantly a first team, came out like they had nothing to play for and knew it. The Toronto regulars were similarly disposed. Less frequent visitors to both lineups, like Philippe Davies for Vancouver and the TFC Academy kids, had a lot more heart and a lot more hustle but less skill. The catastrophic weather, with levels of rain that would make Vancouver blush and a pitch so slippery the Blackhawks and Islanders later skated on it, also inclined the veterans towards conservatism, and so boredom reigned.

I thought Marcus Haber deserved his red card. From where I was sitting at BMO Field, he began the slide after Toronto’s player had got rid of the ball, had his spikes up, and was generally launching an utterly reckless sliding tackle from a player who ought to know better. On a level I was relieved because it meant I wouldn’t have to watch Marcus Haber any more, but on another level it shattered Vancouver’s already slim chances of grabbing a goal. I thought that playing Cornelius Stewart and, later, Randy Edwini-Bonsu alone up front after Haber’s ejection was overly conservative on Teitur Thordarson’s part. But two records remain standing as a result of that conservatism. The Whitecaps complete an undefeated Voyageurs Cup with no wins, no losses, and four draws, and Toronto FC completes an actually triumphant undefeated campaign where they never conceded a goal.

So rather than talk about the game, let’s talk about something else.

As you’d know if you read this site (and if you don’t read this site how did you get this far?), I went to Montreal and Toronto for the away legs. In the course of my travels I hit Bar 99 with the Montreal Ultras after that particular disappointing draw. I hit the Duke of Gloucester with U-Sector to watch Canada take on Venezuela, and after this match I was snared by a Red Patch Boy on my way out of BMO Field and went to Shoeless Joe’s for a thoroughly enjoyable post-game. With apologies to the North End Elite and Tribal Rhythm Nation, I’ve spent more time around away supporters than half the supporters do the last two weeks.

And, you know, it’s the damndest thing. When I was in Montreal I laughed with the Ultras and talked about how, whatever our differences, one thing we had in common was that we all hate Toronto FC. Down at Shoeless Joe’s, I laughed with the Red Patch Boy who brought me in and we agreed that, however many differences we have, we both know that we all hate the Montreal Impact. I can imagine Montreal and Toronto supporters commiserating over a beer and saying that, for all their many disagreements, they know that at least they’re not fucking Southsiders.

It’s easy to forget for those of us who spend more time trolling the discussion boards than actually meeting with our fellow supporter, but ultimately, we’re all coming to matches for the same things. We want to hang out with old friends and make new friends and sing and chant and make a ruckus and cheer our team on to victory, and with all of that common ground the colour of laundry we’re cheering for is really a very minor detail.

I don’t want to get too maudlin here  (although I’m writing this with a fair bit of liquor in me), but I think that we sometimes exaggerate the rivalries forming between us supporters groups. A bit of heat is a good thing. A Whitecaps game, to me, means more when it’s against the Impact or the Timbers than it does against AC St. Louis or the Carolina Railhawks, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But that’s not an excuse to go around picking virtual fights with the Timbers Army or the Montreal Ultras and generally being an asshole. There are few enough Canadian soccer supporters in this country as it is without dividing ourselves further and driving each other away with a constant avalanche of hostility and abuse masquerading as rivalry.

There’s nothing wrong with giving each other the gears, or building those rivalries. When I call Toronto FC supporters “plastics”, it’s a shot but it’s meant in good spirits. When Toronto FC supporters call us Whitecaps fans pot-smoking hippies, I can take it in the same light. Nobody is saying that everybody needs to join hands and sing and dance, or even particularly get along. Just that we can’t let the comforting veil of Internet anonymity divide our too-small community and turn us all into complete cocksuckers.

When I whine like this I’m not so much referring to guys at usector.ca talking shit about their opponent du jour, or the pro-Montreal blogs saying pro-Montreal things, or similar internal affairs. I’m talking about the fact that even the Voyageurs forum has, in some parts, become a cesspool for intra-club rivals sniping at each other. I’m talking about the fact that, more and more, the sort of soccer fan you are in this country depends on which of the big three clubs you support, and if you’re a neutral (or, God help you, a third-division supporter) then you’d better just get out of the way before you wind up crawling under the bed and sobbing at how stupid a bunch of otherwise intelligent people could be.

It bears repeating. When we actually meet up, be it under the national team banner or because some of us are going to support our club on the road, we tend to get along pretty well. Almost every story you hear about particularly infamous club supporters runs something like “yeah, on-line he’s a real asshole but he’s pretty cool in person”. It’s early days for Canadian soccer fandom, and for the most part we don’t actually hate each other quite yet.

There is, after all, quite a large gulf between rivalry and hatred, between wanting Dwayne De Rosario to get hit by the team bus and wanting the supporters to get dragged under the wheels with him. I hope that we never bridge that gulf, because one of the best assets of the Canadian soccer community is that, for all the countless differences between us, we are a community. The Canadian soccer world is united in a way that most countries can never be because, ultimately, we’re all in the same boat. We’re all cheering for a team ranked sixty-third in the world when most of us think that’s too high. We all support clubs that are in leagues of dubious stability and we all have a history of watching teams we loved suspended or killed off. Whether you root for the big bad MLS boys in their soccer-specific stadium or the Canadian Soccer League team whose games are sporadically canceled because the pitch has plywood under it, you’re an underdog.

The success of Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto is terrific. The future success of Edmonton, Ottawa, and others is something to hope for. But if that success comes at the cost of fracturing the Canadian soccer world and destroying the unity that brought us the Voyageurs Cup in the first place, it’ll be of questionable value. For now, I’ll rejoice in the fact that when we gather, nobody can celebrate the beautiful game like a Canadian regardless of what colour he wears. I’ll cheer for Toronto in the CONCACAF Champions League not because I like them but because they’re Canadian and that’s what counts. I’ll adopt the Red Green philosophy: “remember, I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.”

And next time some opposition fan on some message board says something so stupid and inflammatory it can’t help but be destroyed in rhetorical rage, I’ll take a deep breath and I’ll leave it alone. And I hope you will too.

The Voyageurs Cup is over. After the match tonight, Toronto FC will be presented with their justly-earned championship trophy even if they somehow contrive to lose this game by sixty. There’s more of a chance of that than usual, given that Toronto has called up seven TFC Academy kids to at least observe proceedings tonight. But even if it did happen it wouldn’t be in the least relevant.

This being Canada, there’s still controversy over this meaningless game and Toronto’s possible decision to play a bunch of its youngsters in a game that has no relevance to them. Okay, there’s not really any controversy, just a few blindly anti-Toronto people saying their usual blindly anti-Toronto nonsense and a few blindly pro-Toronto people blowing it up into something more than it really is. But it still merits comment, on account of all the actual controversy last year when Montreal played its scrubs in a game irrelevant to them but still very relevant to the country.

Of course, this game is nothing like Montreal – Toronto last year. The tournament is decided this time around and Toronto has every right to play whichever useless pieces of Academy detritus it desires. But I hope they do run out a strong lineup, because this game is on Sportsnet (East and West) and as such is something of a showcase for soccer in this country. It’s true that Sportsnet has always given soccer short shrift, and restricting it to East and West when the two competing teams are in the Pacific and Ontario regions indicates once again that they don’t really care about the game. But people from Edmonton or Halifax channel-flipping and ending up on a tepid BMO Field half-heartedly cheering an avalanche of guys only the hardcores have ever heard of as two teams fight not to get embarrassed by the other… that’s not a very good sales pitch for soccer in this country.

Besides, I’m selfish. This is the last time Vancouver will ever face an MLS team in a competitive match before they move up to MLS themselves. There’s a certain joy in giant-killing that’s lost when you simply beat a rival that’s an equal to yourself. But that giant-killing only counts if the giant hasn’t tied both hands behind his back. I’m sure that the TFC Academy players would be fired up to play the Whitecaps, and I’m also sure that they’re highly competent. They can probably stand up to a Vancouver second eleven better than most non-observers like me would give them credit for. But I’m also sure that if the Whitecaps beat them that’s not an accomplishment, and that if they beat the Whitecaps… hoo boy.

We don’t actually know how many of those seven Academy kids will play, yet, or if any of them will start, or how many of them will even be on the bench. We don’t know if Dwayne De Rosario will get a half, or the start, or a night off. Preki plays his cards irritatingly close to the vest. We don’t know how good the support will be. It is a Wednesday night and for a meaningless game, will some of the supporters stay home? Certainly some of the casuals are (and who can blame them?). Will the cheering be as raucous for second- or third-tier players in a meaningless game? Heck, from what they say Toronto fans don’t even hate the Whitecaps that much, which would take away that little zest that can fire up a crowd in an otherwise dull game (but also means that I may not get beaten up unless I get drunk and start shouting about how plastic all the supporters are, and from what I understand of BMO Field beer that’s an expensive proposition).

I want the Whitecaps to win, because they’re my team and I always want them to win. But it doesn’t matter if they lose. It’s sort of nice, having all the pressure off.  I mean, boy, it would be embarrassing if TFC Academy whooped us but it wouldn’t actually affect anything. I can walk and talk and watch and smile and generally have a good time, and if Vancouver somehow pulls the rabbit of a victory out of their hat then I can sing and cheer and have a gay old time. Either way the game’s at beautiful BMO Field, which I’ve never been to before but seems like a lovely facility, on what will either be a lovely night or a thunder-and-lightning hellstorm fully suitable for football drama, depending on which weather report you believe.

Even though I probably shouldn’t, I’m looking forward to it. The Whitecaps might lose, but their supporters can’t, and that’s a rare thing in sports. Best to embrace the moment.

Somewhat to my surprise, upon getting up this morning I discovered that a minor imbroglio has broken out over Marc Dos Santos and the Montreal Impact’s flagrant time-wasting last night at Stade Saputo. Not merely “oh, that’s annoying” like you hear every time a Jose Mourinho team gets a 1-0 lead, but actual debate. Controversy, even. Nothing on the order of Trois-Rivieres Attak 1, Toronto FC 6, but all the same.

I’m not just referring to my esteemed Copper & Blue colleague Bruce’s comments in my tipsily-written recap from last night. At Bar 99 with a few of the Montreal Ultras last night, I heard a draw called “the worst possible result” since the Impact fans didn’t get the delight of a victory and the Whitecaps fans were knocked out of the tournament, but I really didn’t think any more of it. Yet this morning, the Voyageurs board and to a lesser extent the Southsiders forum are alive decrying, or at least considering, Montreal’s decision to waste time and go for a 1-1 draw. Even occasional Maple Leaf Forever contributor pRoke chimed in on my Facebook wall, saying “if I were the referee I would have given Djekanovic a 2nd yellow for time wasting”.

I haven’t really changed my position from last night. I think dos Santos was entitled to sit on a draw if he wanted to. There was no danger of his delegitimizing the championship as he did last year with the reserve fiasco. Montreal is a fiendishly talented team but Vancouver showed the better offense last night, even after the Impact parked the bus: perhaps dos Santos simply made a tactical assessment that if he opened up, his chances of getting burned for a Vancouver goal were too great. That is a coach’s job, after all, and had he gambled and lost the excoriation in the Montreal and Toronto soccer presses would have been considerable.

What’s most important is the dignity of our championship and the worthiness of its winner. The best contribution Montreal could make, once eliminated, would be to play their last match like it meant something. If it had been a league game, would dos Santos have bunkered like that in such a context? Maybe, but he certainly wouldn’t have blown open the barn doors looking for a goal.

Oh, how I wish dos Santos had thrown caution to the wind, said “dammit, my fans paid to see us win,” and sent Byers, Sebrango, and Placentino thundering down the pitch like their hair was on fire. Because the Whitecaps might have snatched one on the break and we’d be talking about the game next Wednesday in terms other than “how many Academy players should Toronto start?” At the very least Montreal might have scored and the Ultras would have been charmingly insufferable instead of vaguely depressed. But as a manager, Marc dos Santos did his job, and as a Canadian he did right by his national tournament. The prick.

Gutted. Horrified. Infuriated. A whole bevy of emotions, each of them negative.

Should I be pleased that we deserved the result we got, that there’s no “you lucky skunks” 6-1 victory hanging over our head like the Sword of Damocles, that Toronto FC has won our national championship in unimpeachably, impeccably pure and correct fashion? Probably, from an intellectual perspective, but I genuinely don’t care right now. We came all this way just to draw. Just to draw.

Where was the urgency, the desperation, the drive? It showed up in spots, once in a while. Martin Nash had a chip on his shoulder. In spite of his lack of pace he can be omnipresent in midfield when he has a mind and he nearly achieved those rarified heights tonight, with the Impact having no answer to his effective distribution and his surprisingly strong positioning. There was a man who wanted to win. So, too, did Wes Knight, who flew up and down the right-hand channel and whose clean tackles saved the Whitecaps at least one goal against. Nowhere else, from the bench to the starting eleven, was there a player who left me consistently pleased with his effort. The headlines said that the Whitecaps would hold nothing back, but their effort showed a team that thought there were games yet to play.

I am so flabbergasted that I am beyond speech. The questions are bubbling in my head, overriding any effort at analysis. Why was Marcus Haber so utterly decrepit? Perhaps his transfer to West Brom convinced him he is better than he actually is, for Haber was full of athleticism. He thundered with that ball down the wings and no Impact defender could get that thing off of him for love of money, yet what on earth did he achieve with it? What did he even come close to accomplishing?

It has been one long season of struggle for Haber, once the USL-1 golden boy, whose only moment of glory this season has come courtesy a Voyageurs Cup penalty. But Teitur Thordarson’s faith in young Haber is unshakable. Teitur cannot be building for the future, as of course Haber’s loan spell ends soon and he will be returning to West Bromwich Albion. So why the continued selection? Cornelius Stewart, once again, left the older and larger Haber in his dust. Even debutant Doudou Toure was far Haber’s superior, and I’d have rather had Marlon James than Haber ten times out of ten.

Yet James, though healthy for once, sat on the bench for the duration. Why, Teitur? Why? Perplexing decisions were not limited to the players, after all.

One decision that did not perplex me was Montreal’s; to waste time and go for the draw. Last year, we criticized them for not caring enough about the Voyageurs Cup and not giving Vancouver a fair chance. Now, we criticize them for caring about Toronto’s rights too much and not opening themselves up to go for a victory they didn’t need. Time-wasting is despicable anti-football and Montreal was right to employ it.

The problem was that we made it so easy for them. Credit to Ansu Toure, whose goal was a lovely thing, the sort of scrappy blue-collar effort the Whitecaps have had the devil’s own time getting this season. His celebration was worth the price of admission on its own. But when Toure scored the Whitecaps grew complacent – in the stands, even I said to myself “here is what we’re good at, defending the lead”. Marc dos Santos was having none of it, bringing in his best striker Peter Byers for his worst midfielder Tyler Hemming and going with a 4-3-3. The Impact promptly proceeded to shove it down Vancouver’s throat.

Everything went wrong. Greg Janicki, who until that moment I was convinced had super powers from his omnipresent cranial bandage, was beaten cleanly; torn between dropping back and challenging the ball he did neither and was shredded for his trouble. The ball instead found its way at the top of the box to defender Philippe Billy. I don’t really know much about Philippe Billy beyond what I hear from the Montreal Ultras, and what I hear is that he’s a fat tub of lard not worth the all-too-considerable salary the Impact are paying him. So imagine my horror when that round mound made a nifty side-step and pounded the ball past a helpless Jay Nolly to level affairs.

Such a lovely goal from such a fat man. And the astonishing thing was that as the game wore on and Billy went to the sidelines for water during stoppages and was so drenched in sweat it looked like he had come out of a wet t-shirt contest he just kept going, virtually toying with the Whitecaps, and only Zourab Tsiskaridze came anywhere near being able to cope with Billy.

As the game wore on, the Whitecaps started to realize their dire straits, but they reacted in entirely the wrong fashion. Rather than build up and generate attack they sprayed the ball wildly, wasted corners and free kick opportunities, and generally acted like they had ten seconds left rather than twenty minutes. Doudou Toure made his first appearance as a Whitecap, was fast as hell, and in my opinion drew a foul in the area during stoppage time, but lacked the skill to put the Whitecaps over the top. Marcus Haber was terrible. Cornelius Stewart, bless him, was too exhausted to make a difference. The midfield and the defense hoofed the ball up, and as the game wore on only Takashi Hirano (of all people, he of the utter awfulness against Toronto last week) showed any touch or patience whatsoever.

There was nothing. None of the competence or confidence we saw as recently as Saturday. There was merely offensive impotence, midfield idiocy, and defensive ineptitude. There was nothing we could hang our hat on. Even Doudou Toure’s missed would-be penalty felt like a cheat – we didn’t deserve to win on a ninetieth-minute penalty anyway.

There was no question about who deserved the Voyageurs Cup this year, and when I gird myself to cheer for Toronto FC in the CONCACAF Champions League I will at least have the comfort of knowing that our best representative is taking part. Their supporters must be thrilled. But I hope you’ll excuse me if I take some more time to wallow in misery and the humiliating defeat of a team that is, technically, undefeated in the tournament.

What more revolting phrase is there than “playing for pride”? The mere use of it carries a host of implications more fit for the nineteenth century. “Oh, there’s nothing on the line in this game, really, except pride! Bragging rights! That ephemeral athletic chivalry which compels a sportsman to play his blood out for any stakes!” Yet ultimately every match, from a Sunday afternoon for your rec team to the Champions League final, is for pride. Those titles and trophies only hold meaning insofar as players take pride in the achievement and fans take pride in their champions. If a team will not take pride in a game against a professional opponent just because there’s no shiny trophy at the end, they have far greater problems than merely one game.

So yeah, the Montreal Impact have nothing but pride to play for tomorrow, but that should be enough. The Impact have been precious short on pride the last couple of years, what with 6-1 and Roberto “Duran” Brown and actually giving ruffian Adam Braz a professional paycheque. Impact supporters can point with some justification to their USL Division One title in 2009 and their ownership of the Whitecaps in USSF D2 league play. But none of that was on national television against (it galls me to say) the largest, best-supported club in the country. It is a hard truth that pride in obscurity cannot scrub the stain of humiliation before millions.

For the sake of all Canadian soccer fans, the Impact had better play as close to their first team Wednesday as they can get. For their own fans, for the neutrals watching across the country, and even for the innocent Vancouver supporters who already hear the bleating of the more deranged TFC types before the game has even begun (I will not dignify such filth with a link), whinging about a capitulation they view as inevitable.

I’m quite serious. As a Southsider who’ll be at Stade Saputo tomorrow, I want to see Montreal’s best. The Whitecaps winning the Voyageurs Cup right now would take an upset that would make 6-1 look like a game of Parcheesi and I wouldn’t want a Toronto-sized asterisk if by some miracle we did pull off those two wins in two games. Yes, it would balance accounts for last year’s debacle, but some accounts are better not balanced. The last thing our national championship needs is another credibility-sapping capitulation.

Would Marc dos Santos dare to run out the scrubs anyway? Remember, the Impact boss took a bath in the press for his tactics last time out and Joey Saputo actually apologized to the Whitecaps on his team’s behalf. Not even the Ultras, who could be expected to best understand the strategic logic, forgave too easily. Would he really imperil his reputation with a repeat performance? I doubt it. He may dress like a model but Marc’s no Derek Zoolander. We probably won’t see his best eleven but the lineup could be comparable to what Toronto ran out last week at Swangard Stadium, at least.

If he does that, the Impact should be able to do what is required of them. Vancouver’s strung together a couple inspirational performances in a row but even with the goalless drought over Vancouver’s offensive offense is a 72-point question mark. Montreal’s looked the better side so far in the league and has a defense more than equal to Vancouver’s anemic attack. A draw decides the Cup, and in their own building the Impact should get at least one point.

That would, of course, leave next week’s Toronto – Vancouver game as just two teams playing for pride. But I don’t see that being a problem.

I am emotionally drained and physically exhausted. I slump in an unfamiliar chair in North Vancouver, a nervous wreck devoid of intelligence or energy. It is eleven PM. I bought dinner from PetroCanada, because it’s the sort of night when you want to buy dinner from a gas station at 11 PM, but it sits next to my laptop untouched. I am too beaten-down, too exhausted, too completely played out to move.

We needed a win and the stars aligned in so many ways. Preki did not play a second-choice lineup but he started just enough of his bench that the Whitecaps had a skill advantage in a few precious positions. Vancouver, as it too seldom has in games this season, came out guns blazing, hungry for a result. The Southside was as packed as I’ve seen it and as raucous as it’s ever been. I arrived late and as such heard the chanting from outside the stadium – my walk towards Swangard heralded by “here we go, here we go, here we goooo” as if they were serenading me in my absence.

How could we not win? That question keeps insisting itself upon me. How in heaven and earth did we not win that game? The refereeing was not partial but it was bad, as bad as it’s ever been in a match I’ve attended. That’s one reason. Toronto was just plain lucky, getting more than their share of fortunate deflections of shots off of legs and bodies and heads. That was another. Ultimately, it came down to that for once the world’s worst football prognosticator, myself, was right when he said what the Whitecaps’ glaring weakness was, when he started the “sign Ali Gerba” bandwagon and rode it as its lonely single passenger, when he cried and wailed and gnashed his teeth that this team refused to acquire a pure finishing striker when they were ankle-deep on the ground for the taking.

So we outplayed Toronto, and kept the more glamourous names pinned back in their own end for long stretches, and got a rogue’s gallery of chances, and drew. We’re on two points and Toronto is on seven. Two wins in our last two games and we’re through. The Voyageurs Cup is not over, except for the fact that it totally is.

On the SkyTrain, there were a group of soccer moms near me discussing the Voyageurs Cup (by the way, lesson to Toronto plastics: the Vancouver soccer moms can understand and care about the Voyageurs Cup). They were pinning their hopes on a repeat of 2009, when Montreal with nothing to play for fielded a reserve team in the deciding match against Toronto. But after the evisceration the Impact took for their shameful capitulation I would be astonished to see a repeat performance that would “even the score” as it were. Besides, I wouldn’t want to win like that if we could. Country before club and the last thing this amazing tournament needs is a bunch of Toronto plastics questioning its legitimacy now that it’s their team that might get screwed.

And even if we do win that game – which we won’t – we’d be heading into BMO Field, a more hostile domain than any in USSF Division Two, needing three points against higher-level opposition. Higher-level opposition that will have every reason to play its best. Forget it. Not going to happen. We’ll be more likely to see Dwayne De Rosario grow a mullet.

We got the moral victories. I could count the number of times when Justin Moose has impressed me on my fingers after a bandsaw accident but tonight he was the man of the match in my books; omnipresent, devouring allegedly more-skilled players, hustling with aplomb and actually showing the intelligence to make something out of that hustle. The FC leave Swangard Stadium for the last time having never won on that hallowed Burnaby grass, the sort of record that is superficially exciting and completely meaningless. We comprehensively outplayed an MLS team, an MLS team that time-wasted in a nil-nil draw against less famous opposition for fifty minutes and hugged in relief and delight after that draw was over. The neutrals must have been delighted by a free-flowing game, and at Swangard (excepting a particularly obtuse, confrontational Mountie with a baton up his ass) a good time was had by all.

But it was that close. My god, we could have made a competition out of this thing, and instead it’s a coronation.

This is majestic, picturesque, and ironically-named City Centre Park in the quaint little burgh of Langford, British Columbia. It is everything to hate about the modern Canadian soccer stadium. Seating about 1,700 with standing room well over 2,000, the stadium boasts a plastic pitch so the rugby players can use it, lines for multiple sports badly hidden by mediocre paint jobs, one restroom in the form of a porta-potty at the northwest end of the stadium, one beer garden with a thirty-minute line at halftime, and because politicians are idiots it’s out by an industrial park in a far-flung suburb of Victoria.

God, what a fantastic place to watch a soccer game! The sun is shining, the birds are tweeting, there’s a little man-made lake at the east end of the park which is simultaneously incredibly twee and incredibly cool. The plastic pitch is still new enough that the game is quite enjoyable on the surface, security guards aren’t uptight bag-checking assholes, and the fans have the good-spirited nature of people who are watching a semi-professional soccer game in the middle of nowhere and just having a whale of a time.

Last night opened the 2010 USL PDL season, as my boys the Vancouver Whitecaps Residency took on the hometown Victoria Highlanders. Most of the Whitecaps fans were at the actual Whitecaps game in Burnaby against Crystal Palace Baltimore, but as a Victoria resident who’s working Sunday getting to that game was an impossibility. Watching the kids seemed like an enjoyable second choice, so I threw on kit and scarf and walked to the Bard and Banker Pub, downtown gathering place for the Highlanders supporters. The Highlanders supporters club is the Lake Side Buoys (geddit?), who congregate in the Bravehearts section at the east end of the pitch. There was a bit over a dozen of them at the game on this occasion, as well as a healthy four digits attendance from the normal people. In spite of their modest numbers, the Highlanders supporters are a terrific bunch: some of them were be-kilted, there were bagpipers in attendance, and they had a pretty healthy songbook for a small group of people supporting a team in its second season.

The match itself was a far more interesting one than the 0-0 borefest  at Swangard Stadium across the water. The Whitecaps Residency team, by its very nature, is a rather odd bunch. These aren’t guys who are there to win games, really: they’re playing to catch eyes on the Vancouver senior team and play in MLS someday. The roster changes more freely than most in PDL, and tactical priorities sometimes take a back seat to the desires of the first team. The perhaps inevitable result is that the Residency team, too often, plays like eleven individuals rather than a cohesive unit. The fact that the Residency added a new coach (on an interim basis) just a day before this game cannot possibly have helped them.

The Residency team clearly had the more talented players, but the Highlanders had the better team. Not just in their ability to play as a team but physically: the Highlanders were an astonishingly big lineup, particularly at midfield and up front. Their big men didn’t always have the pace to back up their size but their superior form made up for it. Only a few of the Residency players were able to cope with the big Highlanders attack. Central defender Jack Cubbon made a fan in me today: not only was he one of the few Residency players who looked interested in playing with his teammates, but he was the defender who could best handle the larger Highlanders. Cubbon is a pretty tall drink of water himself but he’s also built like a string bean, and he did his best work playing the angles and forcing the Victoria attack into channels it didn’t want to take. He was also just about the only guy on the Residency team who wasn’t completely useless in the air, so naturally he was playing deep and covering the goal line on the corner that led to Victoria’s first goal.

Individually, the two most skilled players on the field were both Residency players: Russell Teibert and Alex Semenets. But they were a study in contrasts. Teibert, the captain, played a roaming midfield role devotees of the Dwayne De Rosario oeuvre would find familiar. He was ridiculously talented on the ball and at times showed very good touch. He was also so short it was like the punchline to a bad joke, although to an extent he made up for it with great jumping ability. However, he was almost completely ineffective throughout the game. Teibert disdained working with his teammates for the most part, preferring to try to do it all himself against the far larger and more mature Highlanders players. He played through balls as if expecting a striker to be on the end of it without checking that the striker was there first. He took most of the Residency corners and wasted them all, and in general his distribution showed that he was incorrectly anticipating events rather than noticing where his players actually were. In spite of taking almost all the dead balls in the first half he was used more sparingly in the second while becoming invisible on the pitch to the point that for a time I thought he had been substituted. Teibert also shies away from contact. A man his size should avoid unnecessary collision, of course, but Teibert took it to an extreme, including charging at defenders as if expecting to be able to get by them, the defender holding his ground, and Teibert just bailing out without the ball in a brutally unforced turnover.

Semenets was far better. He combined Teibert’s skill with the ability to use it as a team player. He reserved the right to take on the entire Highlanders defense by himself but was also willing to try and work with his strikers as well. He scored the Residency’s first goal on a sterling effort: he ran a give-and-go with Teibert that resulted in Teibert actually reading where the play was going and knocking a terrific ball to Semenets. Semenets was at the corner of the area but that didn’t stop him and he labelled a terrific strike that found the top corner, leveling the score at 1-1. Semenets was also responsible defensively and dominated the left side of the pitch for ninety minutes without appearing to tire, in spite of some physical abuse and picking up a knock around the forty-minute mark.

A few of the other Residency players stood out for reasons both good and bad. Goalkeeper Richard Causton got the start for Vancouver and showed some shot-stopping ability, including a penalty. His agility is certainly PDL standard, if maybe not USSF D2. His decision making on his distribution was sometimes bad and he was a very vociferous communicator with his defense: perhaps too vociferous. This is the sort of thing one only notices when standing six feet from the touch line in a PDL stadium; Causton is a classic grumbler, mumbling minced oaths about his defenders whenever the ball went up the pitch. Every goalkeeper does that a bit but Causton kept up a running dialogue throughout the first half when he was close enough for me to hear. Moreover, for all his shouting at defenders his instructions seemed sometimes contradictory and countered by good sense: on the occasion of Vancouver’s first goal he ordered little Russell Teibert to mark a far taller man on the outside when surely an aerial man would have been called for while Jack Cubbon stood around the goal line in a maze of bodies, meaning that neither player was in their best element when the ball was delivered.

Teibert, in general, seemed to be a bit of a whipping boy for Causton. Whatever my complaints about the Residency captain, he picked up his marking assignments and put on an effective, if hardly elite, defensive performance. Causton may have just been upset about the mismatch between his smaller players and Victoria’s oversized attack, but picking on midfielders is hardly the best way to address that.

Substitute striker Caleb Clarke also stood out in the wrong way. At 6′1″, Clarke was a good tall choice against Victoria and has the speed underpinning that size. As soon as Clarke came in for Doudou Toure he became a target man for the Residency. But, for his size, Clarke was putrescent aerially, winning not a single one of the many headers I saw him attempt. Though good enough with the ball at his feet, Clarke was nowhere near Semenets, Teibert, or Toure in that department. Somebody like him has to be able to mix up Vancouver’s attack, and Clarke was found wanting.

The game was chippy, and both sides picked up penalties. Victoria’s came first, in the sixty-sixth minute. I missed the foul on the far end of the pitch, but the crowd howled in derision and the referee did not hesitate in pointing at the spot. Patrick Gawrys, one of the biggest and best Victoria players on the evening, took the kick from the spot after some scuffling and confusion. A poorly-struck spot kick resulted, near the middle of the goal, that Causton blocked easily. But there was enough power that Causton was unable to control the rebound and Gawrys followed up with an easy goal. Gawrys bagged his second hardly ten minutes later on a fine, well-built play from Victoria: the sort of thing that real teams can do even against more talented individuals like Vancouver’s.

The Whitecaps penalty came late, and this time I did see the foul. Clarke had the ball coming down the left-centre into the Highlanders area, and the Victoria defender tried the classic shirt-tug to bring Clarke up short. Clarke, however, had a full head of steam, and whether he meant to or not the Highlander actually stepped up and into Clarke, putting his shoulder into Clarke’s body and sending both players down in a heap. A particularly egregious penalty, and even the Highlanders fans near me admitted “that was pretty bad”.

But Clarke was okay and Kevin Cobby took the kick from the spot. Effortless. Lower corner, and it was a 3-2 Highlanders lead. Vancouver buzzed for the rest of the game, primarily playing long balls to Clarke but getting a few legit chances: one that Clarke badly mishit near the site of his penalty and one from Russell Teibert, who seemed to have an empty cage waiting for him near the top of the box but put a shot through traffic wide.

3-2 Victoria stood as the final, and the better team won. But it was a good contest and one that involved some pretty good fans from the Highlanders, who sang and made noise that you associate with a far higher level than USL PDL. Even the soccer parents in the grandstand were more involved in the game than your stereotypical Canadian fan, applauding and following events with visible agitation. I know there are travel issues, and stadium issues, and all sorts of issues in the way of further growth. But if the Victoria Highlanders keep this up and they’re not in the second division within five years, it’ll be a disgrace.

Also, their supporters had a band going! How awesome is that?