"Your whole front of the ship is in the ocean. At 19 years old, a guy from Toronto having this experience, I was terrified. You’re hoping the ship comes back up. It always does, of course.”

Many Canadians in the USL celebrated the week leading up to Canada Day by providing  fireworks of their own.

The Canadian Premier League’s silly season for coaching announcements continued Thursday, as Halifax Wanderers unveiled former Canadian national-team boss Stephen Hart as the man who will lead the club in its inaugural season.

Unfortunately, there is a major talking point coming out of the game, and it doesn't have to do with the final score. It's the state of left winger/fullback Maxim Tissot’s health.

Amongst traditional English-languageTV consumers, the best the opening week of the World Cup did on TSN in Canada was an average of 660,000 viewers per minute.

For a Canadian league to survive and thrive, it has to be more than giving Canadian players a place to play. It needs to be about giving Canadian coaches the chance to work in professional environments. It’s about having Canadian administrators and general managers.

In hockey, it’s called a natural hat trick. That is, three goals are scored all in a row by one player. One. Two. Three. With no one else getting a goal in between.

When FC Edmonton paused its first-team operation at the end of the 2017 NASL season, Ben Fisk had options.

The Fury will say “heck, we won the first leg, got a road goal, didn’t give up one” and be confident that it will handle things at home for  the second leg; Blainville can say “heck, we fell asleep right at the start of the game, but didn’t give up anything after that.”

So, it’s a good time to analyze the numbers: So far this season, 27 Canadians have played in MLS matches.