The Vancouver Whitecaps defeated Pacific 1-0 in the Canadian Championship. Based on how the game went I would say this was a fair result.

The first half was essentially a series of car crashes. Starlight Stadium has a very small pitch, so when Pacific sat deep and compact it was very hard for Vancouver to get anything going. Combine this with Vancouver’s lack of play-making options aside from Gauld through the middle, and you had both teams firing in crosses and hoping for the best.

That said, Vancouver dominated possession so there were more car crashes happening near the Pacific goal than the Vancouver one. That’s not to say that Pacific had nothing going for them. Josh Heard was on the end of a couple of goal-mouth scrambles but could not convert either of them. Maybe things would have been different if he had but we’ll never know.

In the second half, the Whitecaps took control of things a bit more. This eventually culminated in a headed Ryan Gauld goal after a series of chances. Emil Gazdov, who was a bit of a liability the last time these two teams met, played extremely well and the Whitecaps may well have had more if not for him. Once that goal went in Pacific had more shots but they were mostly from sharp angles and distance. Isaac Boehmer did well to be alert but I wouldn’t say Pacific produced anything I wouldn’t expect him to handle.

So, Vancouver won, they deserved to win, they’ll probably win the tie. The second leg is not for another two months and there’s a transfer window between now and then so both teams could look a bit different by then.

I would also like to briefly address the discourse around these CPL vs MLS games. I would like to use whatever platform I have to urge everyone to calm down a bit. The CPL has been around for six years, we know what these games are like by now. They’re scrappy and relatively close but more often than not the MLS team wins. These relatively close score lines are sometimes used to argue that *really* the difference between MLS and CPL isn’t that big. I think this represents a bit of a misunderstanding of these sorts of results. The fact of the matter is, if you played the exact game that Pacific played today with the same level of chances for and against, every week, you would lose a lot more than you would win. You wouldn’t get blown out very often, but there would be a lot more losses than wins.

Conversely, there are fans who act like having a close game with a CPL team is a mark of shame. There have been lots of CPL vs MLS games and I don’t recall there being a blow-out. The most lopsided match-up was probably Orlando City’s games against Cavalry earlier this year when Cavalry had a limited pre-season and couldn’t play at their home ground. Other than that, the difference between CPL and MLS teams tends to be only a goal or two. That’s the difference between these leagues at this stage. Blow-outs are rare but the MLS teams usually out-play and out-chance the CPL side to a level that you can generally rely on them to win. Every now and then, things go right for the CPL team and they snag a result. But that’s not the norm. I wish everybody could be a bit more honest and clear-minded about that state of affairs, but they probably won’t be. See you in August!