Whitecaps Weekly Deserves A Place In Your Planner

What the game in Canada needs to promote itself here is some quality football magazine-style television programmes.

I know it’s a lot to ask here. I appreciate there isn’t going to be a great demand for the main stations to show this primetime, but they do have a lot of scope the rest of the time. How many times do you really need to show SportsCentre and Sportsnet Connected in a 12 hour period FFS?

Oh for a Soccer AM style show to brighten up our Saturdays mornings/lunchtimes and fill in the time from the Premiership finishing and our own matchday starting.

Gol TV do their bit to promote the cause. They’ve had their Toronto FC Today programme running for a while now and their latest addition came last week when Whitecaps Weekly aired for the first time.

Not that we knew much about it. The publicity for it hasn’t been great and I have to admit that I seldom look at the Gol TV schedules. Thanks to Masster on the Southsiders Forum though, we know about it now.

I missed the first show but caught this week’s one.

Kicking off with the highlights on the Caps site from last weekend’s goalless draw in Miami (hats off to anyone who could come up with watchable action from that horrible feed), it then moved to an interview with Whitecaps (and 86ers) legend Carl Valentine.

The six minute segment was an interesting chat with Carl, covering his time around the legendary 1979 Soccer Bowl win onwards, and featuring some nice old footage of the Caps in game action and even training. Great for a guy like me who wasn’t around in the city at that time.

It was interesting to hear him say that the fans then felt “that they were part of the team” and how close knit everyone was back then. Hopefully these feelings will be the same next year. There was also talk about Canada’s achievement in reaching the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, which Carl took part in. No footage of this though, I’m assuming Gol TV didn’t want to pay for that on the show’s budget!

The rest of the show consisted of interviews with Bart Choufour (Head Coach of the Caps Prospect Boys and former 86ers youth development director) talking about past, present and future work surrounding our great residency program; and a chat with Bob Lenarduzzi about the 79 Soccer Bowl and other stuff.

It’s all quite lightweight just now. More gloss than analytical, but who cares?! So the production value of it isn’t the best and neither is my usual picture quality of any programming on Gol TV, but it’s great to have a show like this devoted to us pre MLS.

It deserves our support and can only get better, so stick a date in your weekly planner or PVR now. It first airs at 5pm PT on a Tuesday and is usually repeated eight times over the next few days. For those that missed this week’s show then you catch it again on Friday at both 2pm and 10pm.

Remember, when spreading the word of football here, every little certainly does help and needs to be taken at every opportunity. Well done to those involved.