Hello, hello everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, with Scotland currently losing to Ukraine, which makes it a sad day for at least half of TSS, but a happy day for most of the world, which is kind of how it seemed when Canada qualified for the World Cup.

It seemed like everybody was pretty excited about that, here to talk all things Canada men's national team is the athletics Josh Cloak. Josh, thank you so much for being here. It is great to speak with you. Well, thank you. It's always, I think sometimes when it comes to Canada and soccer, you know, we sometimes think that people forget we exist or we did up until a few years ago. And so for you to say people felt happy about us qualifying for the World Cup, yeah, I guess that makes me pretty happy as well. It seemed that way. It seemed like if it had been another Conca Calf rival or Mexico had secured it, like, well in advance. I think there would have been more consternation, more frustration. But when it's Canada, I think there's a little bit of jealousy, but there was a lot of like, they deserve it. And it's great because you're totally right that I think for most of my life, if we're talking Canada and soccer, I think we're talking about the women's program, which is obviously historically very, very, very strong.

But the men's program has obviously been coming on leaps and bounds.

And I'm assuming that that is a thing that you will be talking about in your book, which is due out in October.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you've put into that?

Yeah, it was a lot of work.

But, you know, kind of what we're talking about, the men's national

team in Canada, especially abroad, but domestically, too, has been, for my entire life,

something between a disappointment and an afterthought, right? Which is worse. I guess that's up to

you. But the problem is just that, you know,

there was so much interest in the game in Canada, right? Because we're Canada is a multicultural,

diverse population with a strong immigrant and refugee representation. So that love of soccer, that

interest of soccer comes from abroad, but that didn't necessarily translate to the men's team

and that kind of passionate following of the men's team, you know, probably because so many

people had their allegiances elsewhere. There wasn't enough, you know, advancements in coaching in the game.

There wasn't enough, you know, people staying in the game.

And so basically the book itself begins with Canada's loan journey to the World Cup in

1986.

And it looks at the changes in the country and the changes in

soccer itself that led to Canada getting back to the World Cup in 2002. You know, it's full of

exclusive interviews with former coaches, former players, executives, people all around the game.

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