A LEAP OF FAITH FOR CANADA?
Canada’s Kadeisha Buchanan, left, leaps over Germany’s Lina Magull with Diana Matheson (8) nearby during exhibition soccer play at Tim Hortons Field on Sunday. The match was played before a sea of red at a sold-out Timmy’s field. The Canadian women showed resilience as they played in a new 3-5-2 formation designed to give the fourth-ranked team more flexibility and allow it to use the full width of the pitch. Captain Christine Sinclair, with her 173rd international goal, and Jessie Fleming scored in the second half. But Olympic champion Germany won the game 3-2.
The scoreboard read as it so often has — a one-goal win for Germany — but there was another kind of victory here.
The triumph of entertainment. You’d pay money to watch this kind of sporting spectacle and 22,826 did, cramming into Tim Hortons Field on a sunny, windy, Sunday to see the Canadian women’s soccer team’s first game in their home country in six months.
It was fast-paced, highlyskilled soccer — “football” anywhere but North America — between the 2016 Olympic champions, ranked No. 3 in the world, and the Canadians, who are right behind them in No. 4. The lightning strikes of the young German team prevailed, 3-2, over the ballcontrol of the more experienced, but still evolving, Canadian side.
It was the 15th time the Germans have beaten the Canadians in 16 meetings. In six of the past seven games, the margin has been a single goal.
Canada’s only triumph came in the 2016 Olympics group stage, when Ancaster’s Melissa Tancredi scored both goals in a 2-1 win.
Sunday, the Canucks collapsed early, surrendering a goal as the sold-out crowd was still adjusting to sitting down after the national anthems.
Canada still trailed 1-0 at the break. But in the second half Canada fought back to lead 2-1 on goals by the iconic Christine Sinclair — now just 11 short of American Abby Wambach’s all-time record of 184 international goals — and 20-year-old Jessie Fleming, who had the ball on her foot for a large chunk of the game, as she extends her arc toward becoming the world’s best midfielder.
Fleming scored in the 69th minute. But before the 70th had elapsed, Germany’s Sara Dabritz marched downfield and beat Stephane Labbe for the equalizer.
“They are lethal around the box,” Canadian head coach Kenneth Heiner-Moller said afterward. “But they’ll be even more lethal if we give them the opportunity to be there. “This is not against tier 2 opposition, so to come back and lead 2-1, that’s amazing. But we need to finish the job. It was 80 per cent great stuff. The last 20 we’ll work on.”
With only four days of training after his players reassembled in Ontario from six different leagues around the world, Heiner-Moller was installing a new formation (3-5-2) to take advantage of his team’s improving ball-control skills.
That worked for the most part, but a foul just outside the box in the 84th minute forced Canada to build a thicker wall on the free kick and leave the weakside post open. Labbe made a brilliant stop on the kick, but it caromed off the bar to the other side creating an easy empty-netter by Tund Knaa.
“It was a tough one,” said Labbe, who rejuvenated her career with a great performance here in the 2015 Pan Am Games. “We have such high expectations for ourselves now. We say we want to be No. 1 and we’re serious about it. So when we come out against these teams we want the results. We scored two great goals in front of Canadian fans. A good takeway is that we are right there. We’re so close and it’s just a few small lapses, that those teams are going to punish us for.”
Every player in the German lineup plays in the Frauen-Bundesliga, the fourth-highest-paying league in any women’s sport in the world. Three Canadians, including starter Sophie Schmidt, also play in that league. Canadians playing Sunday come from six different leagues, including the NCAA. Ten have their salaries in the North American Women’s Soccer League — which does not have a Canadian team — paid by Soccer Canada.
The Tim Hortons Field crowd dynamic was, of course, different than that of a Tiger-Cat game. No sign of black and gold, but there was a sea of red livery, with the odd pocket of Germany’s black and white jerseys. And there was far less of the social-media-inspired roaming than at a CFL game. This audience, the majority of which was female, stayed in their seats, eyes fixed on the pitch.
And they saw an engaging match as both teams build toward autumn’s World Cup qualifying.
“Obviously, we’re disappointed we lost the game, and disappointed with the way we started the game,” Sinclair said. “To go up 2-1 and have them score within 15 seconds, is deflating. But we put forth a positive performance we can build on for qualifying.”