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  • Pesch earns new challenge


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    Former Canadian international striker Paul Peschisolido has been named manager of English Football League newbies Burton Albion.

    If any other Canadian has ever run a club in England’s top four divisions, I can’t find any mention of it.

    [PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]

    I chatted with Pesch a year ago, broadcasting matches at a youth tournament in Oshawa. His playing days had ended, but he was still holding out hope of a contract with one more English club. It would have been his tenth team over there, had it happened.

    Alert fans will remember he briefly scrimmaged with Toronto FC on that trip, having played for then-TFC coach John Carver in a disastrous season at Luton Town. Pesch professed to be a huge Carver fan, but he and the MLS club didn’t impress each other. The fleet, fiery finisher never suited up for his hometown club.

    Pesch was a tired, quiet man that weekend. The English season had just concluded, and even though he’d been sidelined for a while with another nagging injury, he looked exhausted. Taller than I’d remembered – slimmer, too – with a rolling English accent he certainly hadn’t picked up growing up Italo-Canadian in Scarborough, Ontario.

    I was there, in 1991, the day a 20-year-old Pesch was drafted by the Toronto Blizzard of the old Canadian Soccer League. He looked impossibly small and young then. And he was so, so good.

    He went on to score 11 goals for Canada, but there was a lot of frustration in his 53-game international career. Pesch could run the ball through opposing defenders, and he could finish. Too often though, his runs died when there was no one else to pass to. When he pushed further forward and waited for the ball, it rarely got to him.

    Canada needed two of him. One to run the ball, the other to finish the play. Obviously, that never happened.

    But his desire to find one more contract in England has come true. A bit unexpectedly, perhaps, although the Pesch I met last year was clearly reading the soccer pitch with a coach’s eye. His wife, Karren Brady, is famously the managing director of Birmingham City, newly promoted back to the English Premier League. They have been together since the mid-nineties, so Pesch will have picked up a lot of ideas.

    As for Burton Albion, they are a small, sassy side from Staffordshire, who caught the world’s attention when they held Manchester United 0-0 in an FA Cup stunner at their tiny Pirelli Stadium back in 2006. United buried them 5-0 in the replay at Old Trafford.

    11,000 Brewers fans made the trip to Manchester, and various sources claim this was the largest contingent of visiting support in Man U history. Seems unlikely – but then again there aren’t many United matches where that many tickets would be available in the first place.

    Burton have been consistent contenders for a Football League place ever since, and finally sealed the deal this season, winning the Conference by two clear points.

    Small ambitious club, tiny modern stadium. Conference champions usually do okay in League Two (the most recent comic misnaming of the English Fourth Division), so there’s every opportunity for success.

    Paul Peschisolido is a hugely competitive man, facing an excitingly new and different challenge. And he’ll be paving new trails in Canadian soccer achievement – whatever happens next for Burton Albion.

    Onward!



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