Boys In Red Beat Danish Second-Tier Club (Be Proud, Canada)

What is prestige? Is qualifying for the World Cup? Is it getting promoted to the top division? Or is it a second-rate national team playing a matinee match in Fort Lauderdale against a second-division club from Denmark? You decide. But if the context of Canada’s second friendly of the season, against Vejle Boldklub was about as big a deal as a trip to the bathroom, at least we won.

Of course, the Canadian Soccer Association’s website is not at all useful, so forgive me if you feel I don’t have a Match Of The Day-esque recap for you all, but we Canadian bloggers are deprived of resources like you would not imagine.

What I can tell you at the moment is that the final score was a whopping two goals to nil, with both goals being scored by guys who had never before tallied for Canada, first Montreal’s Charles Gbeke on ten minutes and then Calgary’s Issey Nakajima-Farran on forty minutes. Interestingly, Issey used to play for Vejle as recently as last season.

Player-wise, it’s obvious that the training camp was not chock-full of the best Canada has to offer. Mind you, there were only a few players who could hope to get a start in a Gold Cup match present. We’ve got no clue what the formation was like, but the CSA was nice enough to tell us who started, so here’s more or less what it could have looked like.

—————Sutton (Wagenaar, 46′)——————-
-Cann / Serioux (Ribeiro 65′) / Reda / Pozniak (Jakovic 60′)-
Harmse (Rosenlund 43′) / Williams (P. Nakajima-Farran 80′)
———I. Nakajima-Farran / De Rosario / Nash———-
—————–Gbeke (Simpson 75′)——————–

Basically, this camp was just to have a gander at what Canadian talent was available on our lovely continent. On paper, it looks pretty bad. But with two wins and not a goal conceded, could my skepticism be uncalled for?