Friends, Footy fans, Edmontonians, Albertans, Canadians even. Choke down that bitter pill we call Winter and lend me your … erhm… Eyes.

When I first starting typing out my preseason review I made a point to downplay what I saw at the time as potential negativity coming from some of our more hardcore supporters. We had just seen the departure of Darryl Fordyce and Matt Van Oekel and there were holes on defense that are yet to be filled. I was prepared to come out swinging with my optimistic troll-club, prepared to beat down and subject the butthurt dweller trolls to my will and stand atop the heap of them to proclaim my optimism. I had combed through NASL’s ridiculously detailed stats from the Eddies website, prepared to cite players “battles won” and shooting percentage in what would have been a valiant defence. I’d even sent a tweet to Colin Miller to ensure he’d got his lucky underwear washed and ready to go for matchday one(okay I made this one up, but I totally would have if I had found him on twitter) .

But where the hell am I now? FC Edmonton has made so many moves (we’ll get into those in the next article) that my narrative pretty much completely irrelevant and I’m back at the drawing board combing through my first attempt to see if any of it is salvageable.

But at this point I’d like to emphasize FC Edmonton’s somewhat tacky recent marketing slogan, “#BeLoud”. Now is the time to share this with people. I was optimistic before all the moves, but at this point, I’m sitting in my kitchen feeling like I’m about to blast off a la Wiley Coyote on an Acme brand rocket, right through the roof and into one of the partially developed suburbs that litter the outskirts of this city.

I know this is an FC Edmonton article, but let’s just zoom out a tad and focus a bit on the macro for a moment. The Toronto Montreal series we just witnessed only a few months ago will go down in history (in my opinion) as the beginning of a new age of Canadian Footy. Something just happened. Shit, I had people who only know what offside is because of hockey asking me how aggregate scoring works. Anecdotal evidence, sure – but if you knew the guy, you would understand why this is a big deal. People are paying attention. Canada is considering launching a bid for the 2026 World Cup, and word is slowly but surely getting out. Shit, if ol’ tiny hands keeps up this ban, Canada might even have a chance at a solo bid, and I don’t want to get too crazy just yet… but uh …. TRUMP 2020.

And I haven’t even touched on the swirling CanPL rumours yet.

Jokes (sort of) aside, I suppose I better address what’s actually going on in Edmonton before someone accuses me of dereliction of duties and calls for my head. The academy is crushin’ it – Shome has set the bar, hopefully made Fath a bit of dough for his faith, and I fully expect this to start to become the new normal. FC Edmonton has a legitimate case to make for being “Canada’s Team”, and call making Ledgerwood captain a PR move if you must, but it’s a good PR move.

MVO was a beast, and I was sad to see him go, but don’t underestimate the defense-first ethos that Colin Miller seems to have instilled in the team. Whatever keeper Miller goes to, I will be surprised if they have to bail out the team quite as much as MVO did.

And we still got Albert “The Ogre” Watson taking scalps in the “battles won” column. He plays like he was raised in an abusive dickens-esque orphanage and I love it.

To all the Eddies fans who’ve taken the thing this far.

Three Friday Games and SEVEN SATURDAY GAMES.

Spark becomes a flame 😉

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Guillermo Del Quarto Guillermo finds it hard to write about himself in the third person.

Guillermo tries not to take himself seriously but to provide compelling content and engage in supporter culture as much as is possible from his remote location of Watson Lake, Yukon. He works as a Laboratory and X-ray technician and wants to do his part to help the CPL succeed, even if he may be critical of it at times. He covers FC Edmonton.

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