By Ben Knight

 

Let’s assume that the rumour is correct.  If it isn’t, it should be.

Stephen Hart – any minute now – will be officially confirmed as the non-interim head coach of Canada’s national men’s soccer team, which still faces a very long wait before the next round of World Cup qualifying kicks off in 2012.

This useful, competent and warmly optimistic and enthusiastic man has been gallantly wearing two hats for the Canadian Soccer Association of late, interim coach and technical director.

Effectively, he’s been responsible for the future of the game at both the grassroots and international levels.  In reality, coaching is the only one of those jobs where he has a tangible chance of succeeding.

As each month passes, it becomes more and more clear that the CSA is in full spectator mode when it comes to player development.  Hart is a fine man to oversee the job, but Canada’s pro teams, private soccer academies, local clubs and provincial programs are not sitting around waiting for bureaucratic bafflegab like “Wellness to World Cup” to become the law of the land.

Faced with a recent FIFA circular mandating the registration and acknowledgment of academy players outside the traditional provincial system, the CSA is – surprise, surprise – backing down and deferring just enough to pass the problem on to the provinces.

This is exactly the kind of bottom-up bureaucracy that has left Canadian soccer saddled with a national leadership vacuum for decades.

Okay, that’s a bit blunt.  I’m sure Hart himself would rather say that many useful options are being considered, and the best ways of going forward will be carefully implemented over time with the useful co-operation of all concerned.

Regardless of wording, there is zip-over-bupkis chance that the clubs, academies, pro teams and provinces are pausing to ask “what would the CSA do?” before they sign up promising potential prospects.

And they shouldn’t – because Metcalfe Street is so very far behind the curve.  Even if the CSA can visualize a future, the implementation of what-will-actually-happen is already in full flurry without them.

So it’s time to liberate Stephen Hart.

No, he’s not one of those globetrotting coach-for-hires who’s led eight different nations to the last six World Cups.  But that’s a doomed pursuit for Canada right now.  What’s the guy going to do, with no major action on the slate until the next Gold Cup?

Hart has two huge advantages: he knows the players – and he clearly loves the job and has done well at it.  With an increasing number of Canada’s top players signed up by Toronto FC, and more certain to come home when the Vancouver Whitecaps join Major League Soccer in 2011, it’s a lot more possible to field useful Canada squads on both sides of the Atlantic.

Grass at BMO Field?  Rampant multiculturalism in Toronto?  Sounds like great atmosphere for full international games to me.  A visit by Portugal?  Italy?  … England?  Ka-ching!!

With so much of Canadian soccer still being funded by registration fees on amateur players (a sentence I NEVER want to have to write again), it’s better to take the money we don’t pay Guus Hiddink and spend it on whatever really needs it.

Stephen Hart is one of the most loyal and talented servants the Canadian game has.  He consistently manages to coax creative, attacking soccer out of the same band of red-shirted maple-leafers former coach Dale Mitchell squashed into useless defensive blandness in last year’s utterly wasted World Cup qualifying campaign.

No, I can’t tell you with anything other than my heart that Hart would have done better.  But there is no possible way he could have done worse.

Sometimes, the best thing to do with scarce resources is line them up so that every little piece counts for as much as it possibly can.  Naming Hart fulltime coach of Canada does that elegantly, and exactly.

Onward!