Flags of World Cup nations fly in Toronto ahead of Canada's tournament opener on Friday against Bosnia-Herzegovina.Bernadett Szabo/Reuters
The first World Cup I covered was Germany 2006. At the time, in that milieu, Canadians were treated like farm animals that had escaped from a zoo – curious, but not interesting.
Obviously, the Canadian team wasn’t there and would never be there. As a Canadian journalist, that meant that though you were given a credential, you did not receive tickets to any of the matches. You had to show up the day of and scrounge around for extras.
This involved signing up to a very official looking form, which was then completely disregarded by the person in charge of handing out the thick, glossy, cardboard ducats. I still have all of mine. They are the only sports souvenir I’ve ever kept.
Sometimes, this distribution was done on a meretricious basis – press from other nations in the same group and so forth – and sometimes based on whomever was standing closest to the front shouting the loudest.
One of these charity sessions early in that tournament – Brazil against Croatia at the Olympic Stadium – turned into an honest-to-God riot. Shoving matches broke out. Grown men were weeping from frustration.
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My much-missed Globe colleague, John Doyle, took a swinging steel briefcase to the ribs. I can recall his mournful, “Well, that’s it for me then.” I got a ticket by rushing the front and snatching it out of the hand of the person holding them, after they’d entered the catatonic stage of a breakdown.
Elsewhere, it was a little more civilized. They’d call out the name of every country in the world. Canada was fit in last under “Anyone from somewhere we haven’t called already?”
Once, when I held my credential up for inspection before the ticket was produced, the FIFA hood taking note clucked his tongue sympathetically and said, “Ah. Poor Canada.” This was made so much worse by the fact that all FIFA representatives are, it pains me to say, impossibly suave. You were really being reminded of your place in the grand order of things.
In another line, I watched the tickets go until it was just me and one other person waiting around, like the last two gomers picked for the softball team. He turned to me and asked what organization I wrote for. I told him, and, out of politeness, asked the same question in return.
“The in-flight magazine for Iberia Airlines,” he said.
Canadians have become dedicated supporters of the national team. Saputo Stadium in Montreal was packed last week as Canada and Ireland took part in a friendly.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
All this to say that it was a pervasive, globally held belief that if Canada did have soccer, we played it with a snowball hardened with a coating of maple syrup. We were not an industry joke. We were much less than that.
In international sports terms, 20 years is not that great a stretch. Some teams have come a long way to be at this World Cup. Though it’s being held at home, none has come further, faster than Canada.
This matters because you don’t really belong to the international community if you don’t play soccer. This game is the closest thing humans have to a universally adopted hobby.
Even the countries that aren’t good at soccer care deeply about it, which is not the case with any other sport. To be seen not caring would be like a teenager telling her contemporaries that she doesn’t have a favourite band, because she doesn’t listen to music. It might be true, but in your own social interest, this is one of those fake-it-to-make-it moments in life.
Canada was one of the last holdouts. Twenty years ago, one still routinely got a lot of “Why do they roll around on the ground so much?” e-mails. I don’t know. Why are you taking the time to send me this note, even though I assume you have a whole life you’re living? Because, like them, this is just your way.
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I assume this weird recoiling from something harmless was down to our tendency to be pulled along in America’s ignorant wake. We wanted to like what they liked, which meant bumptiously disliking things they disdained.
Or maybe it was that it was the sport of immigrants, one which native-born Canadians could never know as well as them, so why bother trying?
Today, the Canadian soccer philistine is a vanishing type. The Canadian soccer snob is in ascendance. One isn’t much better company than the other.
What’s more interesting is the wide swath in the middle – the people who like, but don’t obsess about, the game, and take it on its merits.
CF Montreal in March? Sorry, can’t make it.
World Cup in June? Where do I show up and what can I bring?
Canadian fans are hopeful that injured defender Alphonso Davies will be ready for group stage matches against Qatar and Switzerland in Vancouver over the next two weeks.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Right now, Canada likes soccer the correct amount. We wouldn’t appreciate it if Switzerland came elbowing its way into a hockey tournament, talking like they invented the game. So we know enough not to do that to Argentina when soccer rolls around. You don’t need to be talking to be part of something.
That job is rightly being left to the national team. Over the next two or three or (knock wood as you think it) four weeks, they will speak to the world on our behalf.
It is not possible to underplay how important this talking is. When a team does unexpectedly well at a World Cup, it becomes the belle of the planetary ball. People who didn’t know you a few days before the tournament started begin to associate your country with the qualities of your players.
Do you think Brazilians are looser and more carefree than people everywhere else? I doubt it, but their soccer team plays that way. Do Germans really have it all figured out? Based on current events, absolutely not, but a half-century of highly organized national football teams convinced people they were. Are the Dutch fun? We could play this game all day.
Beginning on Friday, Canada’s soccer team will tell the world what Canadians are like. The length and depth of this conversation will determine its level of penetration.
The most important part of that message will be sent beginning at 3 p.m. ET on Friday – we are like you, like the things you like and would like to know all of you better. Welcome.