This is (probably) Valerio Gazzola, the new head coach of our men’s U-20 national soccer team, replacing the promoted Tony Fonseca.

I can hear you protesting. “Hey, Lord Bob! You may not like the guy, but that’s no reason to pick such an unflattering picture scanned off the side of a milk carton. Show some journalistic integrity for once, you hack.”

Naah, I grabbed this picture straight off of the Canadian Soccer Association’s website, in the actual press release they used to announce this hire. I can’t blame them for having such a lousy picture, really. After all, where’s Valerio Gazzola been for the past, oh, thirteen years or so? The CSA tells us he was “technical director” at something called “ARS Laval” and that in the last decade he’s coached at “Dollard”, “Monteuil”, and “Lac St-Louis”. I have never heard of any of those organizations. I do know that they are all comprehensive Quebec youth setups with really ugly websites (although ARS Laval at least has a generic WordPress template rather than trying to get creative). Some of them advertise “high-level” intercity competition, which is nice, I guess?

I’m not saying these are awful youth setups. Remember, I’ve never heard of any of them. I’m just saying, uh, we’re hiring our U-20 head coaches from the ranks of mediocre metro Montreal academies now?

Ah, but I forget myself. Gazzola is also two-time head coach of the Montreal Impact, from 1994 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001. But those were very different days: when Gazzola started with the Impact the league was still called the American Professional Soccer League and was a far less professional outfit than the USL Division One and North American Soccer Leagues we’ve grown to know and tolerate. To give you an idea how long ago Gazzola’s glory days were, the 1997 USISL A-League featured only three organizations still active in the second division (Montreal, the Rochester Raging Rhinos, and the Vancouver 86ers), one that’s moved up (the Seattle Sounders), and a few others still going in lower divisions, mostly the USL PDL but occasionally USL Division Two. Expectations were far lower, teams were generally worse, and attendance was even more erratic.

Gazzola won the last ever APSL championship and three A-League regular season titles, but playoff success in the A-League eluded him. Gazzola’s return to the slowly improving A-League in 2000 was calamitous as the Impact had the two of the three worst seasons in their history: in 2000 they missed the playoffs for the first time since 1993 and finished behind the Toronto Lynx for the first time in their history coming in fourth in the seven-team Northeast Division. The Impact were once again fourth in the division and out of the playoffs in 2001 and Gazzola got his marching orders mid-way through the season, replaced by Nick De Santis who began the modern era for the Impact and the A-League.

This is not Gazzola’s first spin with the national youth teams; he’s been in on the U-17 team and was the assistant coach for Canada U-20 for a disappointing fourth-place finish at the 2009 Jeux de la Francophonie. That’s probably exactly why somebody with no relevant coaching experience since Ali Ngon was a promising rookie is in charge of the future of our national setup.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

…indifference, treason, and greed…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blogging has been scarce the last couple weeks. If anybody who worked with me read my blog, they’d notice that the Maple Leaf Forever is most active when it’s quiet on the job and at its dullest when I have a lot of work to get done. And the last couple weeks have been annoyingly productive from an employment standpoint.

At times when quantity is lacking, the wise blogger will make up for it with quality, writing well-researched articles about subjects with broad interest from angles not previously considered. Not being a wise blogger, I will instead write about a U-20 striker who spent most of the last year in the Premier Development League.

Randy Edwini-Bonsu is part of the great crop of Canadian attacking talent coming up through the ranks as we speak. The comparison to Simeon Jackson is an almost irresistable one. Edwini-Bonsu is short (listed 5′5″ and even that’s generous), young, and has obscenely good pace. He was also born outside of Canada and actually spent most of his life in his native Ghana before emigrating to Edmonton at age twelve.

Jackson’s career is trending better than Edwini-Bonsu’s. At nineteen, Jackson was coming into his own for semi-professional club Rushden and Diamonds of the Conference National. Meanwhile, the nineteen-year-old Edwini-Bonsu has been on the fringe of the Whitecaps for the last two years. There are a few reasons for this: he’s been hurt, which has obviously impacted his development, while Jackson has remained supernaturally healthy for a player of his size and role. Second, Edwini-Bonsu has only been playing football at all for seven years, since he moved to Canada.

For somebody with as much raw athleticism as Edwini-Bonsu, this is not as much of a handicap as you might think. Striker is the least technical position on the pitch. If you have good eyes, a good brain, and can leave trails of fire when you run, then you can play for somebody. “Run fast, kick ball” got Edwini-Bonsu a look with F.C. Metz and a contract at the Whitecaps Residency team to start the 2007 season after time in the metro Edmonton youth leagues.

Luckily, in addition to a superb athlete it turns out that Edwini-Bonsu is also a quick study. His progress is remarkably positive, injuries aside. He’s scored three goals for Canada at the youth level and deserved every one of them, tying for the Golden Boot in the CONCACAF U-20 championships despite Canada going down in the group stage.

In his sparse Whitecaps experience so far, Edwini-Bonsu’s progress has been both obvious and exciting. On Sunday against Miami FC, Edwini-Bonsu appeared as a late substitute with Marlon James ailing and made a ridiculous move to set up Charles Gbeke’s second goal, stepping past defender John Pulido as though it were a practice drill and thundering down a quarter of the pitch before laying the ball off perfectly to a wide-open Gbeke for an easy finish.

If he keeps doing that up, Whitecaps fans might not even notice that James is gone.

Last week, it was made official. Sporting a fancy new beard, Jacob Lensky had signed with FC Utrecht (Dutch).

The manager had a lot of encouraging things to say, considering the fact that Lensky has one career Eredivisie appearance and has been out of football for a year. The technical director was more realistic, calling Lensky a “long-term” project but sounding convinced of his physical and technical abilities. Lensky’s reportedly been getting a look at fullback rather than his native position, which was an attacking midfield role, which will be yet another hurdle for Lensky to overcome as he gets himself back into the professional game.

For those who aren’t familiar with Jacob’s story, the previous edition of the Jacob Lensky Saga is highly recommended reading: to summarise, Lensky was a brilliant prospect since he was old enough to kick a ball whose only question marks were his own desire and a family that may have desired a little too much. If Lensky has genuinely rediscovered his passion, all the luck in the world.

Lensky’s been predominantly getting action at fullback rather than his native midfield positon, and in a 3-1 friendly loss for Utrecht against Ankaraspor of Turkey he got bad reviews (Dutch) for his play in the first half. There’s been some very moderate anxiety over Lensky potentially jumping ship to the Czech Republic national team (his father, Boris, is of Czech descent) after Lensky badmouthed the Canadian programme in an interview back in the Netherlands. But Lensky’s been a good servant of the Canadian team for his entire life to date, including in the Olympic qualifiers and, more importantly, it seems doubtful that the Czechs would want him.

Frankly, for at least a couple years, it seems doubtful that the Canadians would want him.

The big question around Lensky is “is he doing this for the right reasons?” Is he simply another man in his early twenties facing the prospect of working for a living and realizing that kicking a ball around doesn’t seem so bad in comparison? Because if so, it might not be long before he remembers what drove him out of the professional game in the first place. Worst of all, is he succumbing pressure from people around him trying to live out their ambitions through Jacob?

Or maybe he’s someone who’s been flying around Europe since he was a boy, trialing here and getting a youth contract there, who broke into the freedom of adulthood, went to live a normal life for a year, and in so doing rediscovered everything he had loved about the game to begin with? If that’s the case, then the sky’s the limit. Maybe he won’t be the incredible attacking midfielder we’d all dreamed of, a worthy heir to Dwayne De Rosario, but he’ll be a Canadian playing professional football on his own terms. And that ain’t bad.

He was one of the rarest of players. Canadian to the bone, a young west-coast superstar who was being scouted by the Europeans almost from the moment he first saw a football pitch. He was with the Celtic youth academy by the age of 15 and then moved up to Feyenoord, getting an Eredivisie match at age eighteen.

How many Canadians have done that? He was big, quick, and talented: three pretty good attributes to combine. Particularly good off set pieces and probably the best young midfielder this country had since… actually, I’m not sure we’d ever had one at his level.

Alas, success was not to be. Rotterdam was a long way from his native Vancouver and he’d been packing suitcases on a tour of Europe when he was younger than most of us were when we started driving. In an interview later with The Province, he said, “I just wanted to completely remove myself from the situation because I burnt out so badly I couldn’t take it anymore.” So 19-year-old Jacob Lensky requested his release from Feyenoord, one of the best sides in Europe.

Said Peter Bosz, technical director of Feyenoord, “Feyenoord is saddened by the player’s departure, given that his footballing qualities were unquestionable.” But the Dutch giants were class until the end and let Lensky go on his way. The young starlet retired and flew home to Vancouver.

You know what just about everybody in Canadian football said at the time? Good for him! There had always been rumours, and more than rumours, about the Lenskys. Jacob’s father Boris Lensky was your stereotypical football father, flying Jacob around hell’s half acre, openly gunning for a youth deal with Manchester United before inking terms with Celtic. Before Feyenoord, all the Canadian footballing world knew of Jacob Lensky was what Boris Lensky told us and the exciting quotes that filtered through the youth academies of the big European clubs as Boris jerked Jacob around from country to country. As a teenager Jacob played for five European youth setups in three countries. And these are simply the facts of record, before getting into the usual whispers that surround cases like this.

Then, out of nowhere in January, stunning news came down the wire. Lensky was on trial with a football club again. But for the alumnus of Celtic and Feyenoord, the side this time was more humble: the defending USL Division 1 champion Vancouver Whitecaps. In a report from The Province, Lensky identified the reason he was back: he was happy to be playing closer to home and away from the pressures of a big European club. All around, Canadian fans applauded at a young man seeming to be getting back into the game the right way. He impressed in Vancouver and received a trial offer from the MLS’s Seattle Sounders. All was right with the world.

Then Lensky left Vancouver camp. Not to go to Seattle, but to go home. The Sounders confirmed Lensky hadn’t accepted their trial offer. Had he simply grown sick of the game again? Nobody in the Lensky camp was talking, and Jacob was left to fade into the obscurity that is the rightful due of every nineteen-year-old.

Finally, today, almost exactly four months after the Vancouver-Seattle soap opera, Jacob Lensky is back on the footballing pages. Back in the Netherlands, Lensky was on trial with FC Utrecht (Dutch) – and, in spite of eight months layoff, impressing. Lensky is back in Canada now, and the question does not seem to be whether Utrecht wants Lensky but whether, so soon after his release from Feyenoord for personal reasons, he is eligible for another Eredivisie contract.

Of course, there’s still the open matter of whether Lensky really wants to play again or if he’s just being pushed from a certain direction. But not to worry! According to FC Utrecht head of scouting Edwin de Kruijff, Lensky was just taking a gap year to resume his studies.

Where did that come from? In which parallel dimension can one take the words “gap year” from the quote “I burnt out so badly I couldn’t take it anymore?” Burned out so badly that he wasn’t even willing to play for Seattle in North America’s second-best football league, on a team so close to his home town that he could drive back. And after about a semester, he decides “wow, I feel great, and all that studying that I never told anybody about and that was so intensive that I couldn’t, say, stay in shape by playing for a university or in the USL PDL or something has really paid off! I think I’ll go back to the Netherlands and really, really piss off Feyenoord by signing for one of their rivals after securing my release quite possibly under false pretenses!”

Believe me, this is not the last chapter of Jacob Lensky’s footballing soap opera.

Dave Hoilett has been knocked out (German) of the rest of the German 2.Bundesliga season with a broken toe, sustained earlier today in 1-0 loss for his FC St. Pauli side.

This is obvious a serious damper on our hopes of getting Hoilett a cap in the Gold Cup. A broken toe isn’t a hugely serious injury and Hoilett could be back in July if he really wanted to, but is someone with his history of national ambivalence going to put himself through pain in order to wear the maple leaf? I’m not holding my breath.

That said, the Hoilett saga is at the point where, if I’m Stephen Hart, I’d name Hoilett and put him out in the 90th minute sometime just to get him capped if he was willing to come. But coming on the heels of hopeful comments from Hart on It’s Called Football a couple of weeks ago about getting Hoilett a senior cap, this is seriously disappointing. Hopefully the Jamaicans are so disspirited by this minor injury that they never call him again.

It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be. -Anatole France

I have a confession to make, I only recently began following Canadian soccer, and only shortly before that soccer in general. In fact, I have never been to an actual soccer match (youth soccer doesn’t count). Sure, for years I would watch the World Cup or the European Championship on television because it was a big event, and there is an intrinsic flow to soccer which no other sport has.

My first, memorable, non-World Cup or European Championship match was Newcastle’s Premier League home tie against Arsenal in the 2005-06 season, as it was the reason I began watching football matches on a regular basis. The only thing I remember from the match (everything else I looked up) was Scott Parker running around like a madman after he had his teeth knocked out (or chipped), gauze with some numbing agent in his mouth, diving head-first all over the place. It was a remarkable performance and I (foolishly) decided to take up Newcastle as my favourite side. I began to pour hours into playing Football Manager (the best learning tool for a new football fan), seek out websites, and find matches on television to watch.

So, as of 2005 I had found my club, but what about following my Country? As we all know, following the national team is a logistical nightmare. Nonetheless, in 2006 Sportsnet decided to show a couple U-20 matches against Brazil, and so I saw my first national team match. Besides David Edgar, I knew nothing of the Canadians. In fact, Edgar ended up scoring in that match, Canada winning, and my support of the national side started off on unusual footing, although Dale Mitchell was the coach of that U-20 side. The next year I watched as Benito Archundia made one of the worst calls I have ever seen in sport, and my sugar-coated view of soccer came crashing down. If there was a silver lining, that horrible offside call galvanized my support.

That all being said, when it comes to our National teams, I am still fairly naive. I don’t know much NT history and, more importantly, I haven’t experienced the anguish most seasoned fans have. The Gold Cup officiating was harsh, but I wasn’t completely invested at the time and didn’t know who most of the players were. I didn’t realize that following the national team would mean getting all my news from the internet, following the Voyageurs’ forum, or listening to World Cup Qualifying matches thanks to the radio broadcasts of the other team (Phillip’s Bakery: A step above the rest!). Hostile “home” crowds, poor officiating, the CSA, and CONCACAF officiating are obstacles which, as far as I was concerned, may as well have not existed few years ago; I am still in the learning and conditioning stage of my fandom.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, there is so much I did not know going into this odyssey that is supporting the national teams. However, now that I am involved, ingrained, in this voyage, there is a sense of pride in being one of the few. Any idiot can cheer for Canada’s hockey team at the Olympics (and possess an unbelievable amount of arrogance even though they cannot name half the players), but being a Canadian soccer fan, there’s something special there, or at least I think so. Then again, I don’t have the cynicism that comes from experiencing heartbreak after heartbreak.