Yes, I have now seen two FC Edmonton games this exhibition season. No, I didn’t have to board a plane to get to this one. Edmonton had announced months ago that they would be playing the Victoria Highlanders at Foote Field in Edmonton but it was only recently announced there would be a game in Victoria as well, at the still-ironically-named City Centre Park in Langford.

First, I will repeat my most frequently-voiced criticism about FC Edmonton. Three weeks ago, I paid $34 for a general admission ticket to Commonwealth Stadium when I watched Edmonton take on Portsmouth. Today, I paid $13 for an assigned seat to watch Edmonton take on Victoria. It’s true that FC Edmonton isn’t quite as expensive a booking as Pompey, but general admission for the return engagement against Victoria will start at $20 before taxes and fees. It will probably come to twice the price to watch the same matchup in Edmonton as opposed to watching it in Victoria.

In spite of the bargain price and a spectacular night in Langford, attendance in Victoria was disappointing. Though not announced, it couldn’t have been much more than one thousand. The normally-strong Lake Side Buoys supporters’ section was literally down to one guy, who rode the traditional supporters’ bus in alone and blamed the bad supporters’ turnout on a combination of the weather forecast (as late as yesterday afternoon the prediction for today was rain) and the simple fact that August is a big vacation month in Victoria.

Even before kickoff there was a surprise, as it was announced that striker Riley O’Neill, late of SV Wilhelmshaven in the German Regionalliga Nord, would be starting up front for Victoria. My astonishment at a five-time goalscorer in the German fourth division moving to a post-season trial with a USL PDL club was such that I couldn’t believe it was the same Riley O’Neill: I wound up asking around the stands and on Twitter and eventually got confirmation that yes, it’s the same guy.

Next to the ex-professional O’Neill, the biggest name in Victoria’s lineup was Jordie Hughes. I’ve seem Hughes play in person a number of times and each time I’ve come away impressed. Hughes is a 5′10″ midfielder who plays bigger, runs like the wind, is the best amateur ballhander I’ve seen, was a star in the American college ranks before a leg injury, and bluntly deserves better than the USL PDL. He averages better than a goal every two games for Victoria from midfield and could certainly be a contributing player for most NASL or USL-1 teams. He’s 26 years old and not getting any younger, but his exile from the professional ranks is a mystery.

The first half was primarily an even affair. Victoria had the advantage of mostly playing an entire season together, with only a couple reserve players and newbie O’Neill rounding out a good first eleven. They were more-or-less equal with Edmonton athletically, and the dynamism of Hughes and O’Neill was effectively countered by Edmonton’s Shaun Saiko at defensive midfield and Paul Hamilton at fullback. Saiko was a former Middlesborough youth player, was predicted to be one of the team’s stars, and is living up to it, but Hamilton has to me been the surprise star of Edmonton’s lineup. Twice now, against Portsmouth and Victoria, I’ve been flabbergasted by Hamilton’s poise and off-the-ball effectiveness. Of all the Alberta metro players in Edmonton’s lineup, Hamilton is the one I’d predict to survive in the NASL.

Saiko, however, was clearly the star. Although lining up at defensive midfield he had a roving commission, playing the “destroyer” role best exemplified in the Canadian ranks by the young Julian De Guzman (and wearing Jules’s #6 into the bargain). No Victoria player could match Saiko’s pace and he mixed that with tremendous ball control, an extremely intelligent style, and a shouting, commanding presence in midfield unusual in a twenty year old. I was not struck by his tackling but then it occurred to me that Saiko was simply playing smart and athletically enough that he didn’t particularly have to tackle: he simply ran the opposing players out of options. He made the centre of the pitch a no-go zone for the Victoria attack, caused Riley O’Neill to die on the vine for want of service, started most of Edmonton’s best opportunities, and in the 38th minute scored the first and best goal of the game with a screaming effort from distance that rippled the top of the goal.

So impressed was I by Saiko’s first-half performance that, in spite of the uninspiring calibre of opposition, I was growing quite excited. Saiko had also been excellent against Portsmouth and got rave reviews for the game against Colo-Colo: maybe we really have something here. Only once did he falter, around the 27th minute, when Jordie Hughes began a run down the right flank and Saiko did not take the threat seriously enough. Saiko stuck back a bit and Hughes suddenly cut to the middle in front of him, splitting the Edmonton central defense and releasing a low shot that kissed just wide. This was the closest Hughes would come to troubling the scorekeeper, but he still had a dangerous all-round game.

Edmonton held their 1-0 lead into the half and almost immediately upon resuming play added to affairs. It wasn’t a dignified goal but it counted: Matt Lam had come on for first-half captain Chris Kody and promptly poked home a ball on a scramble in front of goal, giving Edmonton a 2-0 lead in the 48th minute.

Unfortunately, complacency began to set in. They got a few chances off the feet of Michael Cox and Milan Timotijevic but Victoria goalkeeper Brandon Watson put on a show, making more than his share of fingertip saves. Conversely, Jas Gill in goal for Edmonton (starting in lieu of Eredivisie veteran Rein Baart) inspired no confidence. He was a combination of nerves, mistimed aggression, and poor handling all night. In the second half, these problems began to come home. Jordie Hughes started a nice counter after an Edmonton chance and as Romaie Martin bore down on goal Gill came out much too far. Martin easily bypassed Gill and with the keeper out of the play had all the goal in the world at his feet. But he flubbed his shot, striking it through the box. Had Gill kept his head he would have intercepted the ball and all would have been well, but as it was he was out of position and Chris Arnett converted the accidental cross to cut Edmonton’s lead.

From that point on, play was even and tempers started to flare. Victoria right back Kevan Brown, a tall ginger drink of water, infuriated FC Edmonton all night long. He provoked Thiago Silva into a shoving match and a warning from the official as well as goading Timotijevic into a yellow card for unsportsmanlike conduct when the Serbian import petulantly threw the ball away on a throw-in. Brown was also conspicuously effective defensively and made Edmonton work for opportunities on the right: normally a reserve player for Victoria, Brown was regardless the most impressive of the players I’d never heard of.

The truculence came from other venues as well. After a Victoria chance was thwarted by a hard tackle from Paul Hamilton, Riley O’Neill took exception and got into a vicious if short scrap with Hamilton behind the touch line. The two exchanged words, shoves, and a little more before the referee charged in to restore order, assessing both O’Neill and Hamilton yellow cards.

Riley O’Neill was physically dominant but struggled to assert himself. Had he played for Edmonton matters might have been different, for the Edmontonians were being badly let down by their strike force. But aside from Jordie Hughes the Victoria midfield was unable to get traction against Edmonton, and Hughes is not the sort of distributing midfielder that gets his strikers chances in bunches. O’Neill was constantly active but almost entirely lacked service. There may have been rust on him, but in any event with his midfielders not providing O’Neill was unable to make his own plays. His best chance came around the eighty-second minute when a Victoria midfielder finally got a ball to O’Neill on the run. O’Neill outpaced the Edmonton defender easily and came up against Jas Gill, whose aggression for once served him in good stead. Gill charged out to meet O’Neill while the striker was still rounding his defender, and no sooner had he seen off one challenge than O’Neill was facing another. Gill more-or-less shoulder-checked O’Neill; not much of a play but he was able to outmuscle the German veteran and O’Neill scuffed the resulting shot wide. Immediately following this miss, O’Neill was substituted out.

By this point, Victoria had also removed Jordie Hughes, depriving them of the best part of their firepower. And they were soon down to ten men thanks to a careless challenge from reserve Davis Stupich. Meeting Paul Matthijs at midfield for a fifty-fifty ball, Stupich went in wildly with his leg up and caught Matthijs on the leg with his spikes. Matthijs went down in a heap and was immediately substituted, being helped off the field without putting any weight on his right leg. Stupich was given a straight red card.

Victoria kept up the pressure, to their credit. In stoppage time, Romaie Martin bore down the centre. Martin was up against Paul Hamilton for the ball and played Hamilton physically: so physically, in fact, that Martin actually wrestled Hamilton to the ground. I was not twenty feet away when it happened: Martin got his arms around Hamilton, who tried to ineffectively grapple back, and pretty much flipped the Edmonton defender over. But the referee kept his whistle in his pocket, only to pull it out when Martin was fouled by the Edmonton defender rushing back to Hamilton’s relief. A clear foul in the box, but what on earth was the referee doing even letting play get that far?

With no time left, defender Tyler Hughes stepped up to take the penalty. Jas Gill guessed the right direction but missed the ball: the game was tied at two. Edmonton actually mustered a half-decent chance in the dying seconds but for nothing: it was a 2-2 final.

It was clear that FC Edmonton had taken their foot off the gas when Matt Lam scored. All the same, Edmonton deserved a win: had Rein Baart been in goal instead of Jas Gill it would have been 2-1 at worst. The most egregious dip came from Shaun Saiko, who with the score 2-0 ceased his destructive attacking charges and let up defensively as well. He played too many poor balls to Victoria’s feet (one actually led to Martin’s chance and the ensuing penalty) and the sublime dominance he showed in the first half was almost canceled out by his mediocrity in the second. Most of Edmonton’s defense and midfield went in with less intensity and played the ball with less thought, letting Victoria sustain scoring opportunities. Although Brandon Watson was tremendous in goal for the Highlanders Edmonton had chances they ought to have scored on anyway and failed to put away.

There was more to be happy than upset about for Edmonton supporters. This is a young team, and many of its players won’t be around when the games start counting. Of the core parts, most acquitted themselves well. They coped with Jordie Hughes and Riley O’Neill, the sorts of players that are dangerous in the NASL, well. And let’s not forget that although they let Victoria back into the game, once it was tied they showed some surprising pluck in charging the Highlanders goal for a last-ditch winner. Given the skill level of these players, it’s a credible result.

But it could have been a win, should have been a win, and if Dwight Lodeweges isn’t letting them know that he isn’t doing his job.

Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton is an excellent place to host a soccer game when it is full. Unfortunately, full for Commonwealth Stadium is 60,081 souls. The fewer people in Commonwealth, the closer you get to an average MLS or, worse, an average NASL team’s attendance, and the more the cavernous emptiness of the place starts to stand out. Chants absorbed by a battalion of empty seats. Seven-eighths of the sections in the stadium closed off and what remains still looking altogether too modest.

Last night, FC Edmonton drew 8,762 fans to watch the new local boys take on the famous foreigners, Portsmouth, for something called the “Edmonton Cup”.

What did those 8,762 fans get? Well, they paid not less than $34, after TicketMaster fees, for an adult ticket (the lowest price for general admission which wasn’t even available online). They got an absolutely spectacular evening to watch soccer. They got an opponent with a famous name but nothing else famous about them. With FC Edmonton sporting their home blues Portsmouth was even forced out of their iconic blue strip and into their white and red away kit, detracting just a little from the air of fame surrounding the opponents.

The team selection was even less inspiring. Nary a name in the lineup would have been familiar to even the most ardent observer of the English leagues. Midfielder Michael Brown was the most famous one to turn out, going all ninety minutes. Striker David Nugent also played ninety minutes. But the rest of the team from top to bottom was reserve players, truly dedicated League bench warmers like Nadir Ciftci, and the dregs of Portsmouth’s already rather poor organization.Five of Pompey’s starting eleven had never played so much as a league game. Anybody who paid their minimum of $34 expecting a display of classic football from European professionals went home horrified.

The game itself was a dreary affair. Even with their watered-down lineup Pompey was clearly more skilled and athletic than FC Edmonton, but the Edmontonians played far better as a team. They kept their shape more readily and read each other better, misplaying far fewer balls and getting some nice opportunities out of well-conceived passing plays. Edmonton actually opened the scoring seven minutes in courtesy former Canadian U-2o and current Canadian beach soccer striker Chris Lemire, converting on one of those lovely Edmonton buildups and forcing the ball (and himself) through keeper Jon Stewart. Stewart was badly injured on Lemire’s goal and left the game with suspicions of a broken leg, being replaced by Liam O’Brien.

O’Brien fumbled with the ball early in his relief appearance but eventually grew more and more steady. More importantly, as the game wore on Portsmouth’s superior athleticism and skill began to tell. The Edmonton players seemed to wear down in spite of the cool evening. Their aerial ability was nil, and Portsmouth started to take more advantage of it. Meanwhile, as Edmonton grew tired their first touch let them down more and more, and balls that once found players began to float into touch.

Portsmouth was due to equalize and did through a nice bit of corner play from Nadir Ciftci, alertly poking in David Ritchie’s curving ball. The teams were level both on the scoreboard and on the pitch, and the decisive match for the Edmonton Cup went to penalties (after some five minutes of confusion where the players seemed uncertain what was going to happen). Portsmouth prevailed, 5-4, and lifted a giant trophy it looked like someone had bought off the shelf of a sporting goods store.

The game was underwhelming, the players often incompetent. It was not of the calibre I’ve grown to expect from the North American second division. But the result was fair and Edmonton fans can say, with pride, that they held the FA Cup finalists to a 1-1 draw.

The 8,000-person crowd will raise a few concerned eyebrows. But it was a ferociously expensive mid-week game against a team that serious football fans can’t really take seriously except as a butt for bankruptcy jokes. There was a surprisingly strong Portsmouth traveling contingent of about thirty souls, mostly middle-aged and very courteous Englishmen who could not, physically, have been less impressed with Edmonton. The recently relegated Blue Army turned out more fans for an utterly pedestrian friendly across the ocean against an obscure club that hasn’t even played in the league yet than Canada gets for the Gold Cup! They were very nice men and women, all, and there for a good time, although when I left them it was after escorting them to a rather loud and quite obnoxious Budweiser “party tent” that I admit to leaving trails of fire running away from.

It was also encouraging to see the development of Edmonton’s supporters culture. The FC Edmonton supporters brigade is both small and nameless, but it seems to be growing and a few fans got caught up in the fun from time to time. The chant repertory consists mostly of old favourites with new words sung unconvincingly, but it improved palpably even as the game wore on (for chanting is the kind of thing that develops only with practice). After Jon Stewart was replaced none of us had any idea who the substitute goalkeeper was, but tall and dressed in pink he made an easy target, so we settled for calling him “Billy” in our heckles until @coxon was nice enough to Tweet me his real name. I dunno. “Billy” was funnier.

It was also my first look at the much-reviled FieldTurf installed at Commonwealth this year. At the time it went in, I opined that for all the guff FieldTurf gets from the peanut gallery it will probably be better than the terrible grass pitch Commonwealth was once cursed by. Now I’ve seen it and it’s definitely better. The ball was not afflicted by the random bumps and skips that were once the bane of soccer players in Edmonton. It stood up well to Edmonton’s mostly ground-based attack and there was never any hint that it was playing anything but perfectly. A skeptic may say that Pompey suffered an inordinate number of injuries in the match, but Edmonton was perfectly healthy and the Portsmouth injuries were generally on account of Edmonton players running into them, not the turf.

All in all, it was a dreary game but a lovely evening. The sun was shining, the fans were cheering, and a professional soccer team in Edmonton was playing before my very eyes for the first time in my adult life. They could have lost 7-0 and I would have enjoyed it anyway.

Last night, sitting in my office, I put up a somewhat agitated post on Twitter. “Okay, FC Edmonton,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. If you draw Colo-Colo or better, I’ll get on the bandwagon. NOT ONE SECOND EARLIER.”

Well, they lost. Yet here I am. World Cup? What’s that?

FC Edmonton being what it is, there was no broadcast of any sort of the game, be it audio or video, online or otherwise. Updates came courtesy FC Edmonton’s own Twitter account and, after the fact, eyewitness reports in Edmonton newspapers and on the Voyageurs forum. The Edmonton Journal buried their article on the game to the extent that it doesn’t even show up on their soccer page. You had to be looking to see anything about this, and judging from the announced crowd of only 5,573 not that many people were looking. The crowd was predominantly Chilean, cheering on Colo-Colo with full voice, while the nascent FC Edmonton supporters section received the odd looks and ignorant comments that is the lot of any trace of supporters’ culture in this country.

With fewer than 6,000 fans the club can’t be anywhere near breaking even on the million dollar payroll and the million dollars they spent bringing Colo-Colo to town (Terry Jones of the Edmonton Sun estimates the club’s loss on the match at “well into six figures“). Moreover, Colo-Colo has replaced FC Edmonton as Vitória’s friendly opponent, allegedly on account of a team in eastern Canada welshing on a friendly with the Chileans and the club having guaranteed Colo-Colo three matches in Canada. To the extent that these friendlies are being held to prepare the team for a 2011 campaign, they are doomed to be a bit less effective now.

That’s the obligatory FC Edmonton bad news. For once, though, the good news outweighs it. First and foremost is FC Edmonton’s play. Thrashing the Montreal Impact reserves 3-0 was impressive, if hardly earth-shattering. But a 4-3 loss to Colo-Colo do the Edmontonians even more credit. It was Colo-Colo’s first game of their 2010-11 campaign, and it showed, but it doesn’t take away from the result. The game was somewhat sloppy and the Chilean champions were hardly overexerting themselves on the turf of Commonwealth Stadium, but all the same by all accounts FC Edmonton played them hard, took an early lead, and endured the Chilean fightback with great composure. The club has been bolstered by a few additional players, including former Ajax trainee and Canadian youth player Matt Lam, and while it’s hard to judge form without actually seeing the team there appears to be nothing but good news.

You’d have to be awfully optimistic to believe the great play will continue, of course. Phillip Araos of Colo-Colo bluntly said that he’d watched FC Edmonton practice and they weren’t that good. Their rosters of aging Dutchmen, a few promising players, and metro league plugs is still the same roster, even if Matt Lam has lent it some more skill and legitimacy. Nobody disputes that Dwight Lodeweges is a good coach but if he can mold that unit into something that’ll be competitive at the NASL level he’s a bloody miracle worker. But two games in they don’t seem to be as bad as the naysayers – and I was a very loud one – were saying.

Moreover, the attendance, while disappointing, is hardly devastating. The friendly schedule was only announced two and a half weeks ago, so there wasn’t a great deal of time for big ticket sales to materialize. 2,106 fans came through the gates of Foote Field for Edmonton’s first friendly against the Impact reserves, a Wednesday evening game against a completely inglorious opponent.  This isn’t a fantastic number but it was more than the opening night draws of USSF D2 Carolina, Miami, and Baltimore and the 2010 averages of Miami, Baltimore, and Minnesota. If FC Edmonton draws 2,100 fans a night in 2011, they won’t make money but they won’t be the NSC Minnesota Stars either. When the team is playing real games against real teams and has some publicity from their friendly season, though, attendance should increase.

Best of all, even with the financial dunking they’ve taken so far the owners seem non-plussed. In Terry Jones’s article linked above, co-owner Tom Fath seems at ease, if not exactly falling over himself with joy. Things are not going that well. FC Edmonton is by no means a certain success. But there have been a few small victories, and every great movement starts somewhere.

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?

FC Edmonton will not play a league game for about ten months, and yet I’m already so far down on them I could probably finish their basement.

FC Edmonton’s roster came out last week, of course, and the only surprise is its mediocre nature. In addition to the previously-reported aging Eredivisie men, there is former Middlesbrough prospect Shaun Saiko, rejected by the English academies and returned to his home town. There are some uninteresting former members of the Vancouver Whitecaps academy, also Alberta natives. There are two Brazilians new to the North American professional ranks. 22-year-old Neto Miguel is a defender from São Paulo who moved to Canada at age 17, an engineering student at the University of Calgary, and a CIS player for two schools whose closest previous run to professional experience was four months training at Corinthians. 25-year-old Thiago Silva moved to Edmonton from Brasilia last year and is playing soccer at NAIT, a technical school not known for athletic achievement. To describe Miguel as “mediocre” would be to do him a favour and Silva is below even that level.

There are a few decent names. Saiko figures to be a decent second-division player and it’s good to see him back in soccer, and Sam Lam was quite a good CIS player with the excellent University of Alberta program who trialled in Seattle. Striker Kenny Sacramento is only 21 years old, saw some time training in Europe, and is a star indoor player with the Winnipeg Alliance of the CMISL. Kyle Yamada even played with Canada’s national soccer team! Well, our national beach soccer team. But none of them are men you can build a second-division team around and the lineup, filled out with players plucked out of AMSL rosters and bad CIS programs, would be an uninspiring USL PDL side. There are no players with extensive second-division experience even though there are some, such as former Aviators and Whitecaps midfielder Gordon Chin, who have Edmonton connections and are readily available.

This is intentional, believe me. FC Edmonton also announced their friendly schedule and what we see is a collection of USL PDL teams as well as the Montreal Impact (reportedly sending their academy rather than the first team) and, as a closer, Miami FC. Giving their organization credit, perhaps they know the level of players they have and are setting their sights accordingly. Certainly, this lineup is likely to be an affordable one, which is an admirable concession to the realities of professional soccer in Edmonton.

The only stunning thing about these friendlies is the price of a ticket: FC Edmonton will charge $25 for a reserved seat and $20 for general admission. This compares to a $26.50 seat at Swangard Stadium for the silver section – seats under cover and better than anything at Foote Field – and $20 for a reserved spot in the roughly-Foote-equivalent bronze section. The Victoria Highlanders, one of Edmonton’s friendly opponents, charge $17.25 for a non-premium seat.

The point is, a minimum of $80 in tickets to take the family of four out to a bad stadium and watch a team of metro league players play a friendly against semi-professionals with hardly a single name recognizable by even hardcore supporters is a big ask.

Of course, on the other hand stand the international friendlies. Portsmouth is the biggest name, hitting Commonwealth Stadium on July 21. But Chilean powerhouse Colo-Colo and Brazilian first division side Vitória are certainly far better opponents than a club of FC Edmonton’s calibre would seem to deserve. Portsmouth’s in a place financially where they might do anything for money. Even so, getting three teams of this calibre to travel such a distance can’t have been cheap for the FC Edmonton administration, and is if nothing else a sign that they’re willing to spend money to make money. Even casual soccer fans would show up to see Portsmouth, relegated or not, and while Colo-Colo and Vitória aren’t household names they’re at least respectable teams which will hopefully draw a crowd.

The Faths and Mel Kowalchuk have some experience with international friendlies: experience that isn’t universally positive but apparently hasn’t put them off. An Everton – River Plate friendly last year at Commonwealth Stadium was a bit of an attendance disappointment, bringing only 15,800 through the turnstiles at Commonwealth Stadium, but ticket prices were high and from a financial point of view the Fath brothers were sufficiently persuaded that they’re bankrolling FC Edmonton and these three international adventures.

So why am I worried? I’ve got a real emotional stake in FC Edmonton and would be gutted to see them fail, of course. And I see a lot of ingredients for a fall in this team as it’s consisted. Their website is enthusiastic but amateurish, running blog posts on the UEFA Champions League and fun but superficial podcasts. So soccer moms and casual fans – you know, the people who make soccer profitable in this country – go to a lousy stadium for soccer, pay USSF D2-level money to get in, and a team of amateurs and old men play obscure opposition, and if somehow the kids do get hooked news or decent on-line resources aren’t coming from the club so far. The international friendlies will be fun but they’re with opponents far superior to even an average Canadian second-division team. They are, essentially, gimmicks, and that may bring fans but it will also bring cynicism.

If FC Edmonton improves their media work, manages expectations, and bolsters the 2011 roster with the USSF D2 veterans that will let them beat Miami FC in their final game, they might get somewhere. If they could open the wallet and grab an old, familiar, respected name like Wes Charles or a can’t-be-long-for-Montreal Eduardo Sebrango (NOT RICK TITUS), even better. But this is a concerning start.

Really, guys? Embossed text? Yet another Canadian team going around in blue? Why not make your motto Latin for “Is it 1998 yet?”

(arbitrary shot at the Red Patch Boys chosen strictly for tradition’s sake and to get eyeballs. I’ll get the Nordecke next time.) If you have your ear close to the Edmonton soccer scene, or the Canadian Football League scene, or you read the 24th Minute, or the Voyageurs board, or… well, the point is, you’ve heard the news by now. Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, the last natural grass venue in the CFL and the largest stadium in the country, is almost certain to convert to FieldTurf at a cost of $2.6 million.

The reaction from the soccer community has been almost uniformly negative.  At the aforementioned 24th Minute, Duane Rollins wrote:

With grass pitches in Toronto and Montreal now and plastic in Edmonton and Vancouver, things have shifted 180 degrees in terms of facilities in Canada. It used to be that most of the games went west because the east didn’t have a proper stadium. Now, it’s likely going to be the opposite.

Also, his post was titled “Plastic crap to Edmonton?” Just in case you thought he didn’t have an opinion.

First, let’s be clear about one thing. This is a move exclusively to the benefit of the Edmonton Eskimos, the CFL club which is Commonwealth Stadium’s primary tenant. And it probably should be. The Eskimos play the home half of a CFL schedule, usually plus a playoff date, and in the near future a Grey Cup game. The Canadian national teams is the only soccer tenant Commonwealth has had since the demise of the Aviators and they average about one game every three years; the men’s team has played at Commonwealth most recently in 2007, 2004, and 2000, all World Cup qualifying matches. The women’s national team has only played at Commonwealth once, a lopsided 8-0 friendly victory over Mexico in 2003. Commonwealth was the primary venue of the U-19 womens’ championship and played second fiddle to BMO Field when we hosted the U-20 World Cup, but that’s the sum total of its major international soccer career. So let’s not pretend that the Canadian Soccer Association has lost a major host site. If the Eskimos prefer FieldTurf, ultimately they’re what matters, not four senior international games in ten years. The City of Edmonton owns Commonwealth Stadium and by all means, they should care about its major tenants.

First-class soccer players don’t like FieldTurf. They don’t like good FieldTurf, like BMO Field was in its early days. They don’t like bad FieldTurf, like BMO Field was last season. This is mostly based off of comfort and anecdotal reports of an increase in lower-body injuries that science doesn’t support. Obviously, if the CSA schedules games for Edmonton and our best players refuse to report or play their best because they’re afraid of injury, that would be a disaster. But that’s not going to happen.

The worst turf surface I’ve ever seen professional soccer played on, I actually saw last year: Florida International University Stadium in Miami, where the turf was so bad that the laws of physics no longer appeared to apply. I attended a Whitecaps – Miami FC USL-1 match where the ball did things I’d never seen before. Ripples and divots in the carpet were visible from the first-row seats where I stood. It was horrendous. Yet not three days prior, the men’s national team had played their blood out on that very rug to a 2-2 draw with Costa Rica in the Gold Cup, one of the best-played and hardest-fought matches of the tournament. These guys are professionals. A few Tomasz Radzinskis aside, they may grumble but they’d still give their best on FieldTurf.

Even more important is one of the reasons the Eskimos want the grass torn out of Commonwealth Stadium. Yes, it was a natural surface. But it was a terrible grass surface. It spent a sub-arctic winter exposed to harsh Edmonton cold and snow, lacking world-class drainage or under-soil heating, and an overburdened grounds crew spent a spring trying to get it into playable shape almost from scratch, and then a bunch of three-hundred pound gridiron players would use it as their primary home during the thirty-degree summers Edmontonians know and love, and then the Canadian national team would get out there and try to kick the ball around.

This is the point, more than any other, I want to make to the eastern Canadians who are lamenting the death of a grass pitch. Commonwealth Stadium had the worst playing surface in the country for international soccer regardless of material. The national teams already hated coming out there. We were two time zones further from Europe and the grass was murderous and even if you managed to get through the entire game without leaving your leg sticking out of the ground like a Roman spear you were still stuck in the middle of goddamned Edmonton.

I honestly believe FieldTurf will be an improvement, so long as it’s properly installed and maintained. The men’s national team will wish they were in Toronto or Montreal instead. But, guys, that’s not new.

You know those movies where a happily married husband’s plane crashes somewhere over the ocean? And the guy never turns up and the wife grieves and her heart breaks. But eventually she gets on with things, puts the past behind her, marries another man, forges a new life. And then the first husband shows up at her door having been rescued from a desert island, only to find his wife in the arms of another man, and that wife needs to choose between the two loves of her life?

That’s how I feel right now with the Edmonton Drillers and the Vancouver Whitecaps.

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.)

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.