It seems like only yesterday that Long Balls was moaning about a lack of goal production from Canadian footballers abroad. Perhaps then we should be careful what we wish for, as in, we should wish for more goals more often.
Josh Simpson! Iain Hume! Tomasz Radzinski! The lot of them scored over the weekend. Imagine what they would be capable of packaged together in a tidy front three for our friendly against Greece in February. I have previously argued that 33-year-old warhorse, all-time cap leader and proud national teamer Paul Stalteri should adopt a less prominent role for Canada going forward, so if pushing for 37-year-old striker Tomasz Radzinski appears to barely makes sense, remember this: Radz is playing almost every match for Lierse in Belgium and scoring on average once in every four of them. Stalteri is nowhere to be found for Borussia Mönchengladbach. [PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
But we've done Radzinski here at Long Balls. Whether he's defying the natural aging process or tussling about with teammates on the training ground his exploits this season have been duly noted. Ditto for Josh Simpson. He's tied for fourth in Turkey's Süper Lig scoring with eight goals, and he's having a smashing cracker of a season overall.
But what about Iain Hume? Four goals now in 14 appearances with Championship side Preston North End. Over the past few weeks he's somewhat eclipsed fellow Canadian Simeon Jackson in terms of playing time. Now his loan with PNE is over, and he returns to 10th place Barnsley, which in Championship speak means four points out of the last playoff spot with a game in hand. Vastly better situation if you ask me, unless of course he ends up sitting on the bench. If Hume holds form does he become an alternative to Simeon Jackson in the Canada attack or a compliment to him?
Elsewhere, as Long Balls noted last week, Serbian-cum-Canadian keeper Milan Borjan only played 60 minutes for Rad in the Serbian top flight. After making some guffaws about how the young Serb is Canada's only keeper getting regular playing time ahead of the Greece friendly, I realized that the Serbian league has a winter break of its own and won't kick on again until late February. Lovely then. We can only hope that whatever it is Haidar Al Shaibani does in between sitting keenly on the bench for Nimes in Ligue Deux will have him in game shape a month and a half from now.
Elsewhere around the horn of Concacaf, Honduran defender Maynor Figueroa was voted Goal.com's flop of the match for his performance in a 0-0 draw with Everton. I'm not entirely certain what kind of criteria the folks at Goal use to come up with their tops and flops (especially in a 0-0 draw), but any time a Honduran footballer is shamed in the international community we should definitely record it for posterity.
And finally, two thirds of the Some Canadian Guys took a break from their breathless schedules to indulge in some mid-Monday-afternoon drinking this week, loosely based on the excuse that a high-profile English Premier League match happened to be playing on several screens of the pub they were in. An argument about how much playing time Canada fence-sitter David Hoilett is actually getting with Blackburn this season broke out, and due to the lack of Blackberry service it was never settled. Until now. David Hoilett has played 372 Premier League minutes with Blackburn this season. Three starts and five substitutions, the majority of those coming since the middle of November.
Graphic credit: Jean Farrugia