Appetite for soccer has empty feeling
While Team Canada seems happy, Sinclair’s return to BC Place should have garnered more fanfare
Fans don’t respond well to being told what they ought to watch. You can’t “guilt” them into paying for a sporting event that doesn’t pique their interest, and there is no right and wrong at the gate, only demand or no demand.
You can market, you can splash the names and faces around, but you can’t bludgeon.
So the conclusion to be drawn from the 7,627 customers who watched Canada’s national women’s soccer team Thursday night in its 6- 0 thrashing of Haiti at the CONCACAF Olympic qualifying tournament in BC Place Stadium is ... what?
That soccer remains a tough sell, and even hanging the word “Olympic” on it — in an Olympic city — isn’t enough to arouse much of a pulse?
That there is no culture of women’s team sports to speak of in North America, and if one were to rise above sea level in Canada, it would surely be hockey and not the world’s most popular game?
That Vancouver, far from being permanently inflamed with Olympic passion by the 2010 Winter Games, has now seen the best and isn’t interested in the rest?
That the town is all bigevented out, after the Olympics and the Canucks’ run to the Stanley Cup Final ( and the subsequent riot) last June, and the RBC Canadian Open a month later and the Lions hosting and winning the Grey Cup in November?
Or that 7,627 fans — all jammed together between two wide blue ribbons along the side of the playing field opposite the TV cameras; the other two- thirds of the 21,500- seat lower bowl empty — is about what the event could expect?
The latter, says Christine Sinclair.
“As a team, I don’t think we expected too much more than that,” said the formidable striker from Burnaby, one of the greatest female players on the planet, who scored four times and set up a fifth in the Haiti match.
It’s an opinion shared by most of her teammates.
File under the heading: Been down so long, it looks like up to me.
“I’m just thankful to see 7,000 people,” said forward Melissa Tancredi. “Not many people want to see the preliminary games, they want to come to the big- time games. So 7,000 people there [ Thursday night] was honestly a surprise to me, it was a good number in my eyes. It’s just nice to have people who haven’t been to our games out to our games for a change — and that’s really a gift.”
The problem, of course, is one of perception, because the bar was set unrealistically high a decade ago when the world under- 19 tournament in Edmonton — FIFA’S first sanctioned youth competition for women — drew 295,133 fans, for a per- match average of 11,351.
The six games at Commonwealth Stadium involving Canada averaged 27,500 per match, including 25,000 for the opener against Denmark and a staggering 47,784 for the final against the United States.
As implausible as that was, the comedown to 7,627 fans Thursday would have been a shock to the systems of the seven players from that U- 19 squad who, a decade later, are on this national women’s team — except that many of them have played professionally in the U. S. or abroad in the intervening years, before crowds ranging from several hundred to a few thousand.
So, far from being crushed by this apparent indifference on Vancouver’s part, they were pleasantly surprised.
“I thought it was great,” said Edmonton- born goalkeeper Erin Mcleod, who sat out the Haiti game, but will probably play tonight’s second match, against Cuba.
“To be honest, that under- 19 tournament superseded any expectations that any of us had. We were like, ‘ We’re going to play in Commonwealth? There’s going to be like 10 people there.’ And then it was packed.”
But this is Sinclair’s backyard, a backyard that knows and respects soccer and was still turning out 20,000 strong at the end of a season in which a really mediocre Whitecaps team won six of 34 games in Major League Soccer.
There is nothing mediocre about the 28- year- old Sinclair, who scored 10 goals ( still the record) and was named the MVP of that U- 19 tournament in 2002, and who has five times been a FIFA nominee as world player of the year in the nineplus years since Edmonton.
She is brilliant on the ball, truly a different class from anyone else on the pitch Thursday. The seven who played on that U- 19 team are nine years older, nine years better.
The quality of the women’s game has risen leaps and bounds.
Sinclair, such a star elsewhere in soccer’s world but still a stranger to most of her countrymen ( and women), can’t even remember the last time, if ever, she played internationally in Vancouver, other than the odd friendly.
How can her homecoming not be a bigger deal?
“Obviously, the under- 19 World Cup was a very unique experience, but that’s a world championship,” said Sinclair, who is so without ego, she would be the last to take a sparse crowd personally.
“Hopefully, the next World Cup we can get those same kinds of crowds, but this being a qualification tournament, we didn’t expect it.
“And to be honest, since the under- 19 World Cup, we just haven’t had tournaments at home, we haven’t played games at home, so there’s been a huge gap — and we just have to build. We have to start somewhere.”
“Well, the games are on [ Sportsnet],” said defender Brittany Timko, a local product like Sinclair, “so we are all just looking forward to whatever we can generate, and we’re hoping that from that first game we can build momentum for the coming games.” And for the coming years. The 2015 Women’s World Cup will be staged in Canada. A year earlier, the U- 20 will be here, too, testing the venues and the Canadian appetite for the kind of football that doesn’t come with two pointy ends.
The appetite needs to grow some, between now and then.