Jesse Marsch, the former Leeds manager, has now watched his first game in his new role.
Former Leeds United manager Jesse Marsch had a terrible start in his debut game as Canada manager, and he made a level admission in the aftermath of a crushing defeat.
Marsch was named the new manager of the Canadian national team in May, and the American played his first game in his new job on Thursday evening against the Netherlands in Rotterdam.
The game remained goalless at halftime, but Memphis Depay, Jeremie Frimpong, Wout Weghorst, and Virgil van Dijk scored after the break to give the hosts a 4-0 triumph.
Before this summer’s Copa America, Canada will play one more very challenging friendly against France in Bordeaux on Sunday evening. Marsch’s team is in the same group as Argentina, Chile, and Peru at the Copa America, which is being held in his native United States.
According to Canadian Soccer Daily, Marsch joked that it was almost “unfair” to face the Netherlands and France in his first two games, but added that his players needed to “grow up” to deal with such high expectations.
“The biggest thing we need to take away, specifically from playing against Holland, is what the level of the game is at the highest,” Marsch stated.
“But in order to accomplish that, we needed to develop a framework for how we wanted to play and incorporate it into our games versus those opponents. Now that we’ve done that, we have a greater understanding of the standards, and we can demonstrate how to improve, as well as what the speed of play is like and what the demands are when competing against the best.
Marsch remarked, “It’s almost unfair to have to play your first match against the Dutch and your second against the French.” But so what? We need to improve as a team and as a football nation. And we have to figure out how to improve, and there is no better way to do so than to play against opponents like these.
“The Dutch are quite skilled at building rotations. They have many technical players. They have a lot of athleticism and a great combination of what it takes to play the game at the highest level, so it puts us to the test, and we held up pretty well in the first half and had some really good stretches where I thought our football was good and our understanding of how to play in all phases of the game was quite good.”
