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Bring the Kids to WCQ?


Lord Bob

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Ledgerwood will never be the answer at RB regardless of his level of play - barring a move to Bayern or one of the B1 top clubs! We need to look elsewhere. Hoping, praying TFC/VWFC/MI can find/develop someone from Canada there.

ps-when does Sanvezzo become a Canadian citizen!? ;)

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Right now, today, I'd call:

Teibert over De Rosario

Gage over de Guzman

Latendresse-Levesque or Santiago over any GK not named Hirschfeld or Borjan

Porter over Friend

...for sure. I do any of those right now.

These players aren't playing. Even Teibert - though he started well - has lost his spot with VWFC, and is playing with the reserves. And honestly, what has Ethan Gage done do deserve a call-up? If they aren't good enough at club level, then they aren't good enough at the international level.

The national team is not the place to develop players. The difference between Canada and Germany, is that the Germans had young kids playing with their club sides at a high level. Though they needed to be "seasoned" at the international level, their development was more than taken care of at the club level, where they played week in and week out. That can't be said for young Canadians.

The only thing to do is to call the best players at all times. That rarely happens, as the CSA is forced to dance around club requests and player preferences. Really, did we even have our top team at the Gold Cup? Or did players/clubs say no to certain attendees?

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The RB spot is a MAJOR problem. I now understand why Hart has continued to call Stalteri over the last year. I honestly think a healthy Stalteri, even if he's not getting matches, is still likely better than Ledgerwood or Peters.

I agree about the first point but not with the second. Stalteri is one guy who needs regular first team minutes to be effective: if not, his play with the ball is pretty dodgy and his 1 v 1 defensive skills suffer, regardless of how good his cardio may be. And he's been gathering rust all year, pretty exiled at club level. He's not the answer unless he does get back into first team football at a reasonable level. However, Father Time is not on his side.

Ledgerwood is a lower league journeyman, a little younger version of Pozniak. Peters has never fulfilled his promise.

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I see the logic and merit in all the arguements against forcing youth into the side. The convential approach to building a natioanal team program is select the best players that are available. The sr. mens team is not supposed to be a player development program its about achieving peak performance from the best players available. That is how is works elsewhere and the logic and wisdom of the approach are sound.

However I think the current circumstances for Canada are not the norm. The game is at a different state of evolution in Canada and in order to compete our approach to the national team program probably has to be slightly different. For reasons long discussed on this board Canada is somewhat behind other nations in the development of the game and the development of players. I wont' rehash all those issues here but they are numerous and well known (ie. weakness in domestive player development limitation, lack of domestic pro league etc...). The result of these weaknesses is:

a) Relative to other nations our player pool is limited in terms of quantity and quality of available players given the population of our country .

B) Our players tend to be 'late bloomers' who have career breakthroughs in their 20's instead of in their teens. Essenitally our guys have shorter national team careers (we have 22-24year old young players this cycle instead of 18 year olds like Mexico and the US), meaning we also lack the cohesion and continuity that comes with having a large core group of veteran players with 2-4 WCQ cycles of experience.

If we build our team like every other nation, our team will generally suffer for quality, quantity, and continuity. So how do you compete given those limitations? Its much like the situation of smaller NCAA schools in basketball or football, they don't have access to the top talent, so in order to compete they have to do things differently. Occasionally one of these small schools breaks through with an outstanding season or tournament run;

i) a radically different approach to style of play (ie Loyola Marymount & Princeton in basketball or Texas Tech in football)

ii) a mature class of seniors starters that have played together for along time (Gonzaga in basketball).

I believe Canada's current situation is much like that of small NCAA schools, we have to do something truly unique to compete at international level. What does that looks like? I don't exactly know. It might mean loading up on youth every other cycle with the intent of being a top team every 8 years. Or it might mean hiring coach who has a system of play that has worked for nations with limited talent pools. Or it might be something else. Whatever it is, its got to be outside the norm, its has to be radical strategy that gives us an edge that offsets the known weaknesses.

In terms of the future, I think we can all see some light at the end of the tunnel, on some of the underlying issues impacting domestic player development. Things are slowly beginning to improve with the growing strength of Mtl, Van and T.O pro clubs and emerging lower tier clubs. But that light is still probably 5-8 years away, in terms of impact on the national team. So until then I say we need to be bold enough to pursue a radical strategy to succeed or we can just keep up the status quo and achieve mediocrity.

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Probably seems like a crazy idea but get a team full of Canadians that seems to know how to win like FC Edmonton, inject some top Canadian talent into their starting XI, and see how they do. At least they will for the most part be used to playing with eachother... And know how to win.

Though this probably seems like a better experiment for our U23 team lol.

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