For 75 minutes of Wednesday’s second leg of the club’s Amway Canadian Championship final against the Vancouver Whitecaps, things looked good for FC Edmonton to be Cinderella at the BC Place ball.
For 75 minutes of Wednesday’s second leg of the club’s Amway Canadian Championship final against the Vancouver Whitecaps, things looked good for FC Edmonton to be Cinderella at the BC Place ball.
He left it late, but Eric Hassli’s 94th minute stoppage-time winner gave the Vancouver Whitecaps a 2-1 win over the San Jose Earthquakes Saturday night at BC Place, sending the 19,271 fans home happy.
The number was painful to read, painful to report. In a concrete monolith of a stadium that’s built to seat more than 60,000, just 2,777 people came to see FC Edmonton play the Vancouver Whitecaps in their first leg of the Amway Canadian Championship semifinal.
“When you see the game, you see the difference in the way we play,” said FCE coach Harry Sinkgraven after the match. “They are more mature, you can see that. In battles, they are stronger. We lost too many individual battles.”
Keep it clean. That’s the prevailing message from FC Edmonton’s final training session before Wednesday’s Amway Canadian Championship semifinal first leg against the Vancouver Whitecaps.
After starting unbeaten in four, the Vancouver Whitecaps are now winless in just as many after a 3-1 loss to Sporting KC at BC Place Wednesday evening.
Then the Caps imploded, giving up three second-half goals to the Quakes thanks to a series of mistakes in the back that’d have you thinking you were watching the 2011 edition of the team.
This was an ugly tearjerker of a game, with the ball stuck in midfield, with both teams cancelling each other out.
It took just three minutes and seven seconds for the Renniessance to officially take hold in Vancouver.
New coach Martin Rennie, late of the Carolina RailHawks of the NASL has imported a number of new faces and has tried to put his stamp on the team by fostering confidence and positive thinking. Perhaps as a gesture to the members of the Montreal media, Sebastien Le Toux, Alain Rochat and Eric Hassli were made available.
The 11 offers insight, interviews and commentary by respected soccer journalists. It is affiliated with the Canadian soccer magazine, Plastic Pitch. Our editor, Steven Sandor, has covered Major League Soccer, United Soccer Leagues, World Cup qualifying, CONCACAF Champions League, women’s soccer and the Canadian Soccer League and has won numerous awards for his magazine work. His work has appeared in the Sun chain of newspapers, Soccer 360, World Soccer, Soccer Canada, Philadelphia Daily News and the Deseret News. His work has appeared in publications in Canada, the United States, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and Namibia.