The Footie Fool

Nice to emerge from my blogging exile with a headline that hasn’t appeared anywhere for pretty well close to a year. Earlier today Canada beat Cyprus 1-0 in an international friendly thanks to a goal by the Simeon Jackson who, along with defender Eddy Sidra and midfielders Tyler Hemming and Dominic Imhof, earned their first caps for Canada today.

Can’t really give you much more than that. The game was televised in Cyprus on a specialty tv channel, so some highlights may surface at some point. For now, we will have to do our best to imagine Jackson’s goal. Perhaps it was similar to the goal he scored for in front of 50,000 fans at Wembley last week – a goal that sent his club, Gillingham up to League 1 as they beat Shrewsbury 1-nil in a League 2 playoff. Oh wait – apparently there is no video of that either so we again have to use our imagination to recreate that memorable scene. Or maybe some clever Gils fan could help us recreate the scene in some other medium. Hmmm….hey, maybe Lego would work.

Yes, I imagine Jackson’s strike today in Cyprus went exactly like that.

At any rate, Happy with a win and looking forward to the Gold Cup with a renewed sense of optimism. Seems Stephen Hart has a bag full of magic that the boys respond to and he can coax winning performances out of them, even when the squad is missing the likes of Dwayne DeRosario, Atiba Hutchinson, Paul Stalteri, Mike Klukowski and Thomas Radzinski.

The one nagging question I have in the back of my mind is this. If part of the intent was to cap a few of the younger players – and it’s hard to question that this wasn’t part of the purpose here – then why didn’t we cap David Edgar? Not to knock a guy like Dominic Imhof who I don’t know snot about him other than he plays in the Swiss third division for FC Tuggen, but you have to think that a guy like Edgar is going to play a pretty prominent role in the future of the MNT. So why not give him the call and let him get a bit of experience now?

Whatever. I am sure Edgar’s day will come. For now let’s all bask in the glory of something that doesn’t happen very often – a Canadian win in an international match. Bring on the Gold Cup!