Canadian soccer fans will be more than pleased to see the combination of Amandine Pierre-Louis and Valerie Sanderson creating a goal for the national team at next year’s U-20 World Cup.

The 11 understands that there was debate about starting the season earlier in year, which would have allowed for a balanced spring-fall schedule. But, that would have been unfair to northern members in Minnesota, Edmonton and Ottawa. A schedule which would start in early March would have meant the Fury and FC Edmonton could have been playing game at home in heavy snow, or been forced to start the campaigns with ridiculously long road trips.

The Montreal Impact has announced the signing of “Piscu” — Spanish central defender Adrian Lopez Rodriguez.

The Board of Governors met with four groups, and approved the Jacksonville and OKC bids. Both teams will join the league in 2015. NASL spokesman Michael Preston said that the league won’t identify the other two cities that had bids in, but they didn’t receive flat-out rejections. See them more as being at the beginning of NASL courtship.

Right now, FC Edmonton has midfielders David Zaharija and Dominic Oppong for the week. On Friday, Anthony Adur (also known as Anthony Bahadur), a former Maccabi Haifa youth team forward who has also played in Singapore and Thailand, will join the Eddies on trial.

Spanish midfielder Alvaro Rey had been on trial with Toronto FC in June. Now, with international slots and cap space cleared thanks to a series of recent roster culls, Rey has officially joined the Reds.

With nearly 40 per cent of the team’s spots taken by Canadians, the W-League’s all-star selections certainly have a good-news feel to them.

It’s hard to imagine Haworth doing any more to impress NASL squad coach Marc Dos Santos than he did in the PDL Northeast Division championship game.

That’s not to blame Payne for the Forlan mess. The sexy DP is a key part of the strategy of Maple Leaf Sports and President Tim Leiweke, who is quickly finding that selling star players on the notion of coming to a last-place team in Canada isn’t quite as easy as selling them on the rock-star lifestyle of Los Angeles. Let’s face it, Cherry Beach ain’t the Santa Monica Pier.

“It was just as I was starting to get going,” said Fordyce of the break. “When you get in a good routine, you don’t want it to end. But, for the three of us (Fordyce, Robert Garrett and captain Albert Watson, who all came to FCE from Belfast’s Linfield FC), it’s the first break we’ve had in a year. It was June of last year that we started training camp, went six to eight weeks, then the start of the season."