With Davies decoy claim, Canada Soccer still can’t get out of its own way

Open this photo in gallery:

The problem with press conferences is that you can do a million of them well, and all anyone will remember is a slice of just one of them that you got wrong.

Canada head coach Jesse Marsch had one of those moments after Canada lost on Wednesday to Switzerland.

He’d said beforehand that injured star Alphonso Davies was ready to go. Not to start, maybe. But Marsch said he’d appear at some point: “I’d expect him to play.”

Davies did not play. He didn’t even properly warm up. Canada lost.

Afterward, Marsch slipped Freudianly as he tried to slide by that part: “To be honest, he wasn’t really ready yet. I was using him a little bit as a decoy.”

Cathal Kelly: Ten disastrous minutes derail Canada's easy path forward at the World Cup

Someone wouldn’t let him off the hook so easy – Why’d you do that?

“Because I wanted Switzerland to have to think about him.”

“You think it worked?”

That was when you could see it in Marsch’s eyes – the confused stare of a person in charge when finally confronted by someone who isn’t being paid to agree with them. Marsch’s reflexive, irritated shrug in response said more than his subsequent (unconvincing) explanation.

Open this photo in gallery:

This sort of reaction was common in the early days of the drone scandal at the Paris Olympics, before it spiralled. It’s a different program and different circumstance – to say nothing of an entirely different moral proposition – but the two things are of a piece.

For reasons that are obscure, soccer in Canada has a problem with thinking way too hard about things that don’t matter in the least. It’s an affliction common to all high-level sports, but our national soccer has it real bad.

If the women’s soccer team had been caught putting low doses of ketamine in opposing teams’ water bottles, people would have understood that. They wouldn’t have loved it, but it would have made sense. You were doing something that pretty much guaranteed you would win.

If you were caught, it would read like a properly villainous caper. It might have made some Canadians secretly proud.

Instead, the women’s team cheated in the stupidest, most ineffectual way possible. They took the trouble of bringing a drone from home, risked flying it in the most secure airspace in any country not actively at war and, for all that trouble, were able to figure out who was taking the corner kicks.

Canada fans optimistic after heartbreaking 2-1 loss to Switzerland

You can get that from a drone. Or you could’ve bought a BeIn Sports cable package and watched the last few games. No villain would come up this. Not unless she was high on her own ketamine supply.

Canada’s reaction to the drone scandal wasn’t outrage. It was disappointment. Just before the world economy flipped on us, we were beginning to grasp why there’s no growth in this country – a worrying lack of vision.

There’s no single fix to a culture problem, but the patch for soccer was pretty simple. Don’t break the rules in a fashion that embarrasses the people who help fund your budget, and get out of your own way.

As far as we know, Canada has solved the first part of that challenge. The second eludes us.

Marsch isn’t Canadian, but he has us pretty well figured. We are a nation of explainers. Nothing that goes wrong was wrong, because there was a reason to do it. That the reason was flawed does not stop it from being a reason, which I will now explain to you very slowly, like you are a small child or a smart dog. If you still don’t get it, then – shrug – I guess that’s on you if you want to get hysterical.

This inability of sports figures to say the honest thing – ‘Yeah, that was silly and it’s on me’ – is an old problem gone turbo in the digital age. In the past, blame was fleeting because nothing you said was recorded and then stored in a publicly accessible virtual space where anybody with a phone can find it instantly.

You made the mistake. You put your hand up. At worst, it would be in the papers for a day. Then it was over.

Now that it’s forever, no coach, or politician, or any sort of public figure can bring themselves to admit wrong in the moment. They won’t do that until the thing spirals – a la the drone scandal – and everyone realizes they’re getting fired or worse.

As a result, everybody’s gripping the controller like they’re trying to snap it in half. You can’t just stick a team/policy/Christmas ad out there and hope for the best. You must, at all costs, avoid blame. You do that by turning simple decisions into advanced game theory.

Canada braces for ‘track meet’ with South Africa in round of 32

If you’re a sports team, you hire a whole bunch of people to do jobs one person is more than capable of handling. You get all these superfluous people in a room and spend hours going over things that shouldn’t need going over.

You stumble out of that room a little light-headed, but with a plan – we will deceive the Swiss into thinking Alphonso Davies will play at some indeterminate point.

And this has got you where exactly? What’s the upside? That Davies – one of the most famous footballers in the world, whom several players on the Swiss team routinely face in the Bundesliga – appears and everybody wearing a white cross goes, “Who the hell is this?” It’s juvenile.

Hours after Thursday’s game, I was walking back to the hotel. The street was still thronged with fans. The Swiss coach, Murat Yakin, walked past with some friends. His hair really is that incredible.

He was waving his hands around, telling a story. It didn’t appear that he was compulsively refreshing a page on his phone, trying to figure out if Algeria will play Mohamed Amoura in the next match. Because Yakin isn’t Canadian.

Meanwhile, Marsch has fixed the Davies problem.

“He will be ready next match,” Marsch said Wednesday.

So it’s the double-double cross, or what?