The Footie Fool

Despite the fact that we made some major defensive mistakes, Canada beat Haiti 2-0 at the Gold Cup Monday night and have now advanced to the quarter-finals.

Overall, a pretty solid effort from the team, but still not the complete cohesive game like we saw against Costa Rica. Haiti had opportunities and keeper Pat Onstad made some key saves to keep the clean sheet for Canada. A defensive lapse by Andrew Hainault caused one of the scarier moments of the game as a Haitian player collided with Onstad in the box. Onstad’s head smacked against the ground and he was down for several moments.

And how horrible was that pitch at the Orange Bowl? Just prior to kickoff, Pat Onstad wisely ripped up most of the turf in front of his net to keep it from slipping out under his feet, an incident we saw happen to the Guadeloupe keeper a few days ago in their win over Canada.

This was my first opportunity to see Issey Nakajima-Farran in action (he came on as a late sub against Venezuela 2 weeks ago, but other than that has only been capped a few times for Canada) and I think this guy has some real potential. He’s fast and tricky, which was particularity evident on the play where he was tripped in the box and won the penalty that DeRo converted.

DeRo had a great game and shows why he is MLS MVP material. The guy is unpredictable and pops up everywhere on the pitch. His first goal shows how he can turn nothing into something, taking a shot from an impossible angle and converting. Really nice stuff.

But Onstad deserves the man of the match status. He stood on his head for Canada at deserved the clean sheet. In the 4 Canada games I have watched in recent weeks, I think he has been more comfortable between the pipes than Greg Sutton.

Canada will face Guatemala in the quarter on Saturday in Boston. The game will be live on the Sportsnet digital channel at 10am Eastern, and according to the Sportsnet website, rebroadcast at 1pm on the regular channels.