New Town signing Jason De Vos captained Canada to a second 4-0 victory over Belize within four days as they progressed to the semi-final stages of CONCACAF's lengthy World Cup qualifying campaign.
De Vos played the full 90 minutes of the game - his 46th full cap - picking up a yellow card in the first half. Canada's goals came from Tomasz Radzinski, Dwayne De Rosario (2) and Jim Brennan.
Head coach and former Town defender Frank Yallop was pleased with the 8-0 aggregate victory: "Good to get through to the next round. With two very good results, we are looking forward to the semi-final round.”
In the semi-final group Canada will meet the winners of Group 5 (Cayman Islands, Cuba, Costa Rica), Group 6 (Aruba, Surinam, Guatemala) and Group 7 (Antigua & Barbuda, Netherlands Antilles, Honduras).
The semi-final match dates are as follows: August 18th, September 4th/5th, September 8th, October 9th/10th, October 13th and November 17th.
The top two from each semi-final group will go through to the final qualifying stage, made up of one group of six teams, with the matches being played on these dates (all 2005): February 9th, March 26th/27th, March 30th, June 4th/5th, June 8th, August 17th, September 3rd/4th, September 7th, October 8th/9th and October 12th.
The top three teams in the group will automatically qualify for the finals, but the side in fourth will face a play-off with the winners of a knock-out game from the Asian qualifying region.
Canada's World Cup campaign looks likely to force De Vos to miss a significant number of Town games during 2004/05 and even some in 2005/06.