It hurts. It hurts a lot.
It always does, but today is worse than usual. Today a real opportunity was lost. Had Canada managed just a draw in Honduras, dreams of Brazil would have been real – they would have seemed reasonable and they would have inspired a whole bunch of people that have never been inspired by Canadian soccer in the past.
Instead, this. Pain, tears and disappointment. The critics have their punch lines ready. Great-great-great-great grandad’s homeland’s strip has been dusted off – time to support the “real” countries again.
The truth is hard to face. However, we must. If Canada can’t get a draw in Honduras it simply does not belong in the World Cup. An argument can be made that it might be good enough for the Hex, but the goal of this thing is to get to Brazil, not play a home and home with Mexico.
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Even if Canada had advanced today it would have needed to get better. A country of this wealth in this confederation should not be touch and go to get past two Central American countries. The infrastructure needs to be better; the players need to be better.
We’re getting there and the results this round show that – 10 points is a massive improvement from the last two cycles. By the time the next cycle comes around we should be even better.
But, that’s four years away. Four. Years. Six if you count we're not even in Brazil yet. But today, it might as well be 50.
Today is not the time for pep talks about how things will get better. It’s perfectly fine to be angry today. Be mad as hell that we choked once more.
However, we need to channel that anger and make it productive. Eventually, once the pain has washed away, we need to see the growth that has occurred and get on with the business of moving forward.
There are plenty of things that need to be addressed – is this it for Stephen Hart? Can we finally get a national league back up and running? How can we better work with the professional clubs? And much, much more.
CSN will address some of those questions in the coming days. We will move on and start to look towards the 2013 and 2015 Gold Cup and qualifying in 2016. Moving on is what Canadian soccer fans do.
But, today we mourn with the rest of you.