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Bev Priestman can finally focus on soccer with off-field distractions diminished

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Coach Bev Priestman says she has “unfinished business” with the Olympic champion Canadian women’s soccer team.

And with a newly signed contract to stay on through the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup, there is clarity about that mission.

The 37-year-old Priestman, who took over the Canadian women on Nov. 1, 2020, was initially appointed “through the next quadrennial” and had been working on a rolling contract that had no term end-date. Now she has a new, defined deal.

“On paper I was always going to be here until 2027. But I think this sends a message to the players, the organization,” she said in an interview.

Priestman sees brighter days ahead for Canada Soccer, which still has to fill the posts of general secretary and men’s coach and finally resolve the ongoing labour dispute with its players.

But she acknowledges it has been a bumpy road at times getting there.

“If I had spoken to you this time last year, it would have been a totally different conversation,” she said.

In recent months, however, she says distractions off the pitch have diminished.

“You look at the back-end of the year, there’s no surprise that things improved on the pitch. Because that’s what I could spend my time focused on. We ended the year with the way I would like to see Canada Soccer continue to move forward, which is investment in the women’s team, great planning off the pitch where I’m not looking (at the) budget left right and centre.”

On the new episode of Player’s Own Voice podcast, coach John Herdman opens up to host Anastasia Bucsis about his regrets surrounding the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Job ‘what it needs to feel like’

She said at the end of the year her feeling was “this is what the job did feel like when I first took over and this is what it needs to feel like moving forward.

“That was a critical piece because I could just focus on what I feel I’m good at. At the beginning of the year, it was nothing like that. If anything, I’m spending my time worrying about things no other head coach in the world is. And like I say there’s a correlation there with how we did on the pitch and what I had to do off it.”

Canada has won five of six since a disappointing showing at last summer’s FIFA World Cup in Australia that saw it exit after the group stage. Priestman’s team, which went 7-5-1 in 2023, has conceded just two goals since the World Cup and recorded three consecutive clean sheets.

It was an encouraging end to a difficult year.

“Some really stressful times off the pitch. And probably things that people aren’t even aware of,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I wanted to commit to the team, to my staff, so we can all put our head down and build.”

Asked whether she had received other job offers, Priestman said “there’s always been whispers or people who want to talk to you.

“What I will say is I never fully went into any interview process. I think I’ve always been transparent with Canada Soccer as well on that. A few things came up but at the end of the day I made my intentions clear, which was to sort this contract out and make it clear for everyone that I’m here to stay.”

‘Shut the door on other things’

Her existing contract had a renegotiation clause, which she chose to activate ahead of this summer’s Paris Olympics “to shut the door on other things.”

“For me and the family, we love Canada, I love this team,” Priestman said. “And I feel like there’s some unfinished business.”

The family is settled on the West Coast.

Her wife, Emma Humphries, is director of women’s football development for the Vancouver Whitecaps and coach of the Canadian women’s under-17 team, which is set to open play Friday at the CONCACAF Women’s U-17 Championship in Toluca, Mexico. Their young son Jack is due to go into his first year of school in September.

Next up for the 10th-ranked Canadian women in the CONCACAF W Gold Cup in February and the SheBelieves Cup in April, both in the United States. Canada opens defence of its Olympic title in late July in France.

Priestman has a 28-9-10 record in 47 matches at Canada’s helm and was a nominee for FIFA Women’s Best Coach in 2021 and 2022. She succeeded Kenneth Heiner-Moller after he returned to his native Denmark.

Priestman spent five years with Canada Soccer in a variety of coaching roles before returning in June 2018 to her native England, where she served as coach of the England’s women’s under-18 side and assistant coach with the senior English women.

 

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Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

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Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

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A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

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The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

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Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

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TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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