The Montreal Impact held its pre-season open house on Thursday evening in front of about 2,000 of its most devoted fans at a poster-festooned Olympic Stadium, many drawn by the news that 1,000 tickets for Saturday’s opener were to be given away to the first folks turning up.

The Montreal Impact has made it clear that striker Ali Gerba is free to go to another club. But, so far, there have been no takers.

The Montreal Impact announced that three players from its NASL roster won’t be part of the team’s pre-MLS evaluation camp. And none of the six new players the Impact have invited to the camp carry Canadian passports.

Coming into tonight’s game against FC Tampa Bay — needing to make up a point a game on the sixth-place Fort Lauderdale over the course of the season’s last nine games in order to take part in the postseason — the Montreal Impact tonight snatched a draw from the jaws of victory, as the visiting FC Tampa Bay came back from a two-goal deficit at the 84-minute mark to end the night in a 3-3 draw.

In the end, the new graphic was well-received but the evening ended on a down note for Montreal, who dropped a 3-1 decision to the third-place Minnesota Stars, a game in which it did not challenge seriously for victory.

Canada likely won’t have reigning national player of the year Atiba Hutchinson available for the beginning of the World Cup qualifying schedule. Canadian national team coach Stephen Hart said in a conference call Thursday that Hutchinson is still recovering from meniscus surgery in June. The injury forced Hutchinson to miss two of Canada’s three games at the Gold Cup.

By the time the whistle blew ending the hostilities, both streaks had come to an end as the hosts took the game by a 1-0 score with 38-year-old Eddy Sebrango giving his team the win and taking the team scoring lead with three goals and six points despite having played in only six of the Impact’s 18 games thus far.

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.

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.

FC Edmonton will try and break its jinx against the Montreal Impact this Sunday. The largest crowd to ever see FC Edmonton play at Foote Field is expected for the weekend match-up, and they’ll want to see the home side, currently sitting second in the NASL table, reverse its recent run of form against the other Canadian team in the league.