‘It sucks,’ but bronze up for grabs
WOMEN’S SOCCER: Canadians say ‘job is to be on that podium’ after 2-0 semifinal defeat
Big dreams die hardest. On the pitch, where the Canadian soccer women had just lost a 2-0 semifinal to Germany and with it the precious chance to fight for Olympic gold, players wept or fell to their knees in naked despair.
Finally, at the toughest time, the wheels fell off the magic ride this team seemed to have been on — when every ball went their way, every scoring chance seemed to go in and the sun always shone on them.
They began the match undefeated, a perfect 4-0 record in the Olympic tournament, having beaten three of the highest-rated teams in the world — Australia, France and even, yes, Germany — as well as Zimbabwe. They were openly talking about wanting to hear O Canada at these Games, about wanting that gold medal around their necks.
And then it fell apart and in the magnificent words of The Tragically Hip song Boots or Hearts, when it starts to fall apart, man, it really falls apart: A German penalty kick for a 1-0 lead, missed Canadian chances and, as coach John Herdman described it just as the Canadians were really pushing it in the second half, “the old sucker punch ... and they caught us,” the Germans were up by two.
Give them this: They had the big parts until the bitter end with Herdman moving up goalkeeper Stephanie Labbe as an extra attacker, the football equivalent of pulling the goalie.
“We try anything in that last 15 minutes,” Herdman said. “You’ve got to try everything you can. Sometimes it pays off; it didn’t tonight.”
But even though their legendary captain Christine Sinclair told them in their post-game huddle of misery, as coach Herdman reported, to “take two hours to let everything out. We’re not going home empty-handed,” they were already beginning to regroup.
“We’ll give ourselves tonight to be sad,” Rhian Wilkinson said in the mixed zone. “We’ll talk to our families and cry.” But in the next breath, she said: “Now the job is to be on that podium.”
The biggest disappointment, she said, was this: “When we as a team aren’t able to just die for one another ... it’s not a matter of heart. It’s never an effort thing with this team.”
They don’t know, either, just what it was.
As fierce little midfielder Diana Matheson said with a bitter halfsmile, “If we had the answer to that, it wouldn’t happen.” But, she said, she thought the team could have played “with a bit more confidence, a little more of that swag.” The Germans were a team that Canada was capable of beating, she said.
“We knew we could create chances and we did. The game was there for the taking and it hurts that we let down ourselves ... We just didn’t get the job done.”
Young scoring sensation Janine Beckie said this, pragmatic and honest: “With big games comes big pressure. They took advantage of their opportunities, but we didn’t.”
She said that when Sinclair talked to them in the immediate aftermath, she spoke of how the team had been in the same boat in London at the 2012 Games.
There, after a heartbreaking semifinal loss to the United States, Canada beat France 1-0 for the bronze.
Some of those key players are still with the club — including Sinclair, Matheson, Wilkinson, Melissa Tancredi, Sophie Schmidt and Desiree Scott — but for many on this youthful club, they were kids watching from afar, the game just an inspiration, the same way that these players are probably galvanizing their successors.
As Herdman said, “Some of the really young players, this is the first time they’ve gone through this kind of disappointment ... (They’ve learned) we do things the hard way, that’s how we do things.”
The veterans have their Olympic medals, Beckie said, but for those who don’t, “We can’t let this slip through our hands.”
One of the kids, 18-year-old Jessie Fleming, said, “It feels like crap right now, we wanted to win the gold medal. But we’re gonna win bronze.” Then, indulging in just a second more of sorrow, “It sucks.”
The Canadians now travel back to Sao Paulo, which earlier in the tournament was a substitute home field for them — until Brazil lost to Sweden Tuesday in the other semifinal, which means they will fight Canada for the bronze on Friday.
The Canadians may want to look at a line from another Hip classic, At the Hundredth Meridian: “Hard, huge and haunted.”
That would be a fine way to play.