Now as you probably all already know, I'm Canadian, and very proud to be Canadian. But there is one thing that bothers me immensely about this country. We don't have a decent football system of our own. Now most Canadians think "football" is that weird rugby spinoff played by men wearing tights and insane amounts of padding, which irks me because they only use their feet what? 5% of the time? :p
We share our systems with the US of A, which is financially efficient, but also means we're stuck with only four truly professional teams - Toronto FC (who start when this upcoming MLS season starts), Vancouver Whitecaps (DEFENDING USL CHAMPS BABY!
) who are the closest thing to a local club that I have, the Montreal Impact (along with Vancouver they comprise two of the three best teams in the USL, the other being the Rochester "Raging Rhinos" in New York State) and the Toronto Lynx (who are pure crap). We did also have the Calgary Mustangs at one point, but they folded.
The so-called "Canadian Professional S****r League" is almost entirely Ontario-based, with only one current team being from outside Ontario, the Dynamites de Laval. (There are two more expansion teams slated for Quebec in the next couple of seasons, but still, western alienation much?) On top of that, they aren't even of Isthmian Premiership calibre.
Then there's the "Pacific Coast S****r League" which is mostly in British Columbia but there are a few Washington State teams as well. My local club in that league, Victoria United, has taken three of the last five, but the defending champs are the Whitecaps Reserve Team. (The other winner was New Westminster Khalsa.)
And in spite of all this, we do manage to get the lone good player. Some notes about Canadian football:
- Most Canadian football fans despise Owen Hargreaves, especially after remarks he made earlier this year (I for one, am a fence-sitter on the whole Hargreaves issue). A similar case is Jonathan de Guzman, who like Hargreaves was born and raised here, but unlike Hargreaves neither of his parents were citizens of the country he's playing for now, the Netherlands. And his older brother, Julian, plays for Canada. Like I say, we're never going to get better if our best guys keep ditching us. (I honestly don't think Jono will ever play with the best guys in the Netherlands anyway!)
- a flip-side of this situation that is awkward for many hardcore Canadian football fans (like most of the people at the Voyageurs site) is QPR mid Marc Bircham, who only plays for Canada through a Canadian passport he was able to obtain somehow because his grandfather lived in Winnipeg for a short time. A lot of said fans, myself included, don't think Bircham should be playing for Canada, but it's a little late now because he's already been capped. He hasn't even lived in the country a day!
- There are a large amount of players that were born abroad and that moved to Canada when very young (well pre-career) in our national team ranks. A particularly high number have Polish citizenship - Tomasz Radzinski, Chris Pozniak, Nicolas Blicharski, Wojciech Zarzycki, Andrzej Ornoch, and Mike Klukowski (who was actually born in Austria) are all Canadian-Polish dual citizens. The three Imhof brothers, Daniel, Dominic and Christoph, are all Canadian-Swiss duals.
- there are a few Canadian-British duals other than Marc Bircham: Iain Hume was born in Edinburgh but grew up in London, the Dodds brothers, Rhian and Jamie, are also of Scottish extraction, and Kevin McKenna got his from having lived in Scotland for so long as a member of Hearts.
- many of our best players come from either the Toronto-Hamilton area or from Montreal, with the occasional input from the south-west of BC (including Steve Nash's little brother Martin, who's from Victoria).
The Maritime provinces (New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador) don't usually produce high-level players, but one noteworthy exception is Halifax native Ante Jazic who has played for Rapid Wien, Hajduk Split, and Kuban Krasnodar.
- In last year's Voyageurs Player of the Year voting, M/F/D Atiba Hutchinson from FC K
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