Canada, U.S. heading to rugby showdown
The Canadian and American men’s rugby teams will head to San Diego with everything to play for.
Both teams missed late opportunities to win the first leg of the twomatch Rugby World Cup Americas qualifying series and instead settled for a 28-28 tie before an enthusiastic gathering of 13,138 at Tim Hortons Field on Saturday.
Canada has never lost to the U.S. in this stage of World Cup qualifying and carried much of the play. The hosts also erased a 10-point deficit late in the match. But both teams also made critical errors. The July 1 second leg could well go to the team with the cleaner game with the winner punching its ticket to Japan 2019.
“We left a lot of tries out there and we gave them a few,” Canadian coach Mark Anscombe said. “If we’re going to win next week, we’re going to have to be more clinical.”
Canada opened the scoring in the seventh minute Andrew Coe found Ciaran Hearn near the sideline. Hearn then passed to DTH van der Merwe, who had a clear path to the line. But on the kickoff, American centre Marcel Brache found open space and near the goal-line, found an open Nick Cevetta. He touched it down to tie the match.
The Canadians were the aggressors early on as both teams were guilty of small errors which prevented any real momentum. So the teams needed to create a try as van der Merwe did in the 18th minute when he nabbed the ball from a ruck and ran toward the corner to put Canada back in front. The two tries gave van der Merwe 25 for his career, putting him alone on Canada’s all-time try-scoring list.
That gave Canada some confidence as the its ground game dominated the next several minutes. Shane O’Leary extended the lead with a penalty kick.
Canada started the second half with an edge in possession but handling errors ruined the momentum. O’Leary kicked his second penalty to cut the Canadian deficit in half but a few minutes later, a handling error by the U.S. set Canada up with a scrum near the try line.
But an errant pass by O’Leary was intercepted by Te’o who had 90 yards of clear sailing to Canada’s line to increase the American lead to 28-18.
Just past the midway mark, an American handling error led to a Canadian attack which looked like it ended in an easy try by Coe.
But he dropped the ball as he was reaching to touch it down, wasting the effort. They would get one eventually from Aaron Carptenter, who came in as a substitute to extend his Canadian caps record to 78 appearances.