You’ve all heard about the new rule instituted by FIFA where players over twenty-one, once considered cap tied, were now international free agents. Whereas once a player would be considered safe after his twenty-first birthday, he is now fair game once more, and those of us who thought we had a young star sewn up must once again live in fear.

However, there’s a lot of confusion regarding the new rule, not to mention a lot of speculation. So, as a public service to the Canadian footballing world, I will field seven hypothetical questions to remove all doubt on the relevant issues.

Also, I hadn’t written a post in, like, a week, and this was 1,400 cheap words.

1) So what, exactly, was the old rule?

Back in the days of yore, a player could be cap tied in two manners. First, he could play a senior match at a FIFA-sanctioned tournament: the World Cup, the Confederations Cup, a continental championship, or qualifying for the same. Second, he could make his final decision on his twenty-first birthday. Once he turned twenty-one, that decision was carved in stone except in unusual cases like a country ceasing to exist.

2) What’s changed?

Your twenty-first birthday no longer has any significance. Until you play a senior match at a FIFA-sanctioned tournament, you are completely fair game. You can play a billion U-20 matches, live in Canada your whole life, eat poutine and drink Rickard’s Red, have a Danish grandfather and go play for Denmark because you think the women are better looking. By making the world of international football even more mercenary and less about representing your homeland on the world stage, players will get more money and everybody will win except for idiot fans.

The punchline is that it’s all retroactive, so players who had formerly been tied to one country can now do what they feel like.

3) Why, how could this happen?

At the FIFA general meeting earlier this month, Algeria put forward a motion to abolish the 21-years-old restriction, and the motion was passed with a 58% vote in favour. This was portrayed as a “surprise” and almost as a spur-of-the-moment decision by the board, but if you believe that I have some northern Ontario swamp land to sell you.

4) Since you know CONCACAF’s going to get screwed somehow, how did Blatter manage to slide the knife between our ribs this time?

This isn’t an issue for the teams in the hex, but the rest of CONCACAF gets reamed in the short term by this rule. UEFA, to pick one example, is in the middle of the first stage of World Cup qualifying with all teams still participating. CONMEBOL is also in World Cup qualifying but they have their final matches in October. The Africans are in their third round, but their third round has twenty teams in it. But the small federations get reamed. Asia will have only one team playing in October (the winner of Bahrain – Saudi Arabia against New Zealand for the last World Cup spot) and CONCACAF will have the six teams in the hex. In Asia’s case, the teams that have already qualified for the World Cup could of course cap players there, but one suspects they won’t use the World Cup for too much experimentation.

Why is October so significant? Because October is when the rule takes effect. Every team in UEFA and CONMEBOL as well as twenty African teams play World Cup qualifying matches in October, allowing them to cap tie players almost immediately. But only six teams from CONCACAF, one from the AFC, and one from the OFC get the same privilege. Bosnia could cap Asmir Begovic, if he was willing, on the fourteenth of October (they probably won’t because it’ll be a vital match against Spain, but they could). But if Jonathan De Guzman had second thoughts and wanted to play for Canada, we could put him in friendlies but not seal him up until the 2011 Gold Cup.

There would have been an incredibly easy fix to this. Have the rule come into effect on July 1 instead of October 1, and the problem almost disappears in CONCACAF, where a dozen nations could call new players to the 2009 Gold Cup rosters. Even Asia, which is almost done their qualification, would have one more team with an opportunity. But one suspects that screwing the smaller federations isn’t a bug to FIFA, it’s a feature.

5) Mother of pearl! Well, who do we stand to lose from this ruling?

There are a few players who could theoretically jump ship, but most of them wouldn’t be missed. The only name anyone is worried about is Asmir Begovic, who was born in Bosnia but lived in Canada from an early age and, after some tension, committed to us on his twenty-first birthday. Bosnia is known to be interested in Begovic and the extent to which Begovic returns the interest is unclear. We know that Hart wanted Begovic for the Gold Cup squad, but Begovic is currently expecting the birth of his first child and quite reasonably decided to stay home.

Theoretically, Simeon Jackson could pull a Tomasz Radzinski, stay home from the Gold Cup without telling anyone, then suit up with his native Jamaica. But I’m going to go ahead and not worry about that.

6) Well, okay, who can we get?

To my knowledge, there’s no registry of uncapped players with Canadian grandparents kicking around Europe, which is a shame because it would come in handy about now. O’Brian White is a possibility: a 23-year-old striker drafted last year by Toronto FC, White is Jamaican to the core but has a Canadian mother and lived in Scarborough starting when he was seventeen. Since White now plays professionally in Canada and was a part of Jamaica’s youth setup before he moved here, it’s possible he may have had a change of heart – certainly, Jamaica’s been in no rush to call him up (he’s not even on their Gold Cup roster).

Another name is 34-year-old San Jose Earthquakes goalkeeper Joe Cannon. Cannon is eligible for Canada through his father. He has capped twice for the United States but both appearances were in friendlies; he was on the American roster for the 2003 Confederations Cup but never appeared. He’s no spring chicken but he’s a capable goalkeeper and he could play with Hirschfeld and Begovic on my 2014 World Cup team.

7) Nobody cares about elderly MLS goalkeepers! Let’s get to the good stuff: do you think Jonathan De Guzman will come back to Canada?

Maybe.

Jonathan hasn’t exactly been setting the world on fire since he committed to the Netherlands. Injuries and poor play have dogged him, and he still hasn’t gotten a look from the full Dutch national team. There’s not even much buzz around him at the club level these days: it’s like he’s fallen off the face of the Earth. The Dutch grabbed him, now he can’t play for anyone else, if he gets good we’ll talk but for now forget about him. That sort of thing. It’s only gotten worse since Marco Van Basten left: he seemed to be Jonathan’s biggest backer other than Julian at times.

Now, the Dutch are not stupid. I’m willing to bet that De Guzman is getting at least a ninetieth-minute appearance in a World Cup qualifying match as soon as they can pay for the airfare. But Jonathan De Guzman isn’t stupid either. If he realizes that he’s an extra cog in the Dutch machine and they don’t so much want him as want to make sure that nobody else gets him, that could be a big factor. And Jonathan still has serious sentimental attachment to Canada. Sure, he picked the Netherlands because he wants to win trophies, but if he realizes the Dutch don’t care whether he lives or dies, he might give us a bit of a longer look.

And, of course, there’s always the chance that the Dutch rate Jonathan so lowly these days they won’t bother trying to cap him. It looks a lot more possible than it did last year.

Let’s make one thing clear: last night was a black day for Canadian football. Not because Toronto won (the chorus of “waah! everybody hates Toronto!” is already up in full force among the usual elements) but because Montreal disgraced our national championship. Short of match fixing, there was nothing more the Impact could have done to discredit the game in this country. A neutral observer used to seeing Manchester United every weekend or somebody being introduced to the game would have walked away thinking that we’re a bunch of amateurs. A Briton I work with laughed in my face today when the game came up.

It wasn’t all bad. Toronto FC fans are happy, as they should be. The Canadian Stretford End has pronounced this a triumph for the Canadian game because of the excitement. Well, for a Toronto FC diehard it was exciting, but we don’t measure success by the number of happy fans who were already supporters. Anybody without a vested rooting interest for Toronto over Vancouver would have walked out shaking their head in disbelief. It’s true that teams from lesser nations tank even the UEFA Champions League in favour of their domestic competition, but is that what we want the Canadian Championship to be? “The Voyageurs Cup: We’re About As Exciting As Andorra”?

Let’s not spare the Impact fans their blushes. No complaints about the real Montreal Ultras, but there’s always been a huge prawn sandwich brigade in Montreal, many of whom call themselves Ultras but only sing when the Impact are winning. On a rainy day with the Impact playing for pride against a supposedly mortal rival, Toronto chants filled Stade Saputo for ninety minutes on television. The disgraceful effort by the Montreal players and staff was met by the disgraceful effort from all but their best fans.

Nobody should blame Toronto. They didn’t pick their opponent. They had a job to do and they did it. I’m going to be behind the FC with full voice in the CONCACAF Champions League, and so should you. There are a lot of sour grapes out there right now, but we saw that last year too when the Impact won and most of us got over it. What we should really worry about is a solution, other than banning Montreal from future Voyageurs Cups (though that has a certain appeal).

The fairest and simplest way is a single-leg replay. If all three teams are tied on points go to goal differential and so on, but if two teams wind up on nine points have them play a single leg at a neutral site, winner take all. Imagine the excitement if, next week, Toronto took on Vancouver in, say, Edmonton or even Montreal for all the marbles. Imagine the buildup! Two teams, in classic elimination fashion, with nothing to lose and everything to win, and no possibility of the Montreal Impact’s lack of integrity fouling up the goal differential.

Of course, really making the Voyageurs Cup great would require weekend dates and more pre-match buildup. It would, in short, require MLS and the USL to stop being inept jackasses, so I’m not holding my breath. It is a horrible truth that the Canadian game is enslaved to the shambolic American leagues, leagues with no conception of the game’s history, leagues that can’t even bother to recognize international dates and dilute their product by going up against the game’s biggest competitions and forcing their stars to choose between club and country. If the CONCACAF Gold Cup can’t get a couple weeks off out of those idiots, what chance does the Voyageurs Cup have?

The Montreal Impact deliberately made a mockery of our only national football competition. It will take a long time for Canadians to forgive them for that. But that mockery was only made possible by the idiocy of our footballing masters across the border, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that essential truth.

Still, only one thing really matters today. Congratulations, Toronto FC, who will be worthy representatives even if their best player has turned his back on Canada. I only hope I can catch one of your many, many CONCACAF Champions League matches in the coming season.

I am writing the beginning of this post in the eighty-forth minute of Toronto – Trois-Rivieres Attack. Toronto leads 5-1 on a hat trick from the unpatriotic Dwayne De Rosario, a goal from outright scumbag Amado Guevara, and a goal from professional pylon Chad Barrett.

I’m not a Whitecaps fan. I’m a club widow whose heart belongs to the Edmonton Aviators. I keep telling myself this. But right now, I am trying to console myself by saying that I am dead, and this is hell.

It turns out that I hate Marc Dos Santos more than I hate cancer. Seriously, he started who again? Srdjan Djenakovic in goal, the guy who was directly responsible for Toronto’s first goal? A couple guys thrown straight into the starting eleven from the Canadian Soccer League? All of their best players, aside from Gjertsen and Di Lorenzo, watching the match from home?

(Eighty-eighth minute.)

Am I a Whitecaps fan? I really didn’t think so before tonight. Sure, I was cheering for them, but that was because I always like the underdogs and Montreal pissed me off because of the whole Honduras thing (I thought I hated Montreal for that? This is the invasion of Poland in comparison). But I am really, really, scotch-drinking, keyboard-throwing, cat-puntingly angry right now.

I don’t really want to be a Whitecaps fan. It seems too high-stress.

What kind of ignorant asshole starts his goddamned reserves in the last match of a round-robin cup tournament, anyway? Vancouver plays Montreal and Toronto at full strength, Toronto plays Vancouver at full strength and Montreal saying “let’s get this over with, happy hour starts at the Peel Pub at ten”. How is that fair? How is that even sport? In a competition where every point is the difference between winning and losing, it turns out that having the last match of the competition is the largest possible advantage.

Ninetieth minute. Guevara just scored again. Amado Guevara. In case you don’t remember, his flagrant dive at this very stadium last year got Patrice Bernier sent off. If I were to create a trinity of unholy names in Canadian football, it would be Guevara, Chris Morgan, and Benito Archundia.

Remember last year in the Voyageurs Cup? Second-last match of the competition and the Whitecaps were out. Toronto went into Swangard Stadium and Vancouver played the hell out of them, emerging with a 2-2 draw that ended up sending Montreal to the CONCACAF Champions League. You remember that? Jesus, I think I am a Whitecaps fan.

Actually, I think I’m angrier at the Montreal fans. I mean, the TFC fans were travelling to a hopeless game and they were by far the louder fans. What gives? Montreal deserves an MLS team with fans like this? Fans like we saw against Honduras? With such blatantly unprofessional behaviour in a national championship? I’m not convinced they still deserve a USL team.

Final whistle. I am going to find a lawyer who can start a class-action suit against the Impact for throwing the game. There’s got to be someone who’ll take it. If John Limniatis was still manager, you know he wouldn’t have played his useless reserves. Seriously, Marc Dos Santos: be ashamed of yourself. You are a terrible human being and a worse sportsman. Do you have any clear conception of what you are paid to do? Do you quite understand how “football” works? You try to score more goals than the other team, not say “meh, I’m not really in the mood”.

Hey, it’s the “this is our house!” commercial. They were going to film one of these in Saputo Stadium, but it turns out that empty seats couldn’t do the chant.

If anyone says that watching Montreal’s disgraceful display is good for Canadian football because Toronto won, they’re wrong.

This is Ali Gerba, former striker for the Montreal Impact, Miami Fusion, Pittsburgh Riverhounds, Toronto Lynx, Montreal again, Toronto again, Montreal once more, GIF Sundsvall, IFK Göteborg, Odd Grenland, AC Horsens, FC Ingolstadt 04 and finally the Milton Keynes Dons, and future disappointment for Toronto FC. The hot rumour around town is that Gerba’s signing with Toronto is imminent: on the order of the next twenty-four hours, and possibly in time to hit the pitch for tomorrow’s Voyageurs Cup match against the Montreal Impact.

Gerba played with the Impact on three brief occasions earlier in his nomadic career, and depending on the state of his beer belly this may be quite the homecoming. Toronto will head into Stade Saputo tomorrow needing a four-goal win to take the Voyageurs Cup, and it’s starting to look more and more like they’ll get it. Joey Saputo’s drinking buddy Marc Dos Santos has already announced that, with the Impact already eliminated, he’ll be forfeiting any pride and self-respect he may have once had by fielding a sub-standard lineup.

Adam Braz, Cedric Jonquivel, Eduardo Sebrango, Zanzan, and Stefano Pesoli are all already confirmed to be out of the starting eleven due to nagging injury, personal reasons, or an international callup in Zanzan’s case. The rumour mill says that these are not the only high-profile absences from the Montreal eleven, with Matt Jordan most glaringly expected to get a night off. Toronto, meanwhile, is rushing Jim Brennan back into action and, by all accounts, going for broke.

The key for Toronto is going to be whether the Montreal players are going to be as complacent as the Montreal management. Your average professional athlete takes pride in going for a result and in playing the game the right way (unless he’s Amado Guevara or Chris Morgan), and nobody wants to get worked over like they owe Chris Cummins money and lose four goals. I think even the most raving, hysterical critics of the USL-1 would acknowledge that it’s not usually four goals a game worse than a mediocre MLS side and, certainly, in the history of the Voyageurs Cup Toronto has never looked anything like they were going to win by that much.

So, having hedged my bets so thoroughly, I should come right out and say that I think Toronto’s going to do it.

Montreal is heavily undermanned, particularly in defense, and has nothing to play for except pride (their manager has announced he plans to forfeit even that). Toronto is getting healthier every match, has been gritting out some nice results lately, may add a superb finishing striker who could be good for twenty minutes of taking through balls and placing them perfectly, and has already demonstrated a laughable superiority over the Impact in their previous match. With Montreal’s missing players, Toronto has a marked superiority in every area of the game.

4-0? It could happen. I hope some of the Toronto fans are at least checking prices for flights to Puerto Rico.

When Canada took on the world’s best in the 2001 FIFA Confederations Cup, it was (and remains) our senior mens team’s only appearance at a full FIFA tournament in my lifetime. Canada and Mexico qualified out of North America: the Canadians by virtue of winning the 2000 Gold Cup and Mexico as the defending champions from 1999.

Of course, the Confederations Cup isn’t a major tournament on the calendar. But for the Canadians it was the biggest stage we’d been on since 1986. Even the major countries send a few top players and play to win: just ask the New Zealanders if Spain was taking it easy last night. And with the Confederations Cup back in the spotlight thanks to the beginning of the 2009 tournament in South Africa, the time is right to look back on the glory that was the 2001 Confederations Cup.

As is traditional, the Confederations Cup was used as a warmup for the next year’s FIFA World Cup, taking place in Japan and South Korea. Canada was drawn into group B with the co-host Japanese, Cameroon, and Brazil. Predictably, the group was based in Japan, playing at Kashima Stadium in Ibaraki and Niigata Stadium.

It was a tough group but the marvelous thing about the Confederations Cup, the thing that makes it so valuable to us middling powers, is that there are no easy groups. Going in, Canada knew they’d face a stern test against three better teams. Fantastic! It would be a great way to test our mettle against some of the ranking sides in the world after the high of our Gold Cup victory. And we had already washed out of World Cup qualifying so this was the biggest opportunity we were going to have for a long time.

It’s easy to forget the calibre of the team we assembled. Craig Forrest is, of course, the best Canadian footballer who has ever lived. Paul Peschisolido was in his First Division-wrecking, butt-kicking, hero-making, managing-director-marrying prime. Mark Watson and Jim Brennan were risking serious arm injuries plunging knives deep into Holger Osieck’s back but they were still good players in high-quality leagues. Jason De Vos is one of the best centre backs we’ve ever run out as well as one of our best pundits. Guys like Davide Xausa and Carl Fletcher were minor pieces when if we had them, in their primes, today we’d be beside ourselves with joy. Carlo Corazzin, Dwayne De Rosario, and Richard Hastings were all on the bench.

The one glaring flaw was the Kevin McKenna Experiment still being in full swing, with Osieck having convinced himself beyond all reason that the big, talented 21-year-old centre back was secretly Marco Van Basten. Considering the trouble Canada would have scoring goals in this tournament, this would be significant.

Canada kicked off against the Japanese on May 31, 2001. The Japanese were famous for their quick attack and their fantastic transition game that was probably the best in Asia. Canada was famous for winning a coin toss against South Korea and then climbing onto Craig Forrest’s back. It was a one-sided matchup on paper, and a reporter asked Mark Watson what he thought of Japan’s speed. “They don’t run so fast,” Watson replied, “when they’re lying on the ground.”

Well, the Japanese attack tore up Watson so badly that they could have used him as sharkbait. Canada limped through the first half thanks to Forrest but with no chance of scoring, and then got shredded for three goals in the second half as Canada went down 3-0.

Realistically, that was it for Canada. They were never going to beat Brazil and a result over Cameroon wouldn’t be enough to put them in the top two. That match was the swing match for the Canadians and they came up well short. But everybody knew they would: for once the results were just the gravy, and what mattered was how they played.

Against Brazil, probably the best team in the world, they played pretty damned well. They did what Holger Osieck teams always did against superior opposition and bunkered in the John Limniatis Memorial 10-0-0 formation whenever a yellow shirt was within radar range of Craig Forrest. Even the lineup adjusted for defense, with Tony Menezes coming in for Carl Fletcher to start. They tried to snatch chances on the counter, which would have worked a lot better if the team was a bit quicker up front than Paul Peschisolido and Kevin McKenna. Canada held against Brazil and got into the half tied at nil.

Then, something odd happened. Midfielder Davide Xausa came out and in came Carlo Corazzin. A striker. Yes, McKenna moved back, but Holger decided “screw this, we can beat those bastards.”

We damned near did it, too. God, but that was a game. It was exactly what you picture when you remember the era of Holger’s Heroes. Forrest was a god incarnated as a man. Brazil constantly buzzed and got opportunities. They were miles and miles more skilled than the Canadians but they couldn’t break us down. Yes, Canada’s defense got worked like a speed bag, but we threatened at intervals. They earned that 0-0 draw and on a lucky day, Canada might have won that match.

The result was good for three points in the Moral Victory column and one point in the real standings. One precious, life-giving point. In a century of Canadian football, our senior mens team, the highest-profile football squad in the country, has achieved precisely one point in a full FIFA tournament. We got it over eight years ago on June 2, 2001 in front of 12,095 largely bored Japanese fans.

Canada followed that up by collapsing in front of the one team we should have had a fighting chance against, Cameroon. Going down 2-0, Canada emerged with little credit in what would be, to date, Canada’s last tournament match outside North America.

Eight years ago.

It’s a bittersweet memory, mostly because of what’s happened since. At the time it was promising. Canada hung tough with better teams against Brazil and for a half against Japan. World Cup qualifying was unfortunate but we seemed to be going up rather than down. Then Osieck took the pipe thanks to bootroom politics and was succeeded by an inept series of overly opinionated and inadequately talented self-described national heroes. Our best results came when we once again went outside Canada for our boss, using interim boss and Trinidadian Stephen Hart. Canada has not yet matched the glory years of 2000 and 2001 despite on paper having every reason to do so.

So, fantastic though the tournament was, we should concentrate above all on getting to the next one.

Enthusiastic observers of the Canadian game doubtless heard the surprising announcement from Canadian Soccer League commissioner Cary Kaplan last month regarding an ambitious plan of expansion, including a six-team western division and officially joining the Canadian Soccer Association with the long-term goal of getting a representative in the Voyageurs Cup. Kaplan went on It’s Called Football and the FAN 590, getting more attention in a week than the CSL usually receives in a full season.

For those of us who support Canadian teams and Canadian leagues, it was good times, but it was left to Canadian football veteran Ben Knight to make the obvious observation: this was still the Canadian Soccer League. Proud fuckups of a near-monopoly on high-level soccer in Ontario that lasted decades until Toronto FC supplanted the undersupported Lynx. A league whose patriotism has always been lukewarm at best, running out its infamous International Division whose best team, the Serbian White Eagles, are the CSL’s closest simulacrum of Manchester United but whose supporters defend their interest in Canadian football by saying that if Canada ever played Serbia, the support would be about fifty-fifty.

I have no problem with the International Division as it stands in today’s CSL (an Ontario regional league with a USL-1 reserve side in Quebec), but it’s incompatible with the idea of being a national football league.

That said, the International Division’s involvement in the latest display of CSL ineptitude is entirely coincidental. The White Eagles were set to take on the Italia Shooters at Etobicoke’s Centennial Stadium yesterday night. Hundreds of fans, thirty-one players, support staff, and stadium officials all showed up at the Stadium duly, and were duly informed that the game was called off, because the pitch wasn’t ready.

Centennial Stadium was formerly a grass park but was changed to artificial turf over the spring. The City of Toronto dallied on getting the conversion started and the USL PDL’s Toronto Lynx had already announced that a Sunday match was being moved to Barrie. Now, I can’t speak for any of you, but if I were on the payroll of an allegedly national football league whose flagship team was holding its home opener at a recently refurbished stadium owned by an infamously dysfunctional city and the other tenant of that stadium had already rescheduled, I might try to nail down the state of that stadium. Instead, the CSL apparently responded to phone calls by just saying the game was on, got everybody to come out, and then sent them all home.

According to an e-mail from the White Eagles, “there was some miscommunication between the CSL and the City/Field. The artificial turf is down.. but not ready to play on as supposedly it not “tightened” properly.” Kudos to their media guru for getting back to me within a couple hours on a Saturday (for reference, the inquiries e-mail for the Italia Shooters bounces) and I realise the club probably isn’t privy to the conversation, but it’s hard for me to imagine what sort of “miscommunication” we could be talking about.

CSL Guy: “So, will Centennial Stadium be ready on Friday?”
City of Toronto Guy: “Hell no!”
CSL Guy: “Fantastic!”

Of course, I don’t walk the corridors of power in Canadian football, but wow. According to VPjr on the Voyageurs board, Centennial Stadium was visibly unready earlier in the week. If there was any uncertainty, the league couldn’t have sent the night janitor out to see if the carpet had been laid?

But I’ll tell you what, CSL. As soon as, say, the English Southern Isthmian League cancels a major fixture because nobody bothers to check if the stadium has a playing surface in it, I’ll consider you guys as legitimate as a semi-professional non-League fourth division in a country that hasn’t won the World Cup in four decades.

Edit (12:10 AM, June 8): apparently this post really irritated an anonymous White Eagles supporter, who has edited a number of his posts including the one I linked to above. I stand by everything I wrote, but please be advised that the posts you see today aren’t as they were when this post was written. Guess I better watch out for tasers next time I’m in Belgrade…

A sentence that hasn’t been used much since about 1917: Fantastic news out of Romania! Via the Voyageurs, a few top-division Scandinavian sides are apparently interested (Romanian) in professional practice target and occasional hero of the men’s national team Lars Hirschfeld.

Lars has been an obsession of mine for a number of years now. Early in his career I saw him a couple times with the Edmonton Drillers (the first indoor incarnation – you could write a masters’ thesis on teams named “Edmonton Drillers”) and I thought he was going to make Craig Forrest look like he should play for the Forest Green Rovers. Then he kicked around Europe like Moses wandering the desert, occasionally resurfacing to humiliate Chelsea in the Champions League, but in spite of incredible skill dropping out of decent clubs and starting jobs.

He went to CFR Cluj, and that was that. Some said that, in spite of his hefty transfer fee, the Romanian champions had decided that they’d prefer to run out a couple other idiots who, by all accounts, aren’t actually that good. Some said that he had fled Romania secretly in the night, lying on a stone pedestal deep in the Austrian Alps, only to awaken in Canada’s hour of need. But he made a credible appearance for us in Cyprus, and as if suddenly reminded of his existence the world is eager to buy and Cluj is eager to sell.

So thank god for Lars Hirschfeld. Judging by the rumours, his transfer might be made official sooner rather than later. He could well be with his new club by, say, early July, just in time to miss the Gold Cup so he could practice with his new squadmates and oh goddammit.

It gets better. Asmir Begovic, our second-best goalkeeper, whose girlfriend is expecting their first child, has effectively withdrawn himself from consideration while becoming eligible for the Bosnian national team again. Our third-best goalkeeper, Pat Onstad, is not only older than the hills but recently retired from international football. Goalkeeper number four is Greg Sutton, who is currently the backup on a mediocre MLS side behind a Swiss infant and when he finally played against Vancouver punched a ball so sweetly to Ansu Toure that even Chad Barrett could have scored the winning goal.

Picture it, if you will. Benito Archundia has called a penalty against Richard Hastings in the ninetieth minute in a quarter-final against Honduras. Amando Guevara is at the spot. The match is tied. Standing on the line for Canada is Kenny Stamatopoulos.

Okay, so you killed yourself. That’s not going to help our readership any but it makes my point. Our number one could easily turn down the call, our numbers two and three basically already have, our number four has more rust than a Corvette after a light shower and nowhere near the performance, our number five is so bad the Norwegians say he stinks, and from there on we get into youth goalkeepers, goalkeepers in really low leagues (my god! that’s Simon Rayner’s music!), and Stephen Hart just biting the bullet and putting Dominic Imhof in goal.

I would murder a drifter to get Dani Fernandes back right now.

Don’t get me wrong. Moving out of CFR Cluj would be best for both Lars and, in the long run, for Canada. Hirschfeld’s still a young man and he will likely be around when the 2014 qualification cycle arrives. The more match practice he gets, the happier we’ll all be when we play the most important games of all.

I’d just prefer that he waited until August to do it.

In the past year, speculation about FIFA attempting to push through a “6+5″ rule to limit foreign players playing for club sides.  Less attention has been paid to other potential amendments from the governing body, including one which could affect the Canadian Men’s National Team.

 The current FIFA congress recently passed an amendment which will remove the age limit which governs whether or not players, with dual nationalities, can switch national teams. Under the previous wording, players became tied to a nation if they had played with at the youth level of that team and reached the age of 21; the amendment has removed the age provision, so now players can change so long as they have not been capped at the senior level.

 Modifying the rule could turn out to be a positive or a negative for the Men’s National Team. The optimist in me believes that this can open up the doors to those lost sons with dual citizenships, who went overseas and played at the youth level for another national team but, for whatever reason, cannot break into that nation’s senior team. Those players could (and should) be welcomed with open arms, given an opportunity to make our side, and make a positive contribution.

 On the other hand, there is a chance of players capped at the youth level for Canada, but not at the senior level, could end up playing abroad. Asmir Begović, for example, could decide to play for Bosnia and Herzegovina instead of Canada.

 Regardless of whether we see an influx or exodus of youth-capped players, one thing is for certain. The Men’s National Team, and the Canadian Soccer Association, needs a clear and organized direction to entice players to play for the country; or we start capping 12 year-olds at the senior level.

So, the Cyprus – Canada match was on digital television in Cyprus. Normally that’s all we need: when you’re a Canadian football fan you get awfully resourceful awfully quickly. If somebody posted a request for Dominic Imhof’s match videos on the Voyageurs board, we’d end up with DivX videos of FC Tuggen’s every match since the Second World War. Unfortunately, there was no Our Man in Cyprus to provide a justin.tv stream, and all the ingenuity of Canadian football fandom could not provide so much as a low-fidelity Greek radio broadcast.

Between this and the lack of intellectual curiousity from Canada’s professional soccer press, information was hard to come by. I’ve put what I’m pretty sure is Stephen Hart’s starting XI in diagram to the left: sides are pretty well hypothetical and based off of my own experience (i.e. they’re probably all lies). Most interestingly, Eddy Sidra went all ninety minutes at probably right back (Cann and McKenna are both almost exclusively central players and if Hastings has ever played on the right side in his life I haven’t seen it).

We saw Peters at midfield, which was depressingly conventional on Hart’s part. We saw Josh Simpson at striker, which was a blast from the past when Simpson cleverly took advantage of a Cypriot mistake to set up the only goal, scored by Simeon Jackson in the fifty-third minute. Jackson now has the best strike rate of any Canadian striker ever to live at one goal in one match, and though I love the Gillingham starlet I doubt that’s going to hold up.

What we know is that Canada dropped the favoured Cypriots 1-0, our first victory over a higher-ranked nation since June 6, 2007 when we dropped Costa Rica in the preliminary round of the 2007 CONCACAF Gold Cup. Paul Stalteri didn’t see any action, and since the people who write about Canadian football are either a) idiots or b) not in a position to fly to Cyprus for international friendlies we don’t know whether he was injured or hung over or Borussia Monchengladbach told Stephen Hart they’d bust his kneecaps if Diesel played or what. Kenny Stamatopoulos also rode the bench, because he stinks. A more interesting did-not-play was striker Tosaint Ricketts, the young Finnish second division semi-wunderkind who was the most obscure member of this lineup until Hart made the mistake of writing “D. Imhof” on his lineup card.

That said, Stephen Hart seemed to be managing to win. I’ve put an even-more-conjectural final eleven to the left based on the substitutions: according to the few descriptions available, from the moment Canada went up Hart started to bunker and try to hold onto the result. Ornoch went in at probably-striker but he’s a rather rangy fellow; having Ricketts up front would not be compatible with this strategy. So Tosaint tosat, and frankly that’s a shame. I wanted to see him a lot more than I wanted to see Dominic Imhof.

Wait, why am I bitching? We beat higher-ranked Cyprus 1-0 in what was a meaningless friendly with a bunch of random European assholes for us and an important World Cup qualifying tuneup for them! Oh when the reds come marching in, I want to be in their number! Oh when the reds come marching in…

Speaking of stolen chants, Toronto FC is in action tomorrow, taking on the Vancouver Whitecaps at Swangard Stadium in what will be the most important match of the Voyageurs Cup. If Toronto FC wins or draws, they take the cup. If Vancouver wins, Toronto will have to beat the hell out of Montreal at a raucous Stade Saputo to get the goal difference.

I was hoping to get to this match from Victoria but was stopped for a couple reasons: turns out that I couldn’t get Wednesday morning off work and turns out that the south side of Swangard Stadium is sold out and nobody in the Southsiders seems inclined to give up a ticket. Swangard is a pleasant, pastoral setting set in a scenic Burnaby park. It is the most lovely stadium for any sport I have ever been to, except for those grandstands on the south side where some of the most die-hard fans in the country scream, swear like sailors, drink to excess, and make damned sure everybody can hear them.

It should be a good match. Toronto got beaten like a Red Patch Boy at a Columbus police convention in Houston on Saturday, but that same day Vancouver went down without much credit in Portland. The weather in Vancouver should be spectacular, which may be an obstacle for The FC, used as they are to miserable squalls off of Lake Ontario. Both squads have been consistently inconsistent but Toronto’s been in better form lately, so I have to give Toronto the edge in this match.

And yes, I’m cheering for the Whitecaps to take the Voyageurs Cup. I dig an underdog, but the nice thing about being a Canadian club widow is that when The FC does win, I’ll be able to root for them with full-throated enthusiasm in the CONCACAF Champions League.

Finally, the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame will induct its Class of 2009 last week. Joining this illustrious group of luminaries is, among others, former Montreal Impact manager and current bulk purchaser of resume paper John Limniatis. The ceremony will take place June 6 at the Country Club in Woodbridge, Ontario, if you’re the sort of person who wants to pay $150 a head to tell John that he should really go for that TFC job.