Nightmare start for Jesse Marsch in new job as ex-Leeds United boss fights 'unfair' verdict

Former Leeds United boss Jesse Marsch endured a difficult start in his first game as Canada boss, after which he made a levels admission in the face of a heavy defeat.

Marsch was appointed the new manager of the Canada national team in May and the American took in his first game in his new role through Thursday evening’s friendly against the Netherlands in Rotterdam.

The contest was goalless at the interval but the floodgates opened after the break as goals from Memphis Depay, Jeremie Frimpong, Wout Weghorst and Virgil van Dijk sealed a 4-0 victory for the hosts.

Canada now have one more very tough friendly to take in via Sunday’s evening’s clash against France in Bordeaux before this summer’s Copa America. Marsch’s side are in the same group as Argentina, Chile and Peru in the Copa America which is being staged in Marsch’s US homeland.

As per Canadian Soccer Daily, Marsch quipped that it was almost “unfair” to be facing the Netherlands and France in his first two games but declared that his team needed to “grow up” to now cope with such lofty levels.

“The biggest thing we need to take away, specifically from playing against Holland, is what the level of the game is at the highest,” said Marsch.

“But to do that, we needed to also create a platform of how we wanted to play and insert it into the games against those opponents. Now we’ve done that and we kind of understand what the standards are, and now we can show exactly how to get better, and then what the speed of play is like and what the demands are playing against the best.”

Marsch added: “t’s almost unfair to have to have your first match against the Dutch and your second against the French. But so what. We have got to grow up as a team, we got to grow up as a football nation. And we’ve got to figure out ways to get better and there’s no better way to do that than playing against opponents like this.

“The Dutch are really good at creating rotations. They have a lot of technical players. They have a lot of athleticism, they have a great combination of what it takes to play the game at the highest level and so it tests us at the highest level 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.”