Been a heck of a week for Canadian soccer. The Whitecaps finally – finally! – forgot to concede a late equalizer against the Montreal Impact in spite of their best efforts and actually beat the turds. The Toronto FC finally – finally! – outplayed and outscored a Central American team in the CONCACAF Champions League. Simeon Jackson’s big transfer was made official. Dwayne De Rosario scored against Manchester United, which hasn’t got the same ring as “Gabe Gala scored against Real Madrid” but ought not to be ignored.

So I’m going to talk about the Kansas City Wizards for a bit.

You’ve probably heard that the Wizards are considering rebranding their team. “Kansas City Wizards” has always been a bit of a silly soccer-mom name (better than the old Kansas City Wiz, but oh wooow), and the magical men from Missouri may be seeking a new name to go along with their new stadium. Given MLS’s well-known boner for faux-European names, I immediately trotted out old standards “Inter Kansas City” and “Borussia Monchenkansascity“, although Sam Bazzarelli wins the title with his suggestion of Kansas City City playing out of City of Kansas City Stadium. But even a bogus European-derived name (Atlético Kansas City? Nah, St. Louis will want that one.) would have to be better than the little-tykes-merchandise-peddling moniker like the Kansas City Wizards, right? Right?

You know what? No.

It’s long been a pet peeve of mine that North American soccer culture is too derivative of European football culture. This reflects itself in many MLS fans’ pants-crapping worship of the first-class European leagues. It’s shown off flagrantly every time someone insists it’s called football or that the players put on their kits and run onto the pitch for the match that will be a nil-nil clean sheet draw. You can hear it whenever a crowd in Canada demands to know “who ate all the pies?” when you’d need some sort of satellite network to find a soccer stadium in this country that actually sells them. Every time the goalkeeper is a bastard and the referee’s a wanker and the opposing supporters are tossers. Every time.

Above all, above everything else, we see this ravenous inferiority complex in the names of North American soccer teams. Not just Real Salt Lake, but Toronto FC? This is Canada, and Toronto’s football club is the Argonauts. Same to you, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, which seems determined to mesh both naming paradigms into a wholly unsatisfying mélange (thank god “Whitecaps” has stuck). D.C. United? FC Dallas? Do we have none of our own traditions whatsoever? Thank goodness for brave souls like the New England Revolution and the Philadelphia Union and yes, even those jokey, comic-book Wizards.

In this country, we waste valuable ink and breath wondering why so many of our native sons go to play for the national teams of England or the Czech Republic or Bosnia or the Netherlands (well, maybe not the Netherlands). Has it occurred to us that the reason Canadians seem to think in droves that European teams and traditions are better than ours is that a significant portion of North American soccer culture is predicated on exactly that? That if a Voyageur in the stands with five or six buddies sang something other than warmed-over EPL chants with “Canada” awkwardly spliced in, that if we were enthusiastic about how English we weren’t, and above all if we stopped getting worked up every time a soccer team was given the same sort of nickname as every other sporting club in this country, it might contribute to that elusive “national pride” we’re too often seen lacking?

But, sure, you bunch of traditionalists, forget about it. Name your team “Sporting Kansas City” and bellow whatever invective would seem at home in the cheapest, dingiest Liverpool pubs. We were a British colony once, right? Nothing stopping us from being one again, leaping on whatever shards of European culture drift over the ocean, and embracing our role as Europe’s farm team.

We Canadian soccer fans, east and west, have an annoying habit of blowing things up to proportions they don’t rightly deserve.

Tonight, Toronto FC will take on C.F. Motagua in what the Toronto faithful are really hoping won’t be a repeat of last year’s debacle against the USL Division One Puerto Rico Islanders. The U-Sector board is abuzz with hope and excitement but also concern – more concern than one usually sees for, say, FC Dallas. The Voyageurs, never your best bet for sober second thought but always a good dipstick for the country’s emotional oil, are burning with enthusiasm even absent the usual partisan napalm. On Twitter, Stretty Sam out-and-out calls it “a big match for Canadian soccer“.

Listen, when you’re relying on Duane Rollins to downplay the importance of a Toronto FC game, things are out of hand.

Of course, as a Canadian soccer supporter, it’s in my interests that Toronto beat Motagua tonight. It’s also in my interests that Toronto beat Real Salt Lake or the New York Red Bulls or pretty much any side that isn’t another Canadian team (I’d probably take the Reds over the CSL’s Serbian White Eagles, too). I’d quite like to see Julian de Guzman superkick Amado Guevara through the north stands into where the beer garden used to be, but that’s pleasure rather than business. My usual Whitecaps fan schadenfreude at seeing Toronto lose to a team from a country with a GDP smaller than my shoe size would be dulled ever-so-slightly by the whole Honduras factor, but intellectually I should want Toronto to emerge with a credible win in the CONCACAF Champions League regardless of the opposition.

(You may have noticed that soccer partisanship is not the most intellectual of activities. I know, I know. Bear with me.)

Now, as we know Toronto has a bad history with this tournament. They got over 20,000 fans out to their first ever continental match, more than twice the next-best attendance total that round, and lost 1-0 in what I can safely call the worst game of soccer ever played. The loss to the Puerto Rico Islanders, a team in the same North American pyramid as Toronto FC and therefore mathematically certain to be inferior, devastated the Toronto and Canadian sports scenes to such an extent that over 20,000 fans are expected tonight for a game against a team that sounds like a discount tequila label.

I feel a little dirty praising Toronto FC fans for their support, but the joy is that Canadian soccer fandom has moved beyond the point where a single game can break us. Indeed, if we survived the Montreal Impact’s Thích Quảng Đức job against Santos Laguna, and Toronto’s two years missing the playoffs, and Benito Archundia, and Benito Archundia again, and pretty much everything about Canada’s last World Cup qualification campaign, we’ve probably been past that point for some time. Toronto could lose by a converted touchdown and it wouldn’t mar the Canadian soccer landscape that badly. Moreover, if Toronto wins, they’ll be doing their job and who will be impressed? It would take an awfully long run and maybe a few flares in the Skydome for the Champions League to weigh down the bandwagon with new support.

If you’re a Toronto fan, your team may have a very specific stain to scrub off its honour and godspeed to you in that. For the rest of us, don’t try and tell me that cheering on the FC is a matter of national priority. We’re not infants anymore. We can survive a little fall down the stairs.

I am outrageously, preposterously jealous of you Americans right now.

I’ve been in a bar with a bunch of fellow revellers when Canada’s national soccer team scored a dramatic stoppage time goal to snatch a draw from a loss, and that was pretty good. But all evening long I’ve been watching videos like this and just staring, soullessly, my heart hardly daring a single beat lest the blood rush to my brain and turn me into a seething, sobbing mess of angry sorrow.

Yes, I’m cheering for the Americans in the World Cup. That’s out of principle, not out of affection. I could no more take pleasure in these sublime, primal outbursts of joy for a team that is not my own than I could feel love and awe towards somebody else’s newborn child. And I know that, even when I am at my most optimistic, when I am looking at cheering New Zealanders in South Africa and declaring in 2014 that’ll be us there’s essentially no chance I’ll be able to savour Canada’s getting to the round of sixteen in my lifetime.

I’m still cheering for the Americans, of course. But now I’m sort of depressed about it.

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.

Where’s your father,
where’s your father,
where’s your father, referee?
You don’t have one,
you’re a bastard,
you’re a bastard, referee.

Perfectly above board!

Where’s your girlfriend,
where’s your girlfriend,
where’s your girlfriend, referee?
You don’t have one,
you’re a wanker,
you’re a wanker, referee.

So far, so good!

Where’s your penis,
where’s your penis…

WHOA! Stop right there!

Canadian football fandom can be remarkably schizophrenic sometimes, and a minor sideplot is doing a good job illustrating it. In a week that’s seen Toronto FC playing for its playoff lives against Antonio Ribeiro and Frank Yallop, Asmir Begovic becoming Fredo Corleone, and Montreal taking on Vancouver for all the marbles, the incomparable Two Canadian Guys and Ben Knight Talking About Soccer and the stalwart Andrew Bates of the 24th Minute have both spent time on Impact – Whitecaps referee Carol Anne Chenard, her lack of a ‘Y’ chromosome, and how much that really totally doesn’t matter at all seriously so why are we even talking about it.

I don’t often notice referees, but I tended to notice Chenard in USL-1 and Voyageurs Cup matches because (let’s face it) she has boobies. And I think she’s a fine referee; the Voyageurs Cup was dying for good refereeing and most of the good calls came courtesy Chenard. Saturday night was not her best, though; the red card against Martin Nash was well-earned and it transpired that Peter Byers’s goal was legitimate, but she seemed to struggle calling fouls consistently. This wasn’t an awfully officiated match, but it wasn’t perfect and a few tough-if-accurate calls went against the home team, which is always going to draw interest.  Bates and Knight were concerned that Chenard would be getting more sledging than usual because of her gender – Bates, a card-carrying Southsider, provides an anecdote of a few Southsiders on Saturday trying to start a chant impugning Chenard for her gender and expresses gratitude that it failed.

Now, I’m going to state the obvious so bear with me. Of course Chenard being a woman has no bearing on her competence as a referee. I think we’ve moved past the nineteenth century. No more than ten, maybe twenty percent of sports doctors still think that a woman will lapse into feminine hysterics when confronted with a tough foul in the box (forgive the expression). Knight was correct to say that on the Canadian Guys podcast, and he was also correct when he added that no sensible fan would pick their referees based on race, either. That sort of thing is reprehensible and if somebody in a league office kicks Chenard off a refereeing crew because she’s a woman, that guy should be buried under the north goal at BMO Field when they put the grass in.

What we’ve seen regarding Chenard over the last few days is once again revealing an odd contradiction in football society. Many supporters pride themselves on being anti-authoritarian and working class. When the Whitecaps and the City of Burnaby asked the Southsiders to pretty please not set flares or smoke at Swangard Stadium, the reaction on the Southsiders forum could be summed up as “you’re not the boss of me.” Half the fun of being a supporter is, to quote a shopworn line of Mr. Knight’s, “ten thousand people chanting the F word” – to say things en masse that would get you punched in the testicles if you said them to somebody’s face. So it’s always seemed peculiar to me that football and supporter’s culture draws this neat little dividing line between what is good offensive and what is bad offensive.

My problem is when fans are criticized for bellowing chants about a referee’s gender. We have no problem with stands criticizing the referee’s parentage or marital status. Giving the goalkeeper a “you fat bastard!” is practically de rigeur in Southsider culture. When you chant at somebody on the pitch for being overweight, you’re not submitting a thesis that fat people are drains on society who couldn’t call an offside correctly because they’d be distracted by the smell of hot dogs. To quote the Godfather trilogy for the second post consecutively, it’s nothing personal. It’s strictly business.

I’d never see Carol Anne Chenard at a coffee shop and say “your refereeing is as bad as your parallel parking”, but, then, I’d never grab Bill Gaudette one-on-one and say “you fat bastard, Brett shagged your wife.” The problem with sexism (or racism or any other form of discrimination) in football isn’t yelling things from the stands that might hurt somebody’s feelings, it’s the guy on the 24th Minute post linked above who said that his teammates wouldn’t respect a female referee because of her gender. It’s not a guy who’s had a few beers yelling that the Algerian player is a terrorist while he’s trying to take a goal kick, it’s the guy who’s perfectly sober saying that he doesn’t want one of “them” on his team. The issue isn’t somebody saying “you like it in the ass!” to an opposing striker. The issue is a manager saying that if somebody who actually likes it in the ass is in his dressing room it’ll upset chemistry, and the ignorant players who make it true.

Carol Anne Chenard is a professional referee and a good one. That’s what matters. If she fucks up and I’m in the stands, I will yell everything I can think of at her. That’s not. If you honestly have a problem with that but are totally fine with all the other invective hurled from the stands, you should really re-evaluate things.

One of my pet peeves about the sports media in this country is that they have no idea what a Canadian football fan is like.

Seriously. Open up the pages of a major daily and even a respected reporter like Stephen Brunt will burst into generalization and errors of fact when Canadian fans come up. Generalizing Canadian supporters from Toronto FC or Vancouver Whitecaps fans or the guys at the pub in Liverpool jerseys are like assuming all NHL fans are basically Toronto Maple Leafs diehards with different laundry. But football’s heritage in this country is far weaker than hockey’s, and the media hacks flower into cliche because they simply don’t know better.

Never fear, mediocre sports scribes of our glorious dominion. I, Lord Bob, despite never having been further east than Montreal, have taken it upon myself to do the generalizing for you. Merely refer to the 2,000 largely inane words below, and you will understand what it is to be a Canadian football fan.

The Casual

Quote: “Who’s that Canadian on Manchester United again?”

Knowledge Level: Wouldn’t recognize Mike Klukowski if he saw him on the street.

Tell-Tale Symptoms: Owns at least one of an Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea, or Liverpool kit. Could tell you how many goals Wayne Rooney scored last year but thinks the New York/New Jersey Metrostars still exist.

By far the most common football fan in Canada, the casual is exactly what he sounds like. He’ll tend to support one of the English Big Four, and perhaps he’ll go to a Major League Soccer game before leaving in the seventy-fifth minute to beat the traffic. This is the sort of guy who’s dragged into a supporter’s section by his buddy, will listen to the singing and chanting and say “this is cool” but not ever, ever join in.

The casuals are perfectly respectable, reasonable people. Many of them are thoroughly decent men and women with rewarding jobs, loving families, and many hobbies besides football. Though they have decided not to arrange their lives around a game, if anything they deserve more of our respect for keeping their priorities so keenly in order.

Real supporters avoid these guys like the plague.

The Apprentice

Quote: That tuneless yelling you get when you don’t quite know a chant yet.

Knowledge Level: Would recognize Mike Klukowski on the street.

Tell-Tale Symptoms: Renews his passport early “just in case”. Buys a Canada kit in the wrong colour because the red ones were out of stock, then feels guilty and spends twice as much to get a red one as well. In the latter stages, becomes genuinely alarmed at how much time and money he’s spending on a losing team that plays in Canada once every two years. Liable to become The Voyageur without swift psychiatric help.

If anybody deserves our pity, it is the apprentice. Lacking the cynicism borne from years of failure, the apprentice is often the most gung-ho member in any supporter’s section. Those casuals who enjoy the supporter’s section a bit too much become the apprentice. When you’re at a sparsely attended match, a person wanders into the supporter’s section, has a beer, has a laugh, and winds up cheering and roaring and chanting and standing on the rail hurling epithets at the referee’s country of origin, you just witnessed the birth of the apprentice.

These guys are prone to lapses, both major and minor. Whether it’s thinking Canada has a midfielder named Maxime Bernier or thinking the movie Green Street was a documentary and trying to start a fight with the opposing supporters, no apprentice gets through his first year as a supporter without doing something unbelievably embarrassing. Usually, though, he’ll be the only one who wasn’t embarrassed by it.

The Voyageur

Quote: “Marc Bircham was all right, but he was no Carl Valentine.”

Knowledge Level: Would recognize Mike Klukowski’s extended family on the street.

Tell-Tale Symptoms: Passport has more stamps than a hyperactive kid’s scrapbook. Can recommend cheap hotels in Honduras. Knows where Phillips Bakery is.

Every country has its bloc of guys who care just a little bit too much. In Canada, these guys are the Voyageurs. For those not up on their Canadian history, back in our colonial days voyageurs were Canadian fur traders renowned for hiking vast distances through unknown country filled with hostile natives while carrying two-hundred-pound packs and portaging canoes before plunging through white-water rapids, killing some beavers, and then doing the same thing in the other direction. They were few in number but highly respected and more than a little crazy.

Replace “carrying huge packs and canoes” with “drinking buckets full of beer” and “killing some beavers” with “cheering on Canada and occasionally fighting Hondurans and Costa Ricans” and that’s basically a modern Voyageur in a nutshell.

Most Voyageurs are very normal people in their non-soccer lives, except that once or twice a year they take time off to travel across the continent to stand in a half-empty stadium and cheer for whichever mediocre eleven-man lineup deigned to show up at the match without defecting. They’re the sort of people who’ll stand in Commonwealth Stadium, in Edmonton, at the end of autumn until ten at night and then say “do you know what we need? More beer.” They also know every player in every league in the world with so much as a Canadian grandparent, except for Dominic Imhof.

Normal people avoid these guys like the plague.

The European

Quote: “You guys don’t understand football like we do in the old country.”

Knowledge Level: Irrationally resents Mike Klukowski for something Poland did in the war.

Tell-Tale Symptoms: Looks at North American supporters groups like a particularly cute puppy who just piddled on the rug. Drinks more than anybody else at the pre-game gathering. Sings words that match no known chant but sings them with so much gusto everyone else has to join in. Knows more than two players for the Serbian White Eagles.

Not to be confused with the faux European (see below), the European is from some country where they play football in ninety-year-old stadia with rivalries determined by genocide instead of a Voyageurs Cup match and who is deadlier with half a beer bottle than most people are with handguns. Though they always view the Canadian game as a pale imitation of what they’re used to, these guys are universally popular because they have the best stories out of anyone, they’ll drink so much that their doctors buy a new Mercedes after every World Cup, and even if they say that the Canadian game is small-time and parochial they’ll throw themselves into it with such unreserved determination that even a Voyageur has to take half a step backwards.

If you’re ever at a pre-match gathering and you want to hear things you’d never heard before, find the oldest guy with the weirdest accent and just start buying him drinks.

The Toronto FC Diehard

Quote: “JIMMY BRENNAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Knowledge Level: Thinks Mike Klukowski would already be playing in Toronto if BMO Field had grass.

Tell-Tale Symptoms: Thinks that Canada’s best players are, in order, Brennan, De Rosario, and Serioux. Is irate whenever one of those players is actually called up to Canada. Evaluates all national team members by considering if they’d make a good designated player.

Say what you will about the Toronto FC diehards, but they’re real fans. Most of them became real fans very very quickly, going from “the Toronto Lynx? Aren’t they a women’s lacrosse team” to “THIS IS OUR HOUSE!” in ten seconds flat. But if they needed the hype and attention of MLS to get drawn in, at least they got drawn in eventually.

I like the Toronto FC crowd. They packed BMO Field to the gills when the national team last played there, which was a pleasant surprise and made the Montrealers look really stupid a month later. That wouldn’t have happened without Toronto FC, because when those fans got into the game, they didn’t do it half-assed. Seeing a pro-Canadian crowd, even if it was just on television, hearing chants for our boys… that’s not something I’ll forget any time soon.

But let’s be honest, guys. They do get the blinkers on a bit. The recent Julian de Guzman excitement was a case in point, where these newly-minted hardcore fans mumbled vague wonderings about where Canada’s best player would go, sat straight upright when it looked like he might go to Toronto, pounding talk radio and blog comments with more material than they see in a month, then mumbling some more when the furore passed. They do their research enough to know what a guy like Julian de Guzman means, but not enough to care when he’s not at BMO Field.

Plus they cheer for Amado Guevara, which gets them a reserved table at the sports bar in Hell on its own.

The Faux European

Quote: “Oh, I don’t watch the Major League, I’m a Serie A fan.” (insert pretentious smirk here)

Knowledge Level: Thinks Mike Klukowski played right back for Juventus back in the mid-nineties. Is wrong, of course, but doesn’t expect you to catch him.

Tell-Tale Symptoms: Non-ironically referred to the Toronto – Real Madrid friendly as “the match of the season”. Thinks two of Canada’s professional teams are the Montreal Impacts and the Toronto Effcees. Has never actually been to Swangard, BMO, or Stade Saputo. Will ramble on about how the dogfight between Barcelona and Real Madrid in La Liga will turn out. Will always specify that Barcelona and Real Madrid are in La Liga as if he thought you wouldn’t know that. Knows much, much less about football than he lets on.

The faux European is one of the only truly loathsome parts of the Canadian footballing world. They are plastic supporters for countries they’ve never even been to. They cheer for some major European powerhouse and always have some bullshit reason like “oh, my dad was born in London so of course I cheer for Chelsea” (he was probably born under the shadow of a League One team’s stadium but that doesn’t matter to these glory-hunting fuckfaces) while trying to defuse criticism by saying they have a favourite “lower-league team”, usually considering “lower-league” to mean Serie B or perhaps the bottom-middle half of the English Premiership.

People like this are the reason why, whenever somebody says “my family is from Manchester”, you can assume they’re a United fan and can’t give a shit about City (and don’t even get me started on FC United of Manchester). They’ll refuse to watch any North American league because it’s “beneath them” – obviously football isn’t  interesting when it’s not Cristiano Ronaldo flopping across the pitch like his hamstrings were pieces of Silly Putty.

And the worst part is, for all these assholes talk about Wayne Rooney and Marco van Basten and Francisco Totti, none of these guys actually know shit about football.

Seriously. They’ll talk your ear off about how Didier Drogba is fat and slow and whatever else the colour commentator helpfully told them, but take them to a match and probe them a glimmer of original thought and they’ll freeze up like Chad Barrett with an open header. The thing is, none of them are football fans. They’re fakes, simulacrums of what they think the cool European is, pale imitations of an archetype that never really existed.

If you go to the Kop at Anfield, yank out a diehard, drop him into a Conference North stadium and tell him to watch a match, he’ll still have a ball because the only thing he loves more than Liverpool is football in general. He has nothing to prove. He doesn’t have to shit on the rest of the world for you to know he’s a Liverpool fan. But his Canadian brethren don’t give a damn about the game. They just want you to think they do, and so they put on their ridiculous facade and prance about like they’re not living a lie.

Close your eyes for a moment and think back to 2004 or so, and all the idiots you met at your local football pub who went to school near Newcastle and pretty much had to become a Magpies fan. Now think about the number of Newcastle fans you haven’t met this year. That’ll tell you all you need to know.

I’ve never been much for coming up with chants. Actual creativity, you know, not really my bag. But I think this one can stick, provided we remember it long enough for it to be relevant.

It’s a call-and-response style, you know what I mean. The tune is familiar enough.

Call: Oh, Begovic!
Response: Oh, Begovic!
Call: Can burn in hell!
Response: Can burn in hell!
All Together: Oh, Begovic can burn in hell.
’cause he’s fat, stupid and a traitor,
oh, Begovic can burn in hell…

(repeat until apocalypse)

On Full Time (Vancouver’s soccer show!) last Sunday, that media-friendly imported Canadian hero Stephen Hart spoke to the TEAM’s Mike Martignago and Tyler Green and, in spite of his downhearted demeanour throughout the interview, managed to get through the entire thing without shooting himself.

Hart’s a good interview on a number of levels. For one thing, unlike Dale Mitchell, he actually gives them. Also, he tells the truth, which gives him a big leg up on certain Yugoslav-born goalkeepers I could mention. When asked about Asmir Begovic, Hart said that the prospective traitor is “leaning towards Bosnia.”

First off, full disclosure. Stephen Hart is a very bright man, but he is an employee of the Canadian Soccer Association and the CSA has made having no idea what’s going on into a fine art. It’s entirely possible that Asmir Begovic is dealing with the impending birth of his first child, thinks that he blew that whole Bosnia rumour to bits earlier on Full Time, and Stephen Hart is simply as panicky and used to this sort of thing as we are.

But if it’s true. Good god.

I hate today’s international game like it killed my father. The overtly mercenary nature of the teams deprives the sport of meaning and makes me a sucker for caring about it. I can’t stand Sepp Blatter, Jack Warner, FIFA, and everybody who has ever worked for them. But the players are only variably guilty; I’ve always said there are three sorts of defectors, some more culpable than others:

1. Dani Fernandes. Born in and passionately interested in one country, which wasn’t interested in him. Went and played for someone else. These guys are okay by me. In Fernandes’s case, he was the backup on the Canadian U-20 team to some kid whose name I’ve forgotten but I seem to remember played college soccer for a couple of years and is now selling mufflers in Abbotsford. He never got a sniff from the Canadian system and was told as much, but Portugal was a bit further-sighted. That said, Dani is eligible to come back to Canada if he wanted to, and I know they’d take him. Canadian equivalent: Marc Bircham.
2. Jonathan de Guzman. Somebody who may have been born and raised in one country but had very real connections to another. Jonathan (and Julian)’s entire family was of Dutch ancestry and the younger de Guzman has also played in the Eredivisie his entire career. He is probably more Canadian than he is Dutch, but he is tolerably Dutch. Also eligible for Canada now, of course. Canadian equivalent: Simeon Jackson.
3. Owen Hargreaves. “What’s that, endorsers? You’ll pay me more money to hawk aerosol cheese if I do it in an England shirt? By god, old chap, I was a bally ol’ Englishman who just happened to be born and raised in Calgary!” Canadian equivalent: none, although Mike Klukowski would be level two and a half if such a thing existed.

That’s it. Three levels, in ascending order from “good guy in a bad situation” to “scumbag”. Then FIFA brought in that new rule and by god, we have a level four.

4. Hypothetical Asmir Begovic. Move to Canada at a young age because your homeland is like a country full of alcoholics, except instead of booze it’s genocide. Grow up in Canada, taking advantage of our generous refugee policy. Accept tens of thousands of dollars in training and youth development time from the Canadian Soccer Association. Do a touching advertisement for a shoe company talking about your Canadianness. Train with the senior team, accepting a callup to sit on a bench for ninety minutes in Jamaica during the merciful euthanasia to our World Cup qualifying run. Passive-aggressively decline a cap-tying callup to the Gold Cup squad because of “pregnant girlfriend” mumble mumble and “‘establish myself in Portsmouth” mumble mumble. Go on the country’s largest soccer radio broadcast and say that you’re Canadian. Go to the largest sports newspaper that hasn’t been bombed out in Bosnia and say that you’re Bosnian. Bolt in the night to Bosnia leaving a trail of evasive statements and outright lies in your wake because you want to hawk aerosol cheese. Pretend that you want to win games, even though the only reason Bosnia is still alive in World Cup qualifying is that, in UEFA, everybody still is. Hope you don’t get ethnically cleansed.

I have strong feelings on this. It’s one thing to leave a country as a refugee and say “I will always be grateful to Canada for completely saving my family’s asses, but in my heart of hearts I am Bosnian and always will be.” I’d understand that (an Ottawa resident, Mahir Hadziresic, was called up to the Bosnian U-20 squad but nobody minds for that reason). It’s another thing to arrive in Canada at eleven years old, come up through our ranks, get into our youth setup, take advantage of our training, our facilities, and our money, and then as soon as Bosnia shows any interest leaving us at the altar with the wedding already paid for, without even having the stones to tell the truth.

It has nothing to do with freedom of labour or even FIFA regulations (in Lord Bob’s FIFA, Begovic would be eligible for Bosnia until cap-tied because he was born there). It’s a matter of not being a complete dirtbag. And if the rumours are true then, well, I just became a Serbian White Eagles fan.