“For example, Etienne Barbara,” said De Santis, referring to the NASL’s leading scorer to date this season and a man who has expressed interest in playing in MLS. “We can negotiate with him and have until March to confirm a contract with him or any other players in those leagues.”

And maybe it’s best that the Impact looks forward. Because, after a 1-0 loss to the NSC Minnesota Stars Friday night, it looks more and more like the current season is a write-off

Eddy Viator, who had been previously on trial with the NASL’s Montreal Impact, has signed with Toronto FC. The defender, who played in Guadeloupe’s 1-0 loss to Canada at the recently completed Gold Cup, is eligible to appear in Wednesday night’s matchup against FC Dallas.

While it has a long and hallowed tradition is show business, “break a leg” is probably not the best way to wish Cameron Knowles good fortune on the pitch. Presently in Montreal on tryout with the Impact, the 28-year-old New Zealand native is attempting to come back from not the first, but the second broken leg of his career.

In a pre-game press conference Sunday afternoon, Impact President Joey Saputo and Richard Legendre, Executive VP of the Impact and Saputo Stadium, announced modifications to both the schedule of activity and the design parameters of the upcoming expansion to the team’s home field. Disappointed in the offers received for the initial tendering of contracts for the project, Saputo told the media that in order to respect the $23-million budget, the construction will begin in September, rather than in July as announced earlier, and that the refurbished stadium would not be ready in time for opening day of the Impact’s first MLS season.

Impact coach and technical director Nick De Santis said after practice yesterday that he wanted to see more initiative on the part of his men, particularly in the visiting Atlanta Silverbacks’ third of the field. He got what he wanted from Eduardo Sebrango who scored two on the afternoon with the second allowing the Impact to snatch a tie from the jaws of defeat and taking him to the century mark for his career.

The days of intermittent, indistinct webstreamed of Montreal Impact games are drawing to a close. When the club join sMLS next year all the team’s games will be televised, available in high-definition as a result of the five-year agreement the team announced today with Quebecor Media and its subsidiaries — a deal that team president Joey Saputo described as “the most important in club history.”

The revolving door has been spinning as released players yield their spots to incoming men in an effort to stimulate scoring on a team that had not put one into the mesh since June and has not posted a victory since the fourth of last month. The first of these situations was rectified this evening but the second remained unchanged as the Impact played to a 1-1 tie, avoiding victory for the seventh straight game.

For several hundred youth soccer players in Pierrefonds, Wednesday night marked the long-anticipated return of the Montreal Impact, who have made the local suburb an annual stop on its public practice tour schedule.

At the start of the NASL season, you’d have predicted that any 2011 match between the Carolina RailHawks and the Montreal Impact would be a top-of-table clash. Only the RailHawks have kept their part of the bargain. When surveying the Impact’s 2-0 road loss to Carolina Sunday, you would be excused for assuming that the RailHawks were preparing to jump to MLS next season while Montreal was, well,just a bad team.