Canada’s victory over Qatar was a game-changer; nothing will ever be the same for men’s World Cup team
It was a night that will take years for any of us to understand. The morning after, the unpacking had just begun.
Most, but not all, of Canada’s men’s soccer team showed up for training on Friday, another in a string of gorgeous mornings in Vancouver, only hours after the most surreal, most consequential game of their lives.
Many of them were red-eyed and puffy faced, but they were committed to their routines and the familiar comforts they provide. They jogged, and they stretched, and they passed the ball to each other and bantered, the way they have so many times before.
But it all felt a little different, to everyone, in a way that was hard for anyone to express.
Thursday’s 6-0 victory over Qatar — the first for Canada in men’s World Cup history, in front of a deafening crowd at B.C. Place — was unbelievable in the truest sense of the word. It was one of those games that seems destined to separate before from after.
Head coach Jesse Marsch looked exhausted but sounded upbeat. After he’d held up six fingers to the delirious crowd, he’d gone to Vancouver General Hospital to sit with Ismaël Koné, whose broken leg, suffered early in the second half, also felt like a kind of inflection point.
Canada earns historic first-ever World Cup win by beating Qatar 6-0. Jonathan David becomes the first Canadian, man or woman, to score a hat trick in a World Cup match. Soccer North hosts Anastasia Bucsis and Amy Walsh break down all the actions with CANWNT players Ashley Lawrence and Jayde Riviere.
One Canada scored three goals before he’d gone down. A different Canada scored three goals after.
“I hold these guys in such high regard already,” Marsch said. “But every time that something happens, they continue to surprise me with how amazing they are, and how committed and connected they are to each other. It was another experience like that… Everybody here cares and takes care of each other so well.”
Now, somehow, they need to take that shared emotion — the joy mixed with regret, the confidence marbled with fear, and most of all the love without conditions — and find a way to use it.
With a win or a draw against Switzerland next week, Canada’s men will win Group B. They will play their first knockout round game in Vancouver, against a third-place opponent from another group.
Win that game, and they’ll play their Round of 16 game in Vancouver again.
It’s as though every door is open to them, and they know it. The impossible is possible; the improbable is suddenly likely. Normally athletes talk in immediacies, addressing only the game in front of them. Canada’s men, on Friday at least, expressed grander aspirations.
“That’s our goal, man,” goalkeeper Max Crépeau said. “It’s an amazing opportunity. We can allow ourselves to imagine what it can be.”
People who haven’t followed this team closely might want to level the result against Qatar, to reduce its significance. This World Cup features 48 teams for the first time, and some of them aren’t very good; Canada, as a co-host, was among the top seeds for December’s draw; Qatar was a fortunate opponent to face, especially at home.
That’s all true.
But it’s also true that Canada’s men have frequently fallen short of even limited expectations. Not so long ago, when they could lose 8-1 to Honduras in a game that mattered, the idea that they might even appear at a World Cup seemed like fiction.
This time, they rose to the occasion. They did more than rise to it, in fact. They outstripped it.
“It wasn’t easy,” Crépeau said. “It’s so difficult to put in a performance like this.”
It was difficult, and it was perfect, except for the singularly horrible moment in the middle of it.
After the game, Koné’s stricken teammates seemed uncertain of how to feel. The win was something spectacular and historic; the cost of it was immeasurable. Many of them cried, and it was hard to know what sort of tears they were shedding.
By Friday morning, they had started to learn a little better.
From his hospital bed, Koné sent a message to his teammates on Instagram: “I wanted you to know that I love you guys from the bottom of my heart and our brotherhood is everything to me. What you guys did yesterday will stay with me forever.”
This is what they did: Jonathan David scored a hat trick, including a volley that might still be travelling if the net hadn’t caught it. Crépeau held a shattered Luc de Fougerolles and told him it was time to get back to work. Nathan Saliba came on to score and held up Kone’s black jersey to the crowd. Marsch walked off the field with those six fingers high in the air.
“This was an incredibly unique moment in the history of Canadian soccer,” he said. “What I’ve learned is that celebrating moments is really important. I was trying to pump the crowd up and make sure that everybody could remember this moment for the performance, for the energy, for everything.”
Some moments, some games, some nights aren’t about one thing. We might like to distill them, but we can’t. We might yearn toward certainty, toward clarity, but they defy those wishes even as they grant others. They are the sum of all possibility. They contain every emotion.
All we can do is accept them in their totality, for their gifts and their curses, and remember how lucky we were to experience any of it, and all of it.
All we can do is remember not to forget.
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