Sporting Madness

This [ Sean Gordon , The Globe and Mail ] perfectly illustrates the state of Canadian soccer: a 2-1 loss to Honduras in CONCACAF qualifying for the 2010 World Cup. With the earlier draw with Jamaica and now this loss, Canada has its back up against the wall: there are only four games left, and two of them are against the powerful Mexicans, who are almost assured to grab one of the top two spots in the group and advance to the next round. The worst thing is that it's so tough to explain. Really, on paper, Canada should have won this game. From the summary, it also sounds like they deserved the win, but couldn't convert a few chances and got caught on some bad breaks. The soccer haters in this country will argue that there's no way we can compete with countries where the game is the number-one sport, so we should just give up now. They'll see that half the crowd of 12,338 were supposedly in Honduran blue, and they'll conclude that no one in Canada even cares enough t...

A quick breakdown of the first match of the qualifying campaign for the CONCACAF Champions League: the Montreal Impact of the USL against Nicaraguan club Real Esteli, Thursday night in Montreal... (A preview of the match can be found at CBCsports.ca ) The Score: Montreal 1, Real Esteli 0 How I saw it : On TV, but buried on bold (formerly CBC Country Canada ). The Good: - Matt Jordan: The Impact keeper looked somewhat shaky early on, but improved as the match possessed, and made several key saves. One of his best saves denied Esteli in stoppage time and preserved the win for the Impact. - Joey Gjertsen: The former Whitecap midfielder had a solid game for the Impact, and notched the only goal of the contest. The Impact weren't overly impressive on the day, but Gjertsen did well, and his goal was all they needed in the end. The Bad: - The defending: The Impact sat back too far after they scored, which only works with rock-solid defending (and not always then). Their defence sh...