Concacaf Champions League: Montreal Shits The Bed

First things first, the backstory:


For there to be 55,000 people out to watch soccer in the middle of hockey season is one of the most amazing things ever. Though soccer is the most played sport in this country, it receives very little attention and more bad news seems to revolve around the sport than good (see Canadian Mens Soccer team). In fact, I wouldn't be so sure that the national team has never had that many spectators, not in recent history anyway.

The additional thing that makes this a cinderella story is that Montreal is a USL team, a division below the MLS, and they beat out Toronto FC of the MLS to become Canada's representative in the CONCACAF Champion's League. Then they made even bigger news to make it out of the group stages. Then, of course, they went on to blank a top Mexican side 2-0 in the home leg of the semifinals as seen above.

Though that lead would still be precarious going south to play the Mexicans at home, up to this point it was nothing but good news for soccer in this country. Just this week there was discussion that Vancouver was a front runner to become a MLS franchise. Even Montreal and Ottawa have been in that mix. This is great news for the development of domestic players, to have something to aspire to right here in Canada.

Then, on Thursday night, everything went horrible wrong. I couldn't find any English highlights, so this will have to do, I'll explain the story below.



Since Montreal won the first game 2-0, Santos needed to win by at least 2-0 to force extra time and had to win by more than 2 goals to win the two leg competition. But if Montreal scored, which they did, they would become the only team to have scored an away goal over the two games. Which means that if the score over the two games was tied, then Montreal would go through to the semifinals because the team having more away goals has the tiebreaking advantage. So when Montreal went up 2-1, shockingly, this forced Santos to need to win by at least 5-2.

All was going well. They carried that lead into half time, so they could prepare to prevent 4 goals in the second half. Easy right? What followed left me feeling like shit yesterday just thinking about it. First off, Montreal left two strikers on the pitch to start the second half, and if I remember correctly, they didn't sub one off until they were down 3-2. And the guy that came off, Roberto Brown, looked disinterested for most of the second half.

Then CBC started to bring out the jinx. In a completely disgusting fashion, they started to announce the dates for the semifinal for Montreal IF they won, with 15 minutes left in the game! Then, Jason Devos, former national team member, concluded victory with 2.5 minutest left. WHY!? Why the fuck would you do that!? Montreal was in dire straights trying to defend for most of the second half and was restricted to clearing the ball out of their box. Anything could have happened. Then it did.

With 2 minutes left, Santos scored, leaving them 1 goal shy of winning the tie. Montreal weathered their next push, and with about 30 seconds remaining in extra time, they cleared the ball out of their half. I don't know who it was, but an Impact player had the ball on the left wing with 2 midfielders stretched across the field, wide open. This winger proceeded to pass the ball straight to the forehead of the central midfielder, which needless to say he couldn't control. 15 seconds later the ball was in the back of the Montreal net again, game over.

Montreal's defending all game was amateur at best, but when you are withstanding a full court press and there is 30 seconds to go in a game and you have the chance to clear the ball, the last thing you do is gift it back to the other team. All the Impact winger had to was play a nice easy ball to Sandro Grande in the midfield and the game was over. And this guy knew he fucked up big time because he instantly grabbed his head, announcing to everyone, "What the fuck did I just do?" Amateur and embarrassing.

So there you have it. Unprofessionalism at its best by both CBC and a bunch of soccer players + coach which, if anyone is like me, has seen a chance to ride the wave of a great Canadian soccer story slip by. And made a team the laughing stock of the soccer world.

I want to cry.