THEY PUT IT ALL ON THE LINE.
U.S./CANADA DRAW AT TIM HORTONS FIELD
What will be the overarching factor here?
That Canada did not hold serve and win their home leg of the two-game Rugby World Cup qualifier against the USA at Tim Hortons Field Saturday afternoon?
Or that Canada rallied in the final 20 minutes from a 10-point hole they should never have been in to tie the opportunistic visitors 28-28?
We’ll know on, appropriately, Canada Day when the return match is held in San Diego. The winner of what is now essentially a one-game playoff, advances directly to the 2019 World Cup in Japan, while the winner will be obliged to play rising Uruguay for the second “Americas” spot in the Cup.
“It’s always a ding-dong battle when we play these guys,” said Brantford’s Aaron Carpenter, the former McMaster star who extended his record to 78 national team caps when he entered the game in the second half. He scored his 17th international try, which pulled Canada back into the game, and nearly had another.
“We’d have liked to build up a bit of a lead heading to San Diego, but a few easy errors led to them getting ahead of us. Our heads got down when mistakes happen, which you can never let happen. We’ll learn from that.”
He was referring to the final minutes of the first half when Canada surrendered two tries and the first portion of the second, when an intercepted pass led to a 95yard U.S. try, with an American player in the sin bin no less, and a 28-18 lead.
Carpenter is 34 and says he won’t play past 2019, but the other Mac grad on the team hopes he himself has another decade left at the sport’s highest level.
Tyler Ardron, 26, helped McMaster to the 2011 OUA championship, the last time the men’s team was provincial champion.
He, like everyone dressed in red, felt that Canada had controlled most of the game, so that the end result was, overall, a letdown. “But one thing Mark (Canadian coach Mark Anscombe) has harped upon is that you can’t always take a negative and turn it straight into a positive. There have to be building blocks in between.
“I’d like to look at this game as taking a negative to a neutral, and a tie is the definition of neutral. And next week is the positive we’re looking for.”
Canada at least broke a six-game losing streak against the Americans, who are ranked 17th in the world to Canada’s 23rd, its lowest ranking ever.
“Since the last World Cup, we haven’t been performing the way we wanted to,” Ardron said. “It’s a game of momentum and we let the momentum slide a bit, but in the last 10 minutes we took the momentum back. That bodes well for next week.”
The crowd of 13,187 — many from out of town — bodes well for rugby in southern Ontario and Carpenter, amazed at the size and noise of the audience, called for more “big games” at Tim Hortons Field.
“I’d never thought this could happen,” he said.
“This is huge for the sport of rugby. I’ve been around a long time and I’ve seen it grow. It was a great venue and led to a great game of rugby.”