Happy-to-be-there not good enough for Canadian soccer team

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This article was published 01/12/2022 (1344 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the end, it really was the happy-to-be-here World Cup for Canada.

They’d insisted it wouldn’t be, that the men’s national team would do more than merely make up the numbers. And we bought in — as we should have — because the team was good, because it’d beaten both the United States and Mexico en route to qualifying, a journey that’d delivered more surprises, highlights and vibes than we’d enjoyed in a generation.

But vibes, it turns out, can take you only so far. And they can’t, evidently, produce points at the sport’s highest-profile event.

No, when you get to a quadrennial World Cup, it’s best to act as though you’ve been there before — even if you really haven’t.

Take Australia, for example. Drawn into a seemingly impossible bracket, and bludgeoned 4-1 by France the first time out, they regrouped with a mature, realistic game plan and upset Tunisia and Denmark in succession. No chest-thumping; no preposterously insolent and geopolitically naïve remarks about an opponent. Just quiet confidence and meticulous execution.

Canada were neither quiet nor meticulous in Qatar. And, in retrospect, the vibes were off from the start.

Remember that embarrassingly delayed press conference ahead of the Belgium match? Canada Soccer couldn’t even get a bus to its destination on time, and head coach John Herdman was visibly upset in the few minutes he was left to introduce himself to the tournament.

Still, his players quite nearly (and probably should have) defeated the Belgians. They might even have gone in front after 10 minutes had Alphonso Davies not insisted on taking one of the few spot-kicks of his career. Not that the Bayern Munich man, who also scored Canada’s first World Cup goal, should in any way be made the fall guy for a winless campaign.

Despite what a CBC reporter might have us think, it does not fall to Davies to carry the future of the sport in this country. Fine, criticize the performance — and his positional deployments by Herdman were certainly not ideal — but to make of him a straw man you then proceed to douse with gasoline and light on fire makes for a bizarre, distasteful hatchet job. Just another cringeworthy episode to add to the list.

If the Belgium match had been a winnable one, the Croatia contest was lost before a ball was kicked. Herdman saw to that, what with his now-infamous remark that needs no revisiting here.

Of course he’d take it back, and he tried to, but the whole ordeal was, or should have been, a reminder that Canada — a G7 nation with a history of international interventions, including the quite necessary shielding of Serbian proto-state Krajina during the Croatian War of Independence — is not universally loved, whatever we might tell ourselves, that far from being the plucky underdog we’re a country that others might want badly to beat.

And it’s a beating we got — the only group stage match, it turns out, in which Croatia managed to score. And score and score and score. Only four days after the long-awaited return to a men’s World Cup, we were out of it. Although, we really weren’t.

There was a final match to play — and one with ramifications not only for opponents Morocco but also for Belgium and Croatia. But you’d never have known it, not with Canada’s friends-and-family photograph session two days before a game. Obviously it was a nice gesture, and of course there are countless people to recognize for their roles in qualification and everything leading up to it.

It’s also something that simply isn’t done at a World Cup. Not when the schedule is still underway and your group stage rivals are trusting you’ll approach each match with the professionalism the occasion demands. There’s a reason serious teams do their utmost to keep their squads as isolated as possible. Concentration is paramount. And Canada could’ve used more of it.

On Thursday, Morocco’s Hakim Ziyech needed less than four minutes to chip walkabout goalkeeper Milan Borjan. The Atlas Lions led 2-0 midway through the first half, and while Canada managed to settle after the restart the damage was done.

Why, we might ask, did Davies begin the encounter as a right-sided wing-back? And why was Jonathan David — among the goalscoring leaders in Ligue 1 — assigned to the bench while Cyle Larin — who hasn’t played a full 90 minutes since February — was among the XI? To that end, why weren’t adjustments made in the first half against Croatia when it was clear the pitch had tilted?

These are questions we’re allowed to put forward, and asking them is a credit to the team and the expectations we have of them.

At what point since securing qualification in March did it all begin trending downward? The cancelled June friendlies as Canada Soccer’s shadowy business dealings came to the fore is a possible demarcation, and there’s no question morale (those vibes again) is yet to fully recover. There will surely be a reckoning with an association that can drive neither a literal bus nor a metaphorical one.

And what of the manager? Herdman deserves at least the next Gold Cup, but he was tactically overmatched this last week. Has he taken Canada as far as he can? Can Canada Soccer even afford to consider a change?

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If, indeed, we went to the World Cup with serious ambitions to do more than simply show up, these and other queries are worth considering. Especially given the fact that had we not even participated, the Group F table would look exactly the same.

Conversely, if we can’t lend a critical eye to those three losses out of three, then it’s true after all: we were just happy to be there.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Twitter @JerradPeters

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