It’s a feeling that I didn’t quite realize I had been missing: Watching every deke, dribble and dive that Team Canada and its world-class opponents executed, on a TV in a pub full of people watching the same; white-knuckling the edge of the bar in one hand and a pint of lime-and-soda in the other; hugging and high-fiving strangers in moments of joy; doubling over in agony with them in moments of joy narrowly denied.
All just because we were Canadian, and because our countrymen were playing soccer, of all sports, shockingly well against world-class competition for one of the first times in memory, living or otherwise. On Sunday in Charlotte, N.C., Canada lost a soccer game to Uruguay on penalty kicks, and in so doing “lost” third place in the Copa America, a tournament comprising 10 teams from South America and six from Central and North America.
It was Canada’s first appearance at the tournament. Uruguay was the 11th-ranked team in the world heading into the tournament, to Canada’s 48th. Uruguay had won the Copa America 15 times. “Losing” third place was an incredible achievement for Canada, in its first-ever invitation to the tournament.
But then, just watching Canadian players face off against the Americas’ best — including twice against number-one-ranked Argentina and soccer’s best-ever player, Lionel Messi — was a remarkably visceral experience. It has been a while since I felt so patriotic, even in defeat.
To paraphrase Neil Young, for my entire life, until very recently, everybody has known that Canadian men’s soccer is nowhere. The team qualified for its first World Cup in 1986. Nothing came of it. Canada didn’t qualify again until 2022, after an impressive romp through our rivals in North and Central America: Mexico, Honduras, Jamaica, etc. (Berths in the World Cup are awarded based on regional competitions. Canada’s region, known as CONCACAF, includes the United States, Mexico and the Central American and Caribbean nations. It is not at all known for beautiful soccer games, stadiums, pitches or fan behaviour, or indeed for producing World Cup champions.)
Predictably, Canada was knocked out of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar after three games, none of which it really threatened to win. And that was fine. It was in a tough group: Vastly better and more experienced teams Belgium, Croatia and Morocco stood in Canada’s way. So it was perhaps unfair to call it a disappointment. Things were still looking up.
But then the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) seemed to melt down, amid wretched allegations of senior officials ignoring sexual abuse against young female players, and later of generally shambolic mismanagement. The women’s team went on strike. John Herdman, the highly regarded men’s team coach who had previously led the women’s team to glory, quit. Just as for the first time in decades there had been any hope for it, the whole project seemed like it might be imploding, and it was depressing.
But then the CSA somehow scraped together the gumption and the cash to hire experienced American coach Jesse Marsch, an ebullient fellow who is sometimes compared to the fictional TV coach Ted Lasso, and who in just a few weeks seems to have rallied the Canadian troops to his way of thinking.
Canada played six games at Copa America against very good teams — a huge boon to the team’s development no matter what the result. It lost three: two of them to best-in-the-world Argentina and one to 11th-ranked Uruguay. But it also won two, against comparably ranked Peru and Venezuela.
That’s nothing to throw a parade about, but even a few days later it’s still making me a bit misty. Rightly or wrongly, when I see a Canadian national team square up against another in just about any sport — hockey included! — the flop sweat starts flowing. This Canadian men’s team has confounded those expectations, and we could really use more confounded expectations in this country nowadays, sporting and otherwise.
At the risk of sounding sappy, it’s also really satisfying that the Canadian men’s soccer team looks a lot like modern Canada. The players’ CVs sound a lot like the country itself. Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana to Liberian parents. He cut his soccer teeth in Edmonton and Vancouver, and now plays for Bayern Munich, one of the top clubs in Europe. Striker Jonathan David was born in New York City to Haitian parents who moved back to Haiti, but then later to Ottawa, where highly regarded local youth coach Hanny El-Magraby took up his cause.
One of Marsch’s favourite players is clearly Moïse Bombito, a 24-year-old Montrealer of Congolese descent who plays for Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids, but who had only played six games for Canada before this year’s Copa America. Bombito was impressive in every respect in the tournament, including on penalty kicks, but his path to the national team and MLS took a circuitous route through a community college in Iowa and then the University of New Hampshire.
“The best example of what’s wrong with the sport in our country is that … Bombito never really was identified (as a top prospect) until 23 years old. Like, that just can’t be,” Marsch told CBC. “We have to find the next Moïse Bombito at 15. We have to know exactly who he is. And we have to be able to challenge him to be a pro at 17, 18 years old, so that by the time he’s 24, 25, he’s playing at a top-10 club in the world, almost like Alphonso Davies.”
“As Canadians, we should aspire to do what a Brazilian kid aspires to do,” El-Magraby told The Athletic in 2020. ”Yes, (Brazilian kids) want to play for their local club, but their hopes are to end up in Madrid or Juventus.”
“As Canadians, it’s not naturally ingrained in us to feel that way. So I felt like I had a responsibility to push (David) on that,” El-Magraby said. What a wonderful thing to hear, at a time when this country so clearly needs more ambition and resolve in every respect.
Time was it was difficult to understand why any young elite Canadian soccer player would want to play for Canada, if he had any other national-team options: Calgary-born midfielder Owen Hargreaves famously chose England; Montreal-born goaltender Yassine Bounou famously chose Morocco, and made himself one of the stars of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Suddenly it’s cool to play for Canada, and this profoundly uncool and complacent nation should be most grateful for that. We should all rally behind this team. It’s not at all easy to make a winning national soccer-team program. We have never done it before, If we can do it now, goodness knows what else we might be capable of.
National Post
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