Canadian Soccer is on wrong path

[TFCRegina]

I'm not posting you the story. I'm a firm believer in hit boosting on websites in order to promote coverage of Canadian soccer. If someone else wants to copy and paste the story, they can.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/sports/Canadian+soccer+wrong+path/3498440/story.html

There's the link.

[Gian-Luca]

Pretty useless article, to be honest, says nothing that hasn't already been said a million times before.

[SteveBeau]

Just criticism and no ideas on what should be done...

[TFCRegina]

Just criticism and no ideas on what should be done...

^ Didn't say it was a good article, just an article.

I still think we should read it.

Articles on the CMNT are needed, and if lots of people read the article by clicking through this link, they will be coming to this website to see what we're saying, negative and positive. Websites keep track of incoming and outgoing links, so it's best that if you disagree with the negativity, you read it and rip into them on this thread.

[joepaco]

Pat Hickey ....meh .......I have not see him do his part supporting the local soccer scene very well ( Montreal Impact ) so he is just as guilty as the CSA.

As part of the media, he has a huge influence on the success of the sport. He only wrote this article because he is yellow and because the hockey season has not started yet.....

[BuzzAndSting]

Why is Pat Hickey writing about soccer? From what I know about him he only covers hockey. From September til May he comes on the local sports radio station here in Ottawa and rants about the Habs. The last time I heard him was right before the playoffs and he was talking about how the Habs wouldn't be able to win a series. The article is useless and gives a negative impression of the state of soccer in Canada. We all know that things aren't great but this kind of off the cuff reporting makes things worse. In the end it comes down to winning games now and his impression that "overwhelming majority are youngsters who lose interest once they hit their mid-teens" makes no differance whether Canada wins in the Ukraine in October or next summer at the Gold Cup or qualifies for the World Cup in 2014. The CSA has 40-50 players on their radar now that will make up the bulk of this team for the next five years and that has nothing to do with the "youngsters" playing now. Essentially there's no link between the argument he's trying to make and the points he giving to back that up.

I urge you to email Pat Hickey as I have and tell him to stick to hockey and not comment on something he knows nothing about.

[BringBackTheBlizzard]

I find it difficult to disagree with most of the article at least where the here and now reality is concerned beyond the "well-meaning" preceding "bumblers" to describe the CSA. I suspect that the journalist is a hockey/football/baseball type who is quite happy for soccer not to succeed as a spectator sport in a Canadian context and that's why he neglects to consider the effect that having three successful MLS franchises regularly appearing on the CBC and Sportsnet is likely to have by the end of the decade but that all has to unfold before it's reasonable to criticize that omission and will happen despite rather than because of anything the CSA gets up to in the interim. I'm not holding my breath on anything positive happening with the CMNT until the 2018 and 2022 qualification cycles. Hope I'm wrong.

[Keano]

Yes he is a hockey writer and part of the "old boys club" of local sports media types that have their own personal nostalgic connections with the traditional 3 sports, and see the growing appeal of soccer as threatening that. It's difficult to listen to Team 990 in my car and listen to these guys barely tolerate a 4 minute spot on soccer, you can almost hear them gritting their teeth. Yet when they talk NFL or MLB it's all about their fuzzy-lensed, golden-tinted childhood memories. I hear a veiled rejoicing in Hickey's (wrong) statement about "all the kids who lose interest" in the sport, and his (slight) under-rating of the elite player pool. Even the guys on that radio station who cover soccer, namely Tony Marinaro and Noel Butler, don't actual know more about it than you or I, in fact less about the Canadian game than you or I. Hickey knows far less than them.

[redhat]

Wow, what a crap article.

Let me summarize the article for those who don't want to read the article:

A) CSA loves slogans

Our men's team ranks 9th in CONCACAF and hasn't won in 8 matches before the Honduras tilt

C) Our women`s team fared much better, but is falling in rankings since 2003

D) Attendance was a paltry 7,000 in a 13,000-seat stadium (ignoring the mid-week match with rain)

E) ``But the biggest problem might be a failure to recognize that Canada simply isn't a soccer nation.``

If Canada Soccer had 25% of the budget of Hockey Canada, we wouldn`t have this problem. The Pathway to Excellence is a long, imperfect process that will hit roadblocks, including poor directionless criticism offered by mainstream sportswriters.

I just want Canada to get to the World Cup again.

[ted]

Well I enjoyed the line - and it bears repeating over and over and over again - where he describes the CSA as, "a group of well-meaning bumblers who prove that the only thing wrong with amateur sport is that it's run by amateurs."

[Danny Boy]

What ever happened to 'any publicity is good publicity'? If a hockey reporter is looking to soccer to fill his quota for articles, that could be considered a step in the right direction. The more mainstream the CSA's woes become, the better for us.

[TFCRegina]

What ever happened to 'any publicity is good publicity'? If a hockey reporter is looking to soccer to fill his quota for articles, that could be considered a step in the right direction. The more mainstream the CSA's woes become, the better for us.

Again, why I posted this article. And I hope they note that the majority of their hits likely came from this website, more specifically this thread, and read our criticisms of it. At the end of the day, we need to be maximizing the hits and offering our opinions on the pieces. Bad publicity is still better than none and negative responses to a bad article will help the writer and the paper focus on what we think, what we see and what other information is potentially out there if they go searching for it. For a writer who focuses on hockey to write a piece about Canadian Soccer when he knows very little is good, and we should be encouraging him to write more so he is encouraged to learn and write more about the topic.

Anyway, I'll continue to post these articles I find. It sorta makes me wish we had a news thread similar to the red patch boys newsthread.

[villus]

Agree with everyone saying this is a completely useless article. Pointing out a coincidence between slogan use and program downfalls is pretty hilarious.

[BuzzAndSting]

Yes he is a hockey writer and part of the "old boys club" of local sports media types that have their own personal nostalgic connections with the traditional 3 sports, and see the growing appeal of soccer as threatening that. It's difficult to listen to Team 990 in my car and listen to these guys barely tolerate a 4 minute spot on soccer, you can almost hear them gritting their teeth. Yet when they talk NFL or MLB it's all about their fuzzy-lensed, golden-tinted childhood memories. I hear a veiled rejoicing in Hickey's (wrong) statement about "all the kids who lose interest" in the sport, and his (slight) under-rating of the elite player pool. Even the guys on that radio station who cover soccer, namely Tony Marinaro and Noel Butler, don't actual know more about it than you or I, in fact less about the Canadian game than you or I. Hickey knows far less than them.

The day after the Honduras game I was listening to "The Intermission" (12pm-1pm) on the Team 990. They started the program by announcing they were going to discuss the game during the show. They ended up discussing the make up of the crowd for 5 minutes then spent 20 minutes on how long it took Marinaro to get to the game and what roads he took. The soccer coverage in this country really is embarissing.