Frankly I’m Tired Of Hearing It

By Bill Ault CanadaKicks

Done If Not Dusted
It’s over.

Canada’s hopes of qualifying for South Africa 2010 disappeared in the span of about ten minutes with two costly giveaways handing Honduras a 2-1 come from behind win on a horrible, cut up pitch in front of a hostile crowd that brayed with delight as Honduras ran out with the full three points after they had showed promise but ultimately failed in Mexico in their first match.

As usual the state of CONCACAF officiating left one wondering who had visited the officials dressing room prior to the match as things definitely seemed a bit slanted at times with Honduran players falling like autumn leaves and the referee buying into each and every academy nomination worthy performance.

Finally things got ugly in the stands as well as happens in these kind of settings where security seems to disappear or is virtually non-existent as the fans of the rival nations decided to take out their aggressions on each other in a bit of a post match melee.

Makes one wonder what the away game in October will have in store for the Canadian side when they travel to Honduras….

To be fair neither the coaching staff nor the players used any of the above to excuse the woeful second half performance but one could not be sure if it was out of true contriteness or to deflect the questioning away from the fact that to a man they almost guaranteed things would be better in Montreal after the performance in Toronto thanks to real grass and because Montreal was so much easier to get to for the European contingent blah… blah… blah….

Frankly I’m tired of hearing it. Right from the fake grass to the travel to inability of the CSA to ensure that our men’s team actually has the overwhelming support of the crowd at a home game.

Let’s finally put the first one to rest – the playing surface debate – case closed anyone who says playing on a torn up, water soaked, lumpy grass field is better than state of the art field turf is, frankly, lying. If the natural grass field was in perfect condition and was only played on a limited number of times each season I agree it would be better – in Canada (anywhere east of Vancouver in any case) where it occasionally – usually – is impossible to control what the weather might bring and where our fields are constantly overused it’s just NOT possible to maintain a high quality natural surface.

The travel complaint – I’m sorry I know flights are long to Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver and elsewhere in this big country of ours but the way people go on about it you would think they were still taking steamships across the Atlantic (which most European teams did for the first World Cup in Uruguay) and it was a two week voyage. I don’t buy it.

The final one is of course a difficult one to solve first because it would involve some real forward thinking on the part of the people who run the game in this country and secondly because of the uniqueness of this country we call Canada.

Many seem to fail to recognize that this is a multicultural country with people from all over the world – and no matter who Canada ‘hosts” especially on the men’s side a sizable contingent of fans will show up to face the visitors. Add to this the general apathy towards our national team program by most of even the soccer playing public means filling the stadium with a truly pro-Canada crowd is always going to be difficult …. but there are plenty of cities, usually the smaller ones, where the chance to host an event of this magnitude would probably result in a more favourable ambience for our side if they were ever given the chance to do it.

On the field the answers are even harder to find – this is/was Canada’s golden generation – our best team ever many, including myself, said. Well they may be our best ever but as we are finding out they are not good enough to accomplish what a team did more than two decades ago, that is qualify for a World Cup.

More and more that effort in 1986 is beginning to look like an aberration as yet another generation of Canadian soccer governors, officials, administrators and players fail to do what was done 22 years ago and counting.

We have failed to keep up and while obviously our technical level has improved to some degree we have not kept pace with the rest of our own region either on or off the field – we have failed.

As we have found on the women’s side the world of soccer does not stand still waiting for the minnows to catch up or for the haughty to keep pace – (see England).

Mathematically of course we still have everything to play for and a positive result in Wednesday’s match in Mexico and a favourable result in the Jamaica – Honduras game would keep Canada in the mix for at least another game or two. But needing probably at least ten points to move on Canada faces the daunting task of winning at least twice on the road – never easy but nigh on impossible in this region.

My heart as always holds hope but my head tells me we are looking at 2014 which is a long ways off.

But probably not far enough off to effect the necessary changes to a system that has not just stagnated but lost ground since 1986.