Are you still upset about the Vancouver Canucks early exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs? Do you like sporting events? How about teams from Vancouver?? Then you, good reader, are in luck, for that playoff-sized hole in your heart is about to be filled with MORE PLAYOFFS! Tonight, the Vancouver Whitecaps will hope to steal some of the Canucks’ audience as they begin their Canadian Championship campaign against FC Edmonton.
As the Canadian soccer championships receive just slightly less media attention in this country than the NHL playoffs, you may ask: “what’s on the line?” The ultimate destination is the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament held annually in December featuring the winners of the six continental soccer federations (either Chelsea or Bayern Munich will feature in this year’s edition). In the short term, however, the Whitecaps will be looking to simultaneously win their first Voyageur’s Cup, earn a spot in the 2012-13 CONCACAF Champions League and make soccer fans in the rest of the country finally shut up about how we’ve never won this trophy before. (Does that last bit sound familiar?)
The tournament will take place over the next four Wednesday nights. The semi-finals will see the Whitecaps take on division 2 FC Edmonton in a two-game aggregate score series. Toronto FC will play the Montreal Impact in the other semi, with the winners meeting in a final series on May 16th and 23rd.
If you haven’t been following the Whitecaps lately, this is not the sad sack team that won only 7 times all last season. New head coach Martin Rennie has brought about a renaissance (Renniesance?) at the club. Though the club has a ton of offensive weapons at its disposal, Rennie has put the emphasis on defense thus far. The Caps have conceded only six goals in their first eight games (all six coming in two games against very good teams), recording six clean sheets in the process. The result has been a respectable 4W-2T-2L record, good for 14 points. That’s a mark the club took until August to reach a season ago.
If you’ve yet to see a Whitecaps game, now is the perfect time to start. Tonight’s game in Edmonton goes at 7:00pm on Sportsnet Pacific. Then, next Wednesday, you can take advantage of a Groupon that the Caps are offering. $65 gets you two tickets to the game plus a copy of EA Sports’ FIFA 12 for either XBOX or PS3. The atmosphere at BC Place for Whitecaps games blows the Rogers Arena experience out of the water, as I wrote about in March. Tune in tonight, come out next Wednesday, and cheer on the Caps as they try for some silverware.