It’s a shame that the Maple Leaf Forever has been so quiet lately. After all, there’s been quite a bit going on with Canadian players around the world. David Hoilett made his debut with Blackburn, Asmir Begovic is getting first team time with Portsmouth, and of course there are the Jonathan De Guzman transfer rumours…

Okay, none of them are exactly Canadian. Regardless, not a few Canadians have been shuffling about the football world. If you ever want up-to-date information on the tribulations of every Canadian outside Canada, the Voyageurs should be your one-stop shop, particularly the aptly-named Mother of all Canadians Abroad thread, from which I mercilessly lifted much of this news. I did, however, try to add my own insight and research to it, so hopefully even the hardest-core Voyageur will find something in this summary they didn’t already know,

In a sad bit of news, alumnus of the Canadian national team and former Toronto Blizzard standout Fernando Aguiar had retired from football at the age of 37, returning to Canada. Mixed in with sorrow at a great warrior from a bygone era finally hanging up his boots, the most natural response to this is “Jesus Christ, Fernando Aguiar was still playing?”

Indeed he was. Aguiar was actually at a surprisingly high level, playing for S.C. Gondomar of the Portugese Liga Vitalis (their second division). Aguiar was once known for speaking before he thought, famously running off his mouth after not being selected for a friendly on the Voyageurs board. But in recent years he has kept his head down while quietly accumulating the best resume of any Canadian outfield player in his age group. The last true casualty of the Yallop-Watson dark age, Aguiar will be remembered fondly.

Andrew Ornoch recently joined the many Canadians plying their trade in the Netherlands, joining up (as reported in superior detail by the Out of Touch guys and by Ben Rycroft) with Heracles Almelo of the Eredivisie. The 24-year-old plays both midfield and striker and enjoys a positive reputation both in Canada and in Europe, where he is called a positive influence as well as a talented player. Ornoch signed on a free transfer after impressing the Dutch in his trial, and the manager has indicated (Dutch) he’ll get a shot in the starting eleven.

Born in Warsaw, Ornoch is (until they change the rules again) a signed, sealed, and delivered Canadian: he appeared in Dale Mitchell’s last match, the famous 3-0 curbstomping in Jamaica which also saw a forgotten Bosnian named Asmir Begovic spend the entire match on the bench. Ornoch has also appeared against Hungary in 2006 and Cyprus earlier this year.

While Ornoch enters the Netherlands, could-be Canadian Jonathan De Guzman is on his way out, being linked to many of the powers of Europe from his current side Feyenoord. Chelsea, Stuttgart, Everton, and Valencia have been linked to the starlet of ambiguous nationality, with the transfer fee rumoured to be in the £4 million range. The Chelsea rumour is getting the most buzz, but that’s probably just because they’re Chelsea: they are reportedly looking to send De Guzman out on loan and the younger De Guzman is not at all happy with that idea.

Jonathan is obviously catching the eye of the European press after an injury-plagued 2008 campaign, which is great for him but a shame for us Canadians as we’d hoped he’d slip under the radar long enough to commit to the maple leaf. For what it’s worth, though, there is still no Dutch national buzz around De Guzman and they seem content to let World Cup Qualifying pass without tying him down. Perhaps the Dutch have no doubts about his loyalties, or perhaps they have no interest. We outsiders can only guess.

The much bigger news for Canada fans came on a much smaller scale, and promising defender Adam Straith, formerly of the Vancouver Whitecaps academy and fresh off of a year on loan in Germany, will stick around in Europe as the Whitecaps agreed on his transfer to 2.Bundesliga Energie Cottbus for an undisclosed fee.

Cottbus have made a habit of acquiring Canadians lately. In addition to Straith and the other half-dozen Whitecaps loanees up and down the Cottbus youth setup, the newly-relegated side also rescued Lars Hirschfeld from obscurity by signing him on a free transfer from CFR Cluj earlier this summer. The Canadians have not yet gotten any first-team experience, with Hirschfeld consigned to the bench until Cottbus manages to transfer out the overqualified Gerhard Tremmel, but both Straith and Hirschfeld were acquired with the expectation that they’ll be starting sooner or later.

Straith, 19, is entirely a product of the British Columbian soccer system, having played with Victoria United of the PCSL, the Whitecaps Residency team, and the usual panoply of elite youth teams. He made five appearances with Cottbus II in his loan spell and acquitted himself very well, and while the Germans will of course train him up to full European standards he and his kinsmen are the much-belated realization of the long-held dream that Canada could develop its own players domestically.

Last but not least, a Canadian goalkeeper has signed in the Scottish second division. There’s not much glory in the Scottish second tier but since I did an entire post on our goalkeeper signing for a soon-to-be-relegated Scottish Premier side, the least I can do is give this guy a paragraph. Cameron McKay agreed to terms earlier this week with Cowdenbeath F.C., joining a promising squad. It’s certainly a leap for McKay, who was previously playing in the Ontario provincial league with the other part-time warriors that dot Canada’s obscure soccer landscape.

According to perpetual newsbreaker of obscure Canadians Dino Rossi, Abney is twenty-four years old, and nobody will be shocked to hear that he has no international resume. I don’t follow the Ontario provincial leagues (surprise surprise) and so I don’t know a damned thing about this kid except what I got out of the Voyageurs thread: most interestingly, he has a blog with six posts but a pretty engaging writing style. He may be even less prolific than I am but he’s also getting paid to play football while I sit in an office staring at the clock all day, so he’s ahead of me there.

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

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

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

The Casual

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

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

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

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

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

Real supporters avoid these guys like the plague.

The Apprentice

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

Knowledge Level: Would recognize Mike Klukowski on the street.

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

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

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

The Voyageur

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normal people avoid these guys like the plague.

The European

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

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

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

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

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

The Toronto FC Diehard

Quote: “JIMMY BRENNAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Faux European

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(repeat until apocalypse)

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.

The Scottish Premier League is bad, and Falkirk is worse.

Scotland’s footballing landscape these days is an all-too-familiar one. Celtic and Rangers are Celtic and Rangers. Some clubs are staying afloat, and the rest are acting exactly like I would if I owned a football club, trying to get new signings with the change in the couch cushions and refusing to answer the phone because you know it’s just a bill collector threatening to cut off your Internet access.

But it’s still the third-best league in the British Isles. It’s still a step above Romania or Greece or any of the other recent haunts of Canada’s lost generation of goalkeepers. And playing Celtic and Rangers is a step above playing Port Vale and Huddersfield, which is why I was so pumped up when Josh Wagenaar signed with Falkirk last week.

Pumped up and blown away. Wagenaar split his starts last year at Yeovil with the enigmatic Asmir Begovic before Begovic was recalled to Pompey and did not get rave reviews. Yeovil offered Wagenaar a contract to remain on but at no point did he look like he deserved to be anywhere other than where he was. Yet he refused to sign the contract because he wanted to play at a higher level, and now, improbably, he is.

Falkirk is not the best environment for Wagenaar to surface in, though. Last year the Bairns escaped relegation by the narrowest of margins by beating Inverness no the last day of the season, while mounting a surprise Cinderella run in the Scottish Cup. But the manager of that remarkable season, “Yogi” Hughes, has left for greener pastures, as did quite a few of the players. New boss Eddie May is getting his first taste of management after coming through the ranks as a player and a youth coach. He’s brought in seven new players and the order of the day is “saving money”, which explains the former mid-table League One goalkeeper.

The good news for Canadian fans is that Wagenaar will compete with incumbent Robert Olejnik for the starting spot, a 22-year-old Austrian best known for some junior international caps and being an Aston Villa youth player once. Olejnik got the start for Falkirk’s season debut, but Wagenaar’s been getting all the press and the Falkirk media seems excited about repeating the words “Canadian international” as often as possible (just to clarify for any Scots reading: two caps, both friendlies, not impressive, rode the pine at the Gold Cup to Greg Sutton’s worst goaltending performance since the early nineties).

Can Wagenaar take the starting job? That depends on Olejnik, but the management seems to be open to the possibility and pleased with Wagenaar so far. It’ll be a big step for Wagenaar if he manages it, but he’d have to be a hero for Falkirk to survive the drop this season.

If he pulls it off, though, I think Lars Hirschfeld might have a backup.

It’s a quiet time of year for Canadian football. Toronto is falling into their usual non-playoff obscurity, Montreal is a shambles, Vancouver is struggling, the national team is inactive and its prospective players are searching their family trees for grandfathers in other countries. The men’s team isn’t going to play a competitive match until 2011 (and, knowing the CSA, going to have one friendly against Moldova until then). Makes it hard for a blog focused on the Canadian national program to find material.

So I’m copping out. I’m looking overseas. 2009-10 is going to be a good season for Canadians in the English Football League, and like seemingly everyone else in the world I’m going to have a look at those lucky few. Canadians will be playing in every level of the Football League from the Premiership to League Two, and here’s a brief glimpse at the ones who matter.

Yes, it’s a cheap gimmick. Yes, it ignores the Canadians playing at a high level in countries that aren’t England. Don’t worry, unless Jacob Lensky retires again or another Andrea Lombardo who isn’t actually our Andrea Lombardo signs with the Mongolian ninth-division champions, I’ll probably get to them.

David Edgar (DF, Burnley [EPL]): A former U-20 player with zero senior caps! His father is English, making Edgar eligible for the country he plays in! Declined a callup to the Gold Cup which would have captied him! Aaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaaaah! Fit that man for Owen Hargreaves’s old jersey already, it’s over!

Mortal panic about his nationality aside, Edgar had the best preseason of any Canadian anywhere in the world. Signing with Burnley on a free transfer was the perfect move for Edgar, who will be getting first team minutes on a Premiership side that has a chance of avoiding relegation. Unlike Newcastle, he won’t be playing in a bankrupt cesspool of resentment but for a promising club on the rise. His reviews were generally positive in preseason play, although he was unremarkable: pretty much David Edgar’s life story to this point.

Edgar is twenty-two, and if he’s for real this is his best chance to show it. Edgar played nineteen first-team matches with Newcastle over the years and didn’t particularly impress the Magpies faithful. Newcastle (as our resident Newcastle fan pRoke could tell you if he ever wrote a post) was not the best team for a youngster to prove himself on, but at some point if Edgar’s going to make a career in the Premier League, he’d better look like he belongs sooner rather than later.

Asmir Begovic (GK, Portsmouth [EPL]): Only arguably Canadian, but if he is he’s our second-most important player. Before the season began there was an expectation that Begovic would be Pompey’s backup behind the seemingly invulnerable David James (the British Pat Onstad), with 28-year-old incumbent backup Jamie Ashdown out of favour at Fratton Park. Unfortunately for Begovic, Pompey recently signed Finnish veteran Antti Niemi, who I thought played for the Chicago Blackhawks but turns out to have a rich English league history, recently starting at both Southampton and Fulham before prematurely retiring with a wrist injury.

As a result, Begovic’s role in 2009-10 seems to be the same as his role in 2008-09, with predominantly reserve duty, maybe a short loan spell to a desperate Championship or an optimistic League One side, and perhaps one or two games with the first team when their pensioner goalkeepers need a night off. This isn’t the development any of us were hoping for from Begovic, and the acquisition of Niemi indicates that, for whatever reason, Paul Hart doesn’t think the twenty-two year old can carry the mail yet. Possibly he’s afraid Begovic will turn up playing for Plymouth all of a sudden.

David Hoilett (FW, Blackburn [EPL]): He’s on this list for completeness’s sake, but the smart money is that Hoilett will be playing for neither Canada nor Blackburn in the coming year. His national loyalties, though ambiguous, seem to lean towards Jamaica. On the club end of things, in spite of a landmark court case to get a work permit this year Hoilett seems most likely to enjoy either another loan stint or a season spent on the bench and with the reserves.

Hey, no complaints! Jesus, the kid’s nineteen! He’s scored a brace in the friendlies and he’s impressing everybody after his preposterously promising loan last year to FC St. Pauli. If he does go to Canada, a strike force of Jackson and Hoilett in five years time would be positively frightening (yes, they’re both short, but when was the last time Canada scored off a header anyway?). Despite missing the end of the 2.Bundesliga season with a broken foot, fitness does not seem to be an issue. If I were Blackburn, I might loan him out to the Championship and let him get first-team experience against men, but at some point this season I expect Hoilett to be the first Canadian striker to run onto a Premier League pitch since Tomasz Radzinski.

Jaime Peters (DF/MF, Ipswich [CC]): Ah, Jaime Peters. The Patron Saint of Lost Footballing Causes, the man who has been just around the corner from stardom since Frank Yallop was manager. When Roy Keane took over in Ipswich, every Voyageur knew immediately: that was it. It was over for the dynamic but sometimes flakey Peters in England. No way… no way… would Keane give Peters minutes at any position other than towel boy. We might as well fit him for his Charleston Battery jersey right now.

Then, late last year, an injury crisis forced Peters to come off the reserves and play at full back, where he did pretty well, actually. Then he showed up in training and busted his ass, got called to the Gold Cup, and last weekend made a start at central midfield for Ipswich where he was, according to witness reports, terrific.

Yes, yet again us Canadian supporters have been drawn into the endless game of holding out hope for Jaime Peters. Whatever corner he had left to turn, he has by all accounts turned it. Keane believes in him enough to put him in a central starting role to open the season, and one match in Peters has repaid that trust. It’s like a dream. Jaime Peters is finally putting it all together? This could end very, very well.

Or he could revert to his typical form and wind up on the reserve team. But I believe in him (again).

Iain Hume (MF/FW, Barnsley [CC]): Chris Morgan is a cunt.

It’s saying something for Humey that he’s even on this list after getting his head split by one of the dirtiest men in football last year. In preseason friendlies, he looked like how you’d expect somebody who was out of shape on account of his near-fatal skull injury to look and the Barnsley management has said that Hume won’t feature in the team straight away until he gets his match fitness back. But, hell, it’s just lovely to see him again.

We won’t know until he plays a little whether he’s the same Iain Hume we all know and love, though. We can hope so, but our hopes aren’t the issue.

Simeon Jackson (FW, Gillingham [L1]): The Great Canadian Hope! Heir apparent to Dale Mitchell as a pacey short guy who somehow manages to score a garbagebag full of goals no matter who he’s playing against! This is a guy who was born to be a Vancouver Whitecap and score nine billion goals over a six hundred year MLS tenure before retiring as a hugely popular and inexplicably productive old man with a potbelly and moving into an ultimately catastrophic management career.

Yeah, he only has one international goal, but in fairness his international career started this past spring. And after a hat trick in an out-of-a-bad-novel 5-0 Gillingham win, he’s scoring three goals per League One game in his career and should be the league’s all-time leading scorer by March or so.

I love Simeon Jackson. Love love love Simeon Jackson. This kid came onto the scene in the Conference National with Rushden and Diamonds and scored a lot, then people said “ah, but let’s see if he can do it in the Football League”. Then he moved to Gillingham and scored a lot, but people said “that’s just League Two, let’s see what he can do in League One!” So far, so good.

Jackson has a history of burying the tough chances. His pace matches up with any striker in England. With his skill set, given time to adjust there’s no reason he can’t thrive in League One or even beyond that. If Gillingham wants to stay up they’ll need a lot of production from Jackson, and if he’s healthy they’ll get it.

Paul Peschisolido (Manager, Burton Albion [L2]): Oh, Pesch. You’re basically English in spirit. Can’t blame you, you’ve lived there a while. But whenever some hack writes an article about you in an English paper, it’ll be emblazoned in type for the world to see: “Canadian-born manager Paul Peschisolido.”

The first Canadian manager in Football League history, Peschisolido’s only previous backroom experience was four months as assistant to Jeff Kenna at Ireland’s St. Patrick Athletic. It’s pretty sparse experience but Burton Albion is a pretty lousy team: freshly promoted from the Conference National, and the jump between Conference and League is as great as any in England. Burton Albion is everyone’s favourite for the drop and if Peschisolido manages to save them that will be an awfully big feather in his already crowded cap.

Terry Dunfield (MF, Shrewsbury Town [L2]): Terry Dunfield is a vision of what David Edgar’s future might be. A talented prospect in the Manchester City system, Dunfield started out with rave reviews but never lived up to them, and his career gradually slumped down, down, down. He scored a goal per game (really) for the Canadian U-20s but never got a sniff at the senior team. Now he’s with a respectable League Two side and didn’t even get into the game to start their season.

Nothing against Dunfield. He’s a respectable Canadian, by most accounts a decent human being, and not a half-bad footballer. He and Shrewsbury Town would have made it to League One last season but for the intervention of Simeon Jackson popping Josh Wright’s corner into the goal at Wembley Stadium. But it hasn’t been going his way the last few years, and if he’s going to be a bench player in Shrewsbury that’s just another disappointment for the twenty-seven year old in a career full of them.

Update, August 10 1:09 PM: The story that seemed too good to be true, as Canadian soccer luminary VPjr informed me in the comment thread. In spite of claims and articles and Wikipedia entries to the contrary, this is a different Andrea Lombardo.

The real Lombardo’s fate is kinda funny, though.

Really, there’s no way the story can beat that headline.

You’ve forgotten about Andrea Lombardo? Well, I can’t blame you. He was Dale Mitchell’s target man for the abysmal 2007 Youth World Cup, beating out such bums as Julian Uccello. He didn’t score during the tournament and never really looked like he could. But his club career was so promising: he played with such famous sides as Atalanta (never scoring), Perugia (never scoring), Rieti (never scoring), and of course Toronto FC (seventeen matches, zero goals).

He got the hype (“unbelievable stamina“, raved John Molinaro of CBC.ca). But he did go on to play for York University after being cut by Toronto, and got national attention for being completely ineligible and costing York four games as a result. York obviously cut him loose after that, and Lombardo faded into the obscurity which is the birthright of all Canadian footballers.

But Lombardo has made good, signing with the Whittlesea Zebras of the Victorian Premier League and soon proud members of the Victorian State League, Division One. Okay, you haven’t heard of the Whittlesea Zebras. Neither had I until Andrea Lombardo signed with them, and I lived in Australia for two years. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of the Victorian State League, Division One.

Well, you’ve heard of the Hyundai A-League, of course: the best league in Oceania for what that’s worth. The level below that is made up of the various state leagues, including the Victorian Premier League. The level below that is the Victorian State League, Division One: Whittlesea is in the Premier League but is mathematically assured of relegation to the State League with two games left to play as Whittlesea sits on six points and safety is all the way up at twenty-four.

Whittlesea is certainly excited about their new acquisition. According to their own website, “the Whittlesea Zebars have hit the recruiting market hard” (and as soon as Toronto’s webmaster calls them Toronto CF, I’ll go back to making fun of MLS). Lombardo is listed as “Andrea Lombardo (Italy)”, which is a nice way to get around saying “Andrea Lombardo (welfare)”.

Of course, it’s probably marketing. Whittlesea is a big team for Melbourne’s Italian community and has a tonne of Italian passports on their roster, including their star Greg “No Relation” Lombardo, and nobody (not even a future third-division team) brags about signing a guy who even Toronto FC thought was a poor goalscorer, or advertise getting the former golden boy of Dale Mitchell.

I’m going to go ahead and say that Lombardo’s not going to be in the national team picture. Call it a hunch.

By the way, the guy who Lombardo beat out for target striker on that U-20 team, Julian Uccello? Currently getting contract offers from Serie B and Serie C1 teams. Just for reference’s sake.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t took a little pleasure from Toronto FC’s undignified, goalless implosion to the Puerto Rico Islanders last night that sent them spiralling out of the CONCACAF Champions League faster than an eagle flying through a jet engine. After all, Vancouver deserves to be there (say I emotionally) and Toronto doesn’t, so it’s only justice. Justice delayed is justice denied, they say, but I’m not sure that works in football.

On balance, though, I was cheering for Toronto.  Us Canadians are all in it together, and since I don’t have that derby-like hatred for the FC I was happy to root for our sole representative in the continental championship, just as I did for Montreal all those centuries ago.

It was a letdown. Not on the level of Montreal losing to Santos Laguna, which was like having a marksman shoot at your crotch for ninety minutes plus stoppages. But it was a dreadful disappointment made worse by the fact that Toronto never looked like they were a match for the lowly Puerto Rico Islanders.

I just heard three million Torontonians spit their Molson Canadian onto their monitor. Calm down. Toronto is more talented, man for man and as a unit, than Puerto Rico. Dwayne De Rosario could probably beat the combined Islanders starting eleven in keepie-uppie. But, with the exception of two bull-in-a-china-shop chances by the only player in MLS who is both a striker and a zombie, Danny Dichio, Puerto Rico bunkered down and Toronto was helpless to do anything about it.

Bunkering down is a skill like any other. It’s a skill that Toronto (and the Impact) have never possessed. Breaking down the bunker is a skill as well and Toronto came up short once again. Toronto had the better players but Puerto Rico was the better team. They earned both their win in Toronto and their draw back home. Skill doesn’t mean a damned thing if you can’t do anything with it, and Toronto was left flailing their limbs while their fans grumbled about “anti-football”.

The 2008 Montreal Impact could give a doctoral thesis on this, but if you’re going for a scoreless draw against a more talented side, you can’t just put eleven men in the box and have them do their thing because you’ll get shredded. You have to do what Puerto Rico did, which is smart zonal marking, frustrate their strikers with chippy, borderline plays, use good direct balls to relieve pressure, and when you get that counter you go for it.

Puerto Rico is a good team; likely the best in USL-1. Certainly I’d favour them at a neutral site over a number of MLS clubs: Toronto FC, New York (obviously), probably FC Dallas, and you could convince me on one or two others. But they win all their matches the same way they beat Toronto. They play the same style against the Carolina Railhawks and they’d try it against Manchester United, because they’re good at it and therefore it works.

So hold your heads high, Toronto fans. You got beaten by a better team.

That doesn’t make you feel any better, does it?

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

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

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

But if it’s true. Good god.

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

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

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

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

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

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