And the award goes to ...

I bit of activity on the Team Canada front this week. Earlier on, the fans voted Tomas Radzinski as their choice for player of the year. A pretty good pick as he looked strong up front for Canada in their failed attempt to qualify for the world cup. The CSA came back at the end of the week with their official picks, Julian De Guzman for the men and Christine Sinclair for the women. Both pretty safe bets as surely they factored in JDG's club performances in their decision and Sinclair seems to be a shoe-in with her goal tally continuing to grow.



We are in crucial times for our national teams as the lack of success given the talent puts the spotlight directly onto the people running the show. Over the years we have grown accustom to seeing the women do very well internationally and the men struggle. We've never heard the women lament about the CSA and are often used as an example to counter their ineptitude. But I am curious to see how long this lasts as we are beginning to see the rest of the world's women's programs catch up and surpass our own. It is interesting that De Guzman was picked and in that same week in an interview he said the following:

I think the World Cup campaign would have had a different result if there was a different organization.The CSA, the OSA and the rest of the associations are the root of our problem and it will only become a cancer to the program across the nation. Anyone involved will fall behind in the world of football. It has an effect on talent and coaches which gives us a bad look.

I am still thinking back to that interview on soccer saturday with Peter Montopoli where when asked the status of Dale Mitchell could only respond with it will be discussed the next time the board meets which isn't in the near future. That there was "no rush" to deal with his coaching status. Agh I said it then and it seems like ther are a few other out there that are saying don't expect him to get fired - he is on contract until 2010 (I think) and with the CSA having no cash cannot afford to pay him out and pay for another coach. De Guzman mentions it that interview above, just how in other countries you can't get away with this shit. We didn't hire a coach who had taken Jamaica to the World Cup because he wanted to bring in his own staff (there had to be a Canadian quota), but we'll keep in a coach who can only win if it's against an island country with less than a million people.

I'll end this off with a video I saw on Soccer by Ives of the US men's team. I know how much larger the US is than us (money, population, etc...), but given our talent I see no reason why we can't be at this level of success. This video is of a team we almost and could have beat in the '05 Gold Cup, but look at the difference between our programs. Smaller and poorer countries qualify in tougher groups than we do. Whenever I get down on our program I always think of trying to find a case study on the US and Australian football program's and find out what it took to get from poor results to being actual contender on the world stage. So maybe one day the CSA ... or whatever the name of the organization running the show will release a similar video!