Archive for the ‘Canada’ Category

Canada is going to the World Cup!

Okay, it’s the U17 World Cup, but considering that the last 12-months have seen Canada crash out of World Cup qualifying at the senior and U20 level, any success should be celebrated. It’s especially gratifying in that it will be Canada’s second consecutive appearance U17 World Cup.

The back-to-back trips come at a time when the influence of the professional academies is growing. Indeed, 13 members of the team come from a domestic professional environment, with 10 coming from either the Vancouver Whitecaps or Toronto FC academy.

Clearly, these teams have helped the program. After all, it had been 16-years between U17 World Cups for Canada prior to 2011.

Manager Sean Fleming directly pointed to this in a conference call following qualification.

“The credit is to the professional academies, and also the provincial programs and clubs,” he said. “Everything across the country is getting better.”

‘Getting better’ needs to be taken in context, of course. The recent failure of the U20 team tells us that there is still lots of improvement to be had.

Fleming alluded to that.

“We have to get (more) opportunities for these younger players. The 18-19-year-old age is still a difficult age for these kids to find spots,” he said.

“I still think we have to somehow better prepare them to play in MLS… We have to find those good competitive environments for the kids so they can continue to develop.”

And there’s the rub. Yes, Canadian soccer is doing some things right (finally), but there is still (as always) many, many problems. Too often in the past the Canadian program has been blinded by modest success, like qualifying for a youth World Cup, and has not been able to see the full picture.

The U17 World Cup is a wonderful learning experience for players. It puts them in a pressure situation and it also creates a patriotic bond between the players and the national program. However, it’s not an end goal.

Most of the world understands that. No one in Europe holds up U17 success to mean much more than what it is: yet-to-be-fulfilled promise. It’s unlikely that there are many in Switzerland celebrating their 2009 U17 title. If anyone there even thinks about it, it’s likely in the context of how it helped develop future club and country stars.

Closer to home, Mexico’s 2005 title is marked as the beginning of that country’s emergence as a contender beyond CONCACAF’s borders. Yet today only four players—Efrain Juarez, Hector Moreno, Giovani dos Santos and Carlos Vela—have more than 30 senior caps for the national team.

That’s actually a good turnover for an U17 team. If a country can produce three semi-regular and one regular (dos Santos, in this case) player per cycle, it’s laughing.

Of course in Mexico, we’re talking about the U17 World Cup champions. More importantly we’re talking about a country that has an established and wide-ranging academy system tied into its professional league, a league that operates within the worlds player market and makes considerable money selling its homegrown players to bigger leagues.

Canada meanwhile has three pro academies that often seem more interested in getting its players NCAA scholarships than they do in producing future professionals. The struggles of players like Russell Teibert or Doneil Henry to get playing time in MLS—or, more troubling, the struggles a player like Matt Stinson has in even finding a pro team—demonstrate just how big a hole there is n the Canadian pyramid.

A U17 run may be more sexy, but real hope in the game here will only be found by filling that hole. The biggest issue facing Canadian soccer today the lack of a stable league option for our academy graduates to flourish in when they aren’t quite ready for MLS, but too good to be in college soccer.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t enjoy the current U17 team’s run in the upcoming World Cup. By all means, cheer them on and be excited for them. Just keep it in context.

The future success of Canadian soccer has little correlation with success in a two-week tournament in Panama.

As Canadians, we don’t like to get advice from our southern neighbours. It’s it bit irrational and a lot defensive, but it is what it is.

So, when Abby Wambach starts a campaign against the decision to play the 2015 World Cup (and, likely, the 2014 U20 World Cup) on field turf, we get our back up. Some might even be tempted to go the juvenile route of calling her “Abby Waaah-bach” and dismissing her complaints out of hand.

Here’s the thing though: she’s right. It is a shame that the Finals will be played on the plastic stuff, and the fact the CSA isn’t looking for alternative solutions does reflect poorly on this country as a host.

Spare us arguments about how turf is the wave of the future or that it won’t affect play. That’s simply not the case. Although, like any technology, this generation of turf is miles ahead of what we saw for the 2007 U20 men’s event, it’s still not the same thing as grass.

The ball will run longer and bounce higher. It will favour a more athletic game and will do nothing for the growth of women’s football, especially in Europe, where fans are already are reluctant to support the sport.
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Sports fans in Canada tend to be a tad bit on the provincial side. As with any generality, there are exceptions—and many readers here would fit that bill—but across the board, most Canadians follow sports that very few people outside of Canada follow.

If you were to walk into a café in Saskatoon and ask a fellow patron whether he saw “the double in-off take out last night at the Scotties” you’d get an animated response that likely would involve the term “the hammer.”

That same conversation (it’s about curling, by the way) would be met with blank stares in most of the rest of the world.

If a person turned to the passenger next to them on the subway in Toronto and said, “There can only ever be one Dougie, eh?”, there’s a good chance they’d respond with high-fives and talk about a 20-year-old overtime winner against the St. Louis Blues. In Mexico City, impromptu hockey talk would result in an empty seat beside you as the passenger moved slowly away from the unhinged tourist.

On the other hand, in Canada conversations about the how great Messi is are as likely to be met with the response “I prefer to keep things tidy” than “Barcelona is a special team, aren’t they?”
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It wasn’t as dramatic as Canada’s mens national team losing 8-1 in Honduras in World Cup qualifying last October, but the recent failure of the Canadian men’s U20 side to advance to the World Cup in Turkey should cause fans as much concern as the disaster in San Pedro Sula.

It’s possible to look at the 8-1 loss and blame it on the mistakes of the past. The current group of senior national team players is a reflection of where Canadian soccer was 10 to 15 years ago, not where it is today. There have been changes at the Canadian Soccer Association and there do seem to be some positive signs.

However, that argument can’t be made about the U20s. Built from a core of players that did go to a World Cup as U17s two years ago, much was expected from this group. Instead, they limped home with a tepid 1-2 record.

Against Cuba the Canadians were out-muscled, and they played scared. Against the United States they were defeated in all aspects of the game.

Most troubling, this was a team that played without spirit and direction. There were rumblings about discontent in the camp and no one seemed all that broken up by the fact that they weren’t going to Turkey for the World Cup.
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Won’t someone please think of the children!

It’s the call of the most aggressive of opponents of the Canadian Soccer Associations’s Long-Term Player Development (LTPD) plan.

“We must protect the children from the creeping socialism of big government,” the anti-LTPD voice screams. “They are trying to bubble wrap kids from the harsh realities of life!”

One gets the vision of an angry, old man shaking his fist while sitting on a porch sipping lemonade.

“They’re making them soft,” he screams. “Soft, I tell you. That’s what’s wrong with this generation. They don’t understand what it’s like to earn their way.

“Life’s not a picnic,” the old man trails off. “Gotta toughen then up…”
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The Road to Russia doesn’t quite have the same ring to it that Road to Rio does. However, for the Canadian men the focus now has shifted from samba dancing and the Copacabana to Matryoshka dolls and Red Square.

More depressing than that are the dates, from next year to what seems like a lifetime away.

However, Canada cannot dwell on the past if it is to progress into the future. If you get bogged down with 27-years of failure now, you might as well shift your focus to the heat of Qatar (if that) and forget about 2018 as a possibility.

Many fans are already doing just that. A quick look at the young players in Canada right now does not lend itself to hope. That feeling of dread was amplified Saturday when a young Danish side bossed Canada around the pitch in this country’s first post 8-1 game, winning 4-0.
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