Sebrango hopes to make Impact

[François]

I'm a bit late with this but good work by Randy Phillips.

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Sebrango hopes to make Impact
Top scorer returns from knee injury. Team was eliminated early in soccer playoffs after striker was sidelined for season

RANDY PHILLIPS
The Gazette


Friday, April 16, 2004


The offseason was good to the Impact's Eduardo Sebrango.

The 6-foot-1 striker made a full recovery from knee surgery after the most serious injury of his soccer career. He had opportunity to reflect on last season with the Montreal Impact, one shortened because of the injury to his right knee that left the team without the services of its top scorer heading into the A-League playoffs.

More importantly, the 31-year-old native of Cuba went home again after a long hiatus.

"It had been almost 51/2 years since I had been home to see my family. It was great," said Sebrango, who returned to his native Sancti Spiritus in central Cuba in mid-January. "It was a wild time, lots of family and friends. I don't think I left my family's house for the first week I was there because it was so busy. It was nice.

"The home cooking was good, too. Beans and rice every day," Sebrango said yesterday after practice at the Catalogna Soccerplexe in Lachine, where the team is preparing for its April 25 season-opener in Puerto Rico.

"Beans and rice in Cuba is what pasta is to Italians," Sebrango continued. "There are lots of different vegetables and our big meat is pork. While you have turkey at Christmastime, we have roast pork."

Sebrango, who became a Canadian citizen June 5, is a former captain of the Cuban national team. He met his wife, Kim, who was working for the Canadian Soccer Association at the time, while playing for Cuba in a World Cup qualifying game in Edmonton in 1996.

He and Kim were married in Cuba the following year. The couple has two children, a 4-year-old daughter, Garbriella, and son, Donovan, 2, and the family now calls Ottawa home.

"Kim and the kids didn't come to Cuba with me this time," Sebrango said. "It would have been all too much, especially for the kids. They wouldn't have known what was going on.

"At home there's my father (Rafael, a school teacher), my mother (Olania) and my older brother (Carlos), but I have a lot cousins, nephews and nieces in many places in the country, so I did a lot of travelling around to see everyone and some of my guys I used to play with.

"Though I was home, for me it was like I was a tourist," said Sebrango, who played 14 seasons with Sancti Spiritus, where he was chosen Cuba's player of the year in 1997. He played 20 games with the national team before coming to Canada.

Sebrango is entering his sixth season in the A-League, his third with Montreal after coming over from the Hershey Wildcats.

He scored a team-record 18 goals appearing in all 28 regular-season games for the Impact in 2002. Last season, he led the club with six goals and three assists in 20 games before tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in a home game against the Pittsburgh Riverhounds on July 23.

The damage was surgically repaired on Aug. 15, but when the playoffs came - after the Impact had captured the Northeast Division regular-season title, finished first in the Eastern Conference, and tied for the best record overall (16-6-6) in the league - he could only watch as the team fell to arch-rival Rochester in the first round.

"Recovering from this type of surgery is long. There was therapy each day for the first three months. I had never experienced anything like that before," Sebrango said.

"I only started running again in January and began doing some lateral moving by the end of February. But the knee feels very strong now. There's no pain. No swelling. I don't have to wear a brace when I play."

With the regular season set to begin - the club's home opener at Claude Robillard Stadium is May 16 against Virginia Beach - Sebrango can't wait to get going.

"Being off, recovering, gave me lots of time to think about how much I want to see this team do better this season and what things I can do differently to help make things better," Sebrango said. "I'm excited about this team and I really want to see us get off to a good start."

Sebrango hopes members of his family to see him play this season.

"I especially would like to bring my mother to see me. While my father and brother have travelled outside Cuba, my mother has never been outside the country," he said.

rphillips@thegazette.canwest.com

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2004