Win, lose or draw against Australia on Tuesday (3 pm ET, streamed liveSportsnet.ca), Canadian national team head coach Benito Floro is unlikely to shift his focus away from his main goal: identifying and preparing a new crop of players that will hopefully lead Canada to the 2018 World Cup.
“I need to see more [young players],” he told reporters in a Monday conference call from London. “It’s necessary to test 24 new players, because we need to choose at least 10 to form the new team.”
Youngsters Michael Petrasso, Dylan Carreiro and Daniel Stanese were a part of this training camp, their first with the national team, while three others – Sam Adekugbe, Jackson Farmer and Jérémy Gagnon-Laparé – got their first looks during the last training camp, in September.
Floro said that it’s difficult to institute a “collective philosophy” when the members of his roster play in so many different countries, but that he will be doing his best to educate incoming youngsters about what it takes to represent their country on the international stage.
“I want to see a lot of young players, and teach them how to play with the national team,” he said. “It would be very good for us if MLS [teams] would play a lot of Canadian players.”
Daniel Squizzato covers the Canadian national team for MLSsoccer.com.
