Heart of Canada might be Herdman
TUESDAY MUSINGS: Our women’s team holds up its end of bargain, even if FIFA sometimes drops the ball
After a week that gave us the longest day of the year, here’s something that will make things feel even longer: The musings and meditations on the world of sports.
The Canadian women’s soccer bronze medal at the London Olympics was rightly hailed as a remarkable achievement for this country but, at the time, it seemed more to do with Christine Sinclair’s starring turn than the overall quality of the program.
Three years later, the women are back in the World Cup quarter-finals with a decidedly different lineup and a decidedly different style of play. The common denominator, of course, is head coach John Herdman, and the more you’re around this team, the more you’re convinced Herdman is that rare case of a coach who’s a legitimate difference-maker.
The belief here is, at the highest levels, the role of the coach is overrated, that in elite competition the results are determined by the quality of the players, not the quality of their coach. But watching these Canadians, you’re aware Herdman is getting every last joule of energy out of the group.
To date, they’ve played four games at the WWC: two one-nil wins and a pair of ties that mean the difference between a successful World Cup and a disaster for Canada has been thinner than a razor’s edge. The players have held up their end of the bargain and the Canadian heart has been at the core of this team.
But it just seems the difference in all those tight matches is the edge provided by Herdman.
If you go to the Wikipedia page on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, it describes the society of George Orwell’s imagination thusly: “A world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system.”
That pretty much describes FIFA and, if you think that’s an exaggeration, you haven’t tried covering the Women’s World Cup.
We’ll spare you a complete recitation of the various stories heard around the WWC. Suffice it to say that everyone covering this event has one and they range from the sublime — on Sunday, a FIFA representative instructed photographers to grab their FIFA-issued bottles of water because they can’t bring their own water to the pitch — to the ridiculous — a friend’s eight-year-old son was accosted by security at the University of B.C. when he wandered near a closed Japanese practice.
OK, in a month some of this will seem funny. But this is also a little more than FIFA being gigantic pains in the arse. Access to players and coaches is doled out with an eyedropper and while FIFA operates in a lot of sectors where they don’t exactly have to sell the game, Canada isn’t one of those places. This tournament represents a huge opportunity for women’s soccer in this country, a chance to create stars, a chance to create a sense of excitement about the team, a chance to bring the sport closer to the mainstream.
But, as things stand, that’s a very difficult story to convey.
The other story FIFA is providing is a lot easier to tell.