Make no mistake. USL-1 is going to compromise or it is going to die.

The healthy franchises in USL-1 last season were, in roughly this order, Montreal, Portland, Vancouver, Rochester, and Puerto Rico. Montreal and Vancouver are being kicked out, Portland (who is part of the rebel alliance themselves) may soon follow and are already in MLS for 2011. Rochester has gone downhill both on and off the pitch over the last two years and have just lost their greatest rival in the Impact. Puerto Rico is constantly teetering on the edge of madness, trying to make a go of things on their little island in the middle of nowhere, and if you’re relying on the Puerto Rico Islanders to keep your league up that league is already dead and you’re just waiting for it to stop moving.

The new owners of USL-1 have fired a shot across the bow of any potential investor: you exist to serve us. You get no say in league operations or we will try to crush you. Have you heard Jeff Hunt’s old excited noises about a USL-1 expansion team ever since Nu-Rock took over? Of course not, because Jeff Hunt is a businessman and he’s not in the habit of lightning a couple million dollars on fire to keep some penny-ante company happy.

So USL-1 as we know it is going to die – maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but within the next couple years. Which may be what Nu-Rock was hoping for all along: the profitable parts of the United Soccer Leagues empire are the U-18 and Premier Development Leagues where the players are amateurs and the travel costs reasonable. As Canadian fans, though, this wanton self-destruction should worry us at least a little, for the USL-1 was also our best hope for B-grade markets getting high level professional football.

Yet there is an opportunity here. Sam of the Stretford End was, to my knowledge, the first to leap onto the bandwagon of a new Canadian soccer league (not to be confused – never to be confused – with the Canadian Soccer League).  But there’s a risk in being too ambitious here. Richard Whittall, a guru on the history of the Canadian game, observes that a Canadian soccer league doesn’t necessarily need to be large so long as it’s sustainable.

My goal is six teams. One division. Ideally all in the east, except for Vancouver in the short term. If a West division ends up being sustainable, fantastic. But the main objective here is to bring in successful organizations, people with money, and stadia with seats and get a league that can compete at a near USL-1 level by the summer of 2010.

My six teams would be:

• Vancouver Whitecaps, obviously. They would also be my sole western team, for a couple reasons: first off, the Whitecaps brand and reputation would be important to lend credibility to any new league, and second because the cost and difficulty of getting a league started increases massively as travel distance does. Vancouver has the motivation, the history, and the financial wherewithal to endure flying to and from Ontario for one summer.
• Montreal Impact, even more obviously. They can be an anchor of the league for at least two years and quite likely longer. They have an established fanbase and garbage bags full of money. They’re a lead pipe cinch to be attendance leaders and, like the Whitecaps, their reputation means that the league would instantly be credible to the soccer media. Both the Whitecaps and the Impact would be encouraged to bring in their current rosters for the same credibility reasons, even though, as will be seen, that would basically guarantee one of them the championship for at least three years.
• Jeff Hunt’s Ottawa team. Another guy with money and a building. No history or reputation here, but Hunt was planning to spend at a USL-1 level before so he’d likely be willing to spend at an approximately-USL-1 level now. I’ve got a lot of respect for Jeff Hunt as a businessman, and certainly he has the wherewithal to see an Ottawa franchise through the growing pains. This is by far preferable to elevating the PDL Fury, who can’t draw flies and whose ownership is questionable at best.
• Toronto FC B. This might be a tricky one. Unless they can get BMO Field, stadia might be a problem. I’m not sure Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment would finance a high-level team unlikely to break even, and MLS would certainly put the kibosh on any formal reserve team deal. A proper reserve team, moreover, would not be competitive with Vancouver or Montreal. But if Toronto’s looking for a way to spend money to improve their team without nudging the salary cap, sending a team of top prospects and not-quite-MLS-calibre veterans to BMO Field for high-level competition on a B team is a good way to do it. The team could be legally distinct from the MLS entity and contracts could be signed with TFC B or MLSE itself instead of TFC proper, avoiding hassles from Don Garber and company.
• Forest City London, our first USL PDL elevation. London played their first PDL campaign in 2009 and were a resounding success off the field. They’re a well-run organization with good ownership and a lovely 8,000-seat stadium at the University of Western Ontario, which means they’re arguably better off for facilities than Toronto FC B or the Whitecaps. The two problems are that they’d have to build their roster from scratch, maybe maintaining a couple exceptional talents such as Anthony Di Biase, and their pockets aren’t too deep, meaning that the larger teams might need to pay a fairly heavy subsidy. It would be nothing, however, compared to the hit the Whitecaps and the Impact take to maintain the likes of Miami FC in USL-1.
• Pick ‘em: somebody who’s probably going to fold, anyway. From here we’re out of the strong immediate candidates and into the realm of risky picks. The PDL Thunder Bay Chill would be attractive because of their history and organizational depth if not for their three-digit attendance. An attractively bold option would be elevating a better CSL team like the Serbian White Eagles, but this would obviously run into perils with ownership, stadia, team quality, and alienating the CSA. Finally, there’d be good ol’ expansion; Quebec City has a larger soccer community than you probably think and would probably have USL-1 already if not for the Impact’s territorial rights. Going further afield to Halifax or Winnipeg would also be possibilities that might not break the bank.

In the short term, this league would work. Except for Ottawa and our hypothetical sixth team, the infrastructure is in place for this league to start playing right now. Ottawa could get going immediately with a temporary home at Frank Clair Stadium playing around the renovations. Our sixth team would be flung into the fire a bit but if the rest of the league is in it to win it this would work. Even if Toronto and the sixth team don’t pan out, that’s four very reasonable organizations and leagues have been built with less.

Not enough for you? Well, there are a couple other bold possibilities.

• Rochester Rhinos. Think about it. They’ve always had plenty of success but they went bankrupt in 2008 and their new owner isn’t exactly a multi-millionaire. Attendance has fluctuated wildly in recent seasons, and now they’re being asked to play in a league where their biggest rivals and best meal ticket, the Montreal Impact, have left? Not to mention another strong franchise in Vancouver and likely a few lesser lights as well? They’re near enough to the Canadian border for our purposes, and their ownership has no sentimental attachments to the United Soccer Leagues.
• Portland Timbers. Another short-term solution but another tempting one. Portland isn’t as gung-ho towards rebellion as the Whitecaps or Impact but they’re part of the rebel ownership group making Nu-Rock’s life such a misery. With the Whitecaps gone the Timbers are left with no rivals west of the Great Lakes and they’re heading up to MLS in 2011 anyway. They may as well get the best value for their one remaining season, and another year of Cascadia Cup derbies in a competitive league might well appeal to the Timbers instead of trying to thump whatever shambles of a USL-2 organization gets dragged upward.

In the medium to long term, we’d face the problem of elevating the Whitecaps and probably the Impact to MLS. They could pull a Toronto FC and send “B” teams down, but that’s not a long-term solution to anyone and would erode the quality of play. Ideally, when Vancouver goes up they’d be replaced by another eastern team, and if the Impact moved up we’d start to creep west. The league could make do with four teams but to me six is the critical mass: few enough to breed rivalries but not so few that familiarity breeds contempt.

Over a decade or so, the league could creep west to other promising markets – Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, to name a few. The best part of this scheme is that it doesn’t require anything we already have, and once a stable core has been built it’ll be no problem adding onto that foundation.

Yes, I’m crazily optimistic. That’s because I’m a Canadian soccer fan.

Two weeks ago, the Canadian Soccer Association announced that the Canadian men’s national team would…

No, no, one sentence in and I’ve already screwed up my facts. The Canadian Soccer Assocation didn’t announce boo. The Canadian Soccer Association, to my knowledge, has never formally announced either of these matches, although they have deigned to put our November 14 match against Macedonia on their website. The Macedonian media informed us about that friendly, whereas our November 18 fixture against Slovakia came via Pompey Canuck of Think It All In. CSA media czar Richard Scott, also known as “one of the only, like, three guys at the CSA who actually does his job well” is in Nigeria right now, possibly explaining the glacial Canadian media coverage.

But friendlies! Matches! Actual competitive games! We’re playing them in recently war-torn Central European countries that haven’t qualified for the World Cup, and the Canadian team officially will not molest the plastic of BMO Field with a home match in 2009. Next to no Canadians will be able to witness the madness (for the hell of it, I looked up the cost of round trip airfare from Victoria to Skopje, Macedonia and it came out just south of $6000). But, except for Pompey Canuck and his fear for our FIFA ranking, all of us supporters are pleased as punch. Hooray! Away friendlies that we’ll probably have to listen to a low-fidelity stolen Greek Internet radio stream in order to witness! This is a pleasant surprise to us!

These are legitimate opponents, too. Better than, to pick teams not at all at random, Cyprus or Estonia. Canada last played Poland on July 15, 1988 (!), at Varsity Stadum (!!) in Toronto (!!!), losing 2-1. The Reds also played Poland three times in the 1974-75 soccer semester, losing 2-0 in Warsaw and drawing 0-0 in Toronto and Montreal. In spite of the long layoff Poland’s one of our most popular European adversaries even though Canada’s career record against the Poles is a sterling 0-4-2.

Macedonia, on the other hand, we played once. In 1998, in Toronto. We beat them 1-0. Former Impact/86ers/Impact again/Whitecaps this time striker Niall Thompson scored his second and, it turned out, last national goal in the win at Varsity. As a result we are undefeated against the Red Lions, and there are so few nations left we can say that about it’s a vague thrill to put that perfect record on the line.

As always, the Voyageurs are your best source for the minutiae of the Canadian national team. Say what you will about certain Ultras who go off like fireworks every time the Impact are even remotely denigrated,  but where else in this country would you learn that our match against Macedonia will not take place in the capital of Skopje but instead in picturesque little Strumica in the eastern quarter of the country, population 55,000, meaning the Canadian men’s national team will play a full international in a city smaller than the Edmonton suburb I grew up in. Mladost Stadium, or as I like to call it the Wembley of the Balkans, has a capacity of 6,500, great big bare patches in the outfield, and a waist-high chainlink fence around three sides of the playing surface.

We’re not playing Poland in their capital of Warsaw either, but we’re still getting a legitimate ground. The Voyageurs report that we’ll be playing in the north-central city of Bydgoszcz, and their largest and most likely venue is Zdzisław Krzyszkowiak Stadium, a 20,000-man all-seater and a rather elegant, modern stadium despite being built in 1960. Poland missed out on the World Cup and is actually ranked below us at #56, but don’t be fooled for a second. The Poles are worthy adversaries despite only placing fifth in their strong World Cup qualifying group, and they’re better than we are nine days out of ten.

Macedonia came fourth in their five-team group and had some notable performances, including a 2-1-1 record at home against pretty strong teams. They’re ranked #66, leading to some angst for the ratings-watchers among us, but they are at worst Canada’s equal on the pitch.

I’m not a huge ratings guru. I understand their importance in terms of getting us a better seed for 2014 World Cup qualification,  but I think it’s more important to play teams that are slightly above our level in order to improve our players. Any given day, we ought to be able to beat Jamaica or El Salvador or even Honduras provided we get our team to play as one, and friendlies against legitimate nations are the most important way to do that.

Certainly, Stephen Hart would agree with me: he went public around the time of the Gold Cup saying that, as a condition for staying on as manager, he’d want Canada to contest every international friendly date. If the CSA is unable or unwilling to make the expenditure to bring in a home friendly they’re doing the next-best thing. With luck, they’ll also be able to bring together a reasonable A squad made up of out-of-season MLSrs and whatever Europeans we can lay our hands on.

My particular fond hope is for a certain 35-year-old Tomasz Radzinski to get a run out. Radzinski was born in Poznań, Poland, but has never as far as I can tell played in his original homeland. It would be a fitting tribute to one of our truest warriors.

“From deep down in my stomach, with every inch of me, I pure, straight, hate you.

But goddammit, do I respect you.”

Wes Mantooth, Anchorman

Toronto FC. Fuck them.

This is pretty much just the Southsider in me talking, but the FC can go to hell. Stealing the Voyageurs Cup we so rightly earned, stealing Canada’s best players from our biggest competition for three years, generally acting like they’re the be-all and end-all of football in this country. “Oh, Montreal beat Vancouver in a thrilling championship encounter, that’s nice, but our lead story is Toronto FC vs. the San Jose Earthquakes!” Getting so smug because they managed to put up a banner. Big deal. Everybody has banners, and we don’t feel the need to make ours so huge it almost compensates for our penis size.

(I am pretty much overtly angling for hits now. From my experience, the more rude things I say about Toronto FC, even if I don’t mean them, the more attention I get. I am gradually turning into the Canadian Bill Archer.)

Truth be told, I don’t quite feel that derby-like resentment yet for Toronto FC. I know that I should, and there are the seeds of a mighty rivalry here, but my bitterness over the Voyageurs and Gold Cups is still cloaked by a warm, fuzzy joy that there’s a soccer team in Canada cracking the front pages of sports sections. I can say things like “I want all the Toronto FC players to suffer career-ending injuries in a bus crash,” but then I start qualifying myself. “Well, okay, not the Canadians. And that Stefan Frei’s pretty good. Actually, I pretty much just want Chad Barrett and Pablo Vitti to suffer career-ending injuries in a bus crash” and by then the Toronto fans are agreeing with me.

So, with all respect to the esteemed Out of Touch Guy, I still want Toronto FC to do well. I still want them to make the playoffs and roll through a couple rounds and maybe kick the pants off the Columbus Crew. Part of me wants them to lose in time for De Guzman, De Rosario, Attakora, and company to be available for the Macedonia – Canada friendly in November, but I can’t say I’d be embittered if they went on a triumphant surge to the MLS Cup. I may resent them, but I respect them in equal measure.

Let’s be honest, non-fans of the FC. Apart from everything else, it’s fun to have a team to hate, and there’s nothing that says “hate” like “a first-division sports club in Toronto”. How could you hate the Toronto Lynx? That was like kicking a one-legged puppy. Cheering against the FC while rolling waves of white-hot loathing from 20,000 fevered supporters crash into you like breakers is more viscerally satisfying on every level. I like that. Cheering for the Whitecaps to beat Toronto was so much more fun than cheering for them to beat Montreal because I hate Toronto anyway.

And the simple fact of the matter is, as awe-inspiring insipid and ridiculous as it was for a Toronto regular-season game to get more coverage than an all-Canadian USL-1 championship, the fact is that it did. Toronto is not the centre of the universe but it’s the centre of the Canadian media. The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post, It’s Called Football – Canada’s greatest media luminaries focus on Toronto and are usually based there. Some of them try harder than others to maintain balanced coverage, but they are each Toronto-centric to a greater or lesser degree. So when Canadian soccer does well in Toronto, it gets that much more attention.

How can we say that Toronto’s fans don’t deserve that success? They pack that stadium night in and night out, even for crappy friendlies against Spanish prima donnas at overinflated prices. The one national match at BMO Field since Toronto FC featured the greatest Canadian home crowd in decades, a stark contrast to the letdown later that month at Stade Saputo. Dick jokes aside, their Danny Dichio banners were the products of dedicated and possibly insane men. Toronto finally making some noise in MLS after three seasons is still only a downpayment on the triumph those supporters have earned. The more glory they get, the more attention Toronto FC gets, and the better the odds that maybe next time we play Honduras the crowd will be more in our favour.

Go kick the pants off of the Red Bulls tomorrow, Toronto. I’ll be cheering you on. Reluctantly, and with a vague sense of shame, but I’ll mean it nonetheless.

Saturday was a bit of a rough day for me. I had to work the next morning, so my strategy of “getting right liquored up” was a pretty poor one in hindsight. I effed with my elderly Palm on various unsecured WiFi spots as I staggered through downtown Vancouver, writing my half-recap on this very site and sending various inappropriate Twitter messages. I even implied that Duane Rollins was an alcoholic while staggering drunkenly through Vancouver at 2:30 in the afternoon, which takes a certain sort of chutzpah.

(For the record: I made the “is it too early to switch to hard liquor?” joke at the Lions Pub immediately after the Impact scored to go up 2-0. When they later built on that lead, it was no longer a joke.)

I played some blackjack, which is probably the best drunk activity ever invented. I spend $5 on something called a smoked salmon wrap. I spent the rest of the ferry ride home regretting that expenditure and wound up sauntering through Esquimalt with a bottle of Southern Comfort clutched furtively in my hand singing an Irish lament for Randy Edwini-Bonsu.

What is wrong with me, anyway? I became an official Whitecaps Fan on June 18, 2009, a date you should recognize if only because of the Je me souviens banner waving in the Southside two Saturdays ago. When we somehow scraped and clawed our way into the playoffs and then though the playoffs, even defeating the hated Portland Timbers in one of the best two-leg matches you ever will see, I was happy, but I sure didn’t get thunderingly hammered and send ecstatic Palm-based Twitter messages saying “wooooooooo! the Timbers Army sucks cocks in hell!” Plus I am a Canada fan first and foremost. I wonder if I just like losing.

Actually, no, I don’t wonder, because that game was horseshit and Dave Gantar, the referee, is up for induction into the Benito Archundia Hall of Fame. There was an old joke back in the Aviators days about how the Montreal Impact bought their players and they bought their referees. Like all jokes that strike a little too close to home, it was never really funny so much as painful.

I’m not seriously alleging corruption; that with the Whitecaps heading to MLS in 2011 and the Impact softening their stance towards the new league ownership the league office might want to throw Saputo some love. Stade Saputo is an intimidating place to referee by USL-1 standings, and when 12,000 screaming Hondurans Montrealers are rewarding every dive with a demand for a red card, it can be easy for a non-professional referee to be influenced by it.

I was a hard-nosed, physical defender back in the days when I could sprint the length of a football pitch without collapsing, so I have my opinions on Shaun Pejic’s slide tackle to win the ball after Jay Nolly had been beaten. The defender has as much right to the ball as the attacker does. A striker does not receive magical protection simply by virtue of having temporary possession. Pejic’s slide clipped the ball neatly, sending it out of harm’s way, and only Roberto Brown’s overrunning made him hit Pejic’s legs at all. When he went down (a bit too easily, in my opinion), that was just football. Pejic had played the ball and not the man and he had hit his challenge perfectly. Gantar’s call was either ludicrous over-protectionism or swayed by the Montreal support, packed on the eastern end of the stadium: the fans were up in arms as fans will be on every seemingly borderline play.

(Having stood in those very stands, there’s no way you can see a foul in that close to the goal. Forget it. Brown just fell over and that was good enough for them.)

Was the referee just concerned about protecting strikers from physical play? Hardly. Fast forward to later in the match. The Whitecaps are down and out. Randy Edwini-Bonsu is hauling ass on the ball again. He has speed to burn but not enough moves and he’s reluctant to lay the ball off: this was one of his worse matches because he seemed determined to do it all by himself. But this time it works, and he simply outruns the Impact defenders. The last man back for the Impact takes a few steps forward to meet Edwini-Bonsu about twelve yards from the goal as Edwini-Bonsu is preparing for his shot, and drives Edwini-Bonsu to the ground. The ball did not so much as alter its path. It was a simple shoulder charge, a penalty in any rule book except, apparently, the one Dave Gantar was calling from.

This is without even getting into Shaun Pejic’s red card, which only the most blinded Montreal Ultras are even trying to defend. Or the fact that Roberto Brown was offside on Vancouver’s second goal. Or the missed throw-in calls and various hard Montreal tackles that were overlooked and blatant Montreal dives that were rewarded. Dave Gantar had a horrible, horrible game, and it went entirely in the Impact’s favour. Perhaps he was simply swayed by the crowd, although it is amazingly appropriate that the picture for his Facebook profile is a Whitecaps player protesting as Gantar sends him off.

Gantar was also responsible for the debacle of a game between the Whitecaps and the Carolina Railhawks at Swangard Stadium in August, when he called a vital game decidedly in favour of the Railhawks, including denying an obvious goal for Marlon James. These are not his only incidents. He is just not a good referee and not fit to be officiating the final of North America’s second division.

The first, often unspoken question after a football match is always “did the better team win?” What Impact fans, as well as Whitecaps fans, should be upset about is that Gantar made sure we could not know.

On my Palm and drunk, so must be brief.

1) Worst. referee. ever.
2) Fuck you, Roberto Brown.
3) Eleven on eleven, the Caps were the better team.
4) Between this, Honduras, and the Voyageurs Cup, I want to burn Stade Saputo down and salt the ashes.

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

Perfectly above board!

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

So far, so good!

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

WHOA! Stop right there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asmir, you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a countryman, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the stadia, I don’t want you near my soccer teams. When you visit our country, I want to know a day in advance so I won’t be there.

You understand?

I’ve been holding off on writing about the USL Division One playoffs so far. At first, it was because I was lazy and busy. My real job has been pretty packed, and I recently got a fake job writing about hockey for SBNation.com, which pays very poorly but infinitely better than this blog does. Hockey may be my second-favourite sport but it, in strictly relative terms, sells.

Then the Whitecaps beat Charleston and I said “why write about it? they’re going to lose the away leg anyway.” Then they didn’t (Jay Nolly is magic), and I started to get superstitious. By the time the Whitecaps clung to their fingernails to a 3-3 draw in Portland, a game I watched with a heart-pounding combination of delight and mortal terror, not writing about the games had become a full-blown obsession. It was working so far! What if I write about the Whitecaps and Impact and they both lose? Considering my first post to this site was a screed about Santos Laguna stomping on the Impact like the Mexicans were Columbus cops,  it seemed better to avoid the subject altogether.

But now, fuck it. My Whitecaps may lose but Canada is certain to win. Vancouver vs. Montreal, west vs. east, Anglos vs. Frenchies. If we could get an argument on the merits of Toronto FC vs. the USL-1 two, we could work in a we-all-hate-Toronto angle and cover every granule of the Canadian soccer psyche. Wait! Thanks, the Voyageurs!

What am I going to do, provide cogent analysis? Jay Nolly is utterly fantastic. Matt Jordan is pretty fantastic himself. Marcus Haber, Charles Gbeke, Marlon James, and Randy Edwini-Bonsu are the best strike force in USL-1. What a shame about the midfield and defense, which is where Montreal ought to exploit Vancouver like a Downtown Eastside junkie desperate for a fix. But you knew all that already, unless you’re an MLS-only sort of “fan” in which case why have you even read this far?

Really, I owe the Impact something. They’re the reason I realized I was a Whitecaps fan in the first place, when they blew the last match of the Voyageurs Cup so shamefully and I swore using words I didn’t even realize I knew. That’s the sort of debt that can never be repaid. On the other hand, Montreal was also the home of my least favourite experience as a Canadian football fan, standing in the stands of Stade Saputo having beer tossed at me and walking back to my hotel down Rue Ste-Catherine seeing a bunch of cars with Quebec license plates flying Honduran flags while honking their horns triumphantly. Je me souviens my ass.

Playoffs in football are said to be sacrilege. Every great league in the world settles its champions by the standings, not by a contrived cup contest. Not even a Chelsea fan would argue they were champions of England last year by virtue of their FA Cup win.

But here’s what I know. Portland were USL-1 regular season champions this year by a walk. Without the playoffs, I’d be sitting at home wondering if there was some Argentinian league action to watch. Instead, seven teams still had a chance at ultimate glory. Rather than putting away their title with a win and two losses or three draws or whatever they might prefer, they were tested in a must-win situation against a blood rival and found wanting. Montreal, who were left for dead not so long ago, would never have had the chance to scrape and claw and fight their way into a final opportunity that they never deserved until those last weeks where they earned it completely.

Let us suppose that the purpose of football is not to be absolutely fair. Nobody truly loves sports because they want to see the best team win. What we want is excitement, the chance to never say “die”, the agony of losing the title you deserved making it all the sweeter when you win the title you didn’t. What we love is standing in the stands with our supporters knowing that, while Portland should win, there’s just enough doubt in those six little letters to fill our hearts with hope. Knowing that, even if we were worse on the road than Diego Maradona on a Monday morning, we still had a shot.

Look at it this way. You can’t tell me, if the Columbus Crew win the MLS Supporters Shield and face a playoff with, to pick a team that could conceivably be the last playoff seed, Toronto FC, that both sets of fans wouldn’t treat that match as the most important battle since Stalingrad.

They say Don Garber is in Europe imparting his wisdom to the European football czars. Mostly he’s supposed to be talking about sustainable wages and cost certainty and other important parts of the game. But he should take along a tape of the Timbers Army and the Southside waging a verbal war at PGE Park in a match that never could have happened anywhere in Europe, and say how is this not better?

Tradition? Tradition is what you call a ritual when there’s no good reason to keep it.

(By the way, Vancouver 2 – 1 Montreal, Montreal 2 – 0 Vancouver. The Impact are just too deep.)