Canada head coach Jesse Marsch holds up six digits to indicate the final score of Thursday's lopsided World Cup match against Qatar.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Dutch legend Johan Cruyff came up with more great aphorisms than any athlete, ever. Among his best: “You only see it when you get it.”
Like all of Cruyff’s most brilliant and banal ideas, this is a warning as well as an encouragement. The line flashes through my head every time anything goes very well for a team, a player or me. You may see it, but have you got it? Wait and take soundings before doing anything too crazy.
That line was blinking like a “missile incoming” sign right after Canada’s win over Qatar on Thursday. How do you handle such a transformative moment? Well, not in the way Canada did.
You don’t come steaming out into the middle of the pitch and looking to start a brawl. You don’t go on a march around the stadium so triumphal that all it lacked was subtitles in Latin.
Head coach Jesse Marsch pumped his fists for the full length of the field – the side facing photographers. He held up six fingers to the crowd, representing the six goals Canada had just scored. Poor planning. What happens if they score 11 in the next game? All of it had the whiff of hysteria.
Canada steamrolls nine-man Qatar for historic World Cup win
Okay, no problem. It was an emotional day, exacerbated by a bad injury to midfielder Ismaël Koné. These are (mostly) young people. All of us get carried away sometimes. God knows, I’ve said and done things in the parking lot at Costco I wouldn’t want TSN to broadcast live.
But whipping people into a frenzy is the job of newspaper columnists and other carnival barkers. A professional act that’s only halfway through the show ought not be demanding standing ovations.
The column take is “win of a lifetime.” The sports management take is that Canada just laid a beating on a team that played nearly half the game down two players. This wasn’t upsetting the Argentina soccer team in Buenos Aires. It was beating the Argentina hockey team in Brandon, Man.
If indulged, this tendency to overreact quickly gets out of hand. It’s an old danger, with new significance.
Canadian sports are different now, and I’m not just talking about men’s soccer. Every time a Canadian team does anything that catches wide notice, this country is ready to go bananas.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his wife, Diana Fox Carney, celebrate Canada's sixth and final goal in the thrashing of Qatar.Agustin Marcarian/Reuters
You could see it in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s wobbly postgame speech to the team. At times, he seemed on the verge of shedding a single, poignant, memeable tear.
Once the politicians start popping up in the dressing room, it’s time to review your security procedures.
Carney gets it. The Canadian polity is in an agitated state – on the one hand, experiencing an adrenalin spike of national feeling, and on the other, wondering where the hell this is all going. Are we the president of the Middle Power Cool Kids Club or splitting up or what?
When the news is coming at you this fast, any chance you get, you’re going to party like its 2099.
You saw it with the Toronto Blue Jays last year, and the Montreal Canadiens this year. Even preliminary sporting success produces an outsize, cross-country reaction, as well as a colossal expectation.
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For Marsch’s part, one can guess what Thursday’s postgame, hundred-metre shimmy was all about. He came into this thing intending to be more Canadian than milk in bags. What he didn’t count on was his actual country noticing. Marsch made some comments he shouldn’t have about “begging” U.S. players to sing their own anthem.
That made him a live target of American punditry at the start of the tournament, when they had nothing better to talk about. Getting laid across the media road and backed over a few times can’t have been fun. It’s not hard to draw a line between that lashing and a 52-year-old guy running up and down the sideline like his parents just told him he can stay up an extra half-hour watching SpongeBob.
In the pros, players police their own behaviour, based on complicated hierarchies. But at the national level, they model their comportment on that of their coach. If she veers jingo, so will everyone else. Marsch has freed everyone to go full Rocky at this thing. Even as it was happening, you were getting a bad “we got this” vibe from the Canadians.
Cruyff had some good advice about this too: “Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake.”
You won’t believe how useful this is if you make it a mantra. Before you send that e-mail/say exactly what you’re thinking/cry on the phone with a customer-service rep, don’t. Everything you do is within your own power to control.
Alex Grimm/Getty Images
Jacob Shaffelburg, shown celebrating with teammates and fans, fired the shot that led to Canada's fifth goal, an own goal credited to Qatar's Mohamed Manai.SIMON FEARN/Reuters
Canada has had its freakout mulligan. Nobody’s going to remember it did it once. They’ll never forget if it does it twice. Unless you’re holding a trophy over your head, no more celebrating like you just stuck the moon landing.
The good news is that while the Canadian team has a lot yet to accomplish, Canada’s core mission is complete. The minimum goal was for the country to stage a competent competition, and for its team not to embarrass itself. Those benchmarks have been met. Everything that happens from now on is a bonus situation.
If you’re into such things, there’s never been a better time to be a general sports fan in this country. It’s not the teams or the players. It’s everyone else.
If Canada had done this at the 1986 World Cup, would it be this big a deal? Men, women and children done up like they’re going out for Halloween as Captain Canuck? No chance.
It’s not the number of goals. It’s the momentousness of the historic occasion.
It’s understandable that the irrational exuberance that produces is contagious. That’s not an excuse to indulge it. The key to seeming like you’ve been here before is acting like you’ve been here before.