Canada coach Jesse Marsch has gone viral for his celebration of Jonathan David's second goal in the team's 6-0 win over Qatar.Lee Smith/Reuters
At a team meeting last week ahead of Canada’s crucial match against Qatar, coach Jesse Marsch detailed the stakes. Marsch, a former pro player, is always intense. This time, it was a corralled intensity – but it radiated.
“Almost the entire tournament, for me, is riding on the Qatar match,” he told the players, the video later shared by Canada Soccer.
He gesticulated each point. “At a bare minimum, a win,” Marsch declared. He raised his hand to indicate a high-level result.
What the team absolutely could not do was come out flat, like it had in the World Cup opener against Bosnia-Herzegovina in Toronto when it went down 1-0 and faced a disastrous loss before rallying a concerted effort in the second half for a 1-1 draw.
Against Qatar, Canada had to start strong. Marsch said: “Go full throttle – and make sure we control our destiny.”
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The team delivered. Canada pounded in two early goals before Qatar ended up short one man via red card, and later another red, for the rough tackle that injured Ismaël Koné. The final was 6-0.
This week, Canada controls its destiny. Defeat – or draw – favoured Switzerland to win Group B and play in the round of 32 at home in Vancouver the day after Canada Day.
The key words? Go full throttle.
This is the Marsch ethos. When the former pro became a coach, he soon connected with the Red Bull system of teams, New York in MLS and then Salzburg in Austria and Leipzig in the German Bundesliga. You’d have to be asleep for the whole of this century to not know the Red Bull approach to everything, from extreme skiing to elite soccer: go full throttle.
While Marsch's expressive antics have drawn criticism from the outside, Canada's players say they appreciate their coach's energy.Albert Gea/Reuters
Right after Canada’s first-ever World Cup win last Thursday, Qatar coach Julen Lopetegui told Marsch something widely believed to be along the lines of he didn’t appreciate Canada running up the score on a team two men down. Marsch blew him off. Those goals mattered. They’re the reason a draw against the Swiss is enough to win the group.
A brief contretemps between the teams flared and fizzled. Marsch, soon after, held up six fingers to the adoring sold-out crowd of more than 52,000 at BC Place Vancouver, almost everyone in it Canadian. Perhaps it was premature. Perhaps it was overly triumphant. But Marsch, as people around the team say, cannot be anything other than himself. The 52-year-old, who grew up near Milwaukee, belts out the Canadian anthem. He dirts former American players who didn’t openly sing theirs back in his day.
Marsch’s heart is less on his sleeve as much as it is jumping out of his chest.
Some veterans of the game scoff at what they see as classless antics.
“Cool the jets,” Alan Cawley, a former Irish pro, said on TSN. Cawley, advising decorum after what was only a second group stage game and a blowout against low-ranked Qatar, complained Marsch did much the same when he coached at Leeds United. “That’s the way he carries on but it’s nonsense. It’s absolutely nonsense.”
Marsch’s intensity, whether simmering, boiling or roiling, pours out in so many ways. Against Bosnia, when Jonathan David failed to score on a great look in the early going, Marsch had something like an apoplectic fit, mourning what could have been. Like an overly passionate fan watching on television.
Against Qatar, when a perfect Koné pass from near midfield put David on a breakaway at the top of the box, the striker drew a foul and Qatar’s first red card. Marsch performed a strange sort of shuffling dance players later explained to mean something about getting vertical.
Last week, at the news conference before the Qatar match, Marsch acknowledged he has always been a cut apart. The Premier League, the Championship League, the World Cup.
And he tells it like he sees it.
Canada's Liam Millar, right, said Marsch's confidence is contagious for the roster and helps the team play more aggressively.Bernadett Szabo/Reuters
“I kind of just answer questions with what I think,” he said. “That’s not normal.” Other coaches choose words carefully, he said. He chooses to “try to represent everything that we want to be at all times.”
The players like it – and sometimes laugh. Liam Millar could not help but laugh on the sidelines against Qatar at Marsch’s shuffle after the foul on David. Animated and emotional, this is Marsch everyday, said Millar on Sunday morning before training, following a team rest day on Saturday.
“When my coach is a real person, has real emotions, it always can help the group,” said Millar, a left winger in the midfield.
The intensity is infectious.
“Jesse talks about us being almost too Canadian sometimes, you know, being too polite and too nice,” Millar said. “He injects his confidence into us.”
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It’s exactly what he told the team early on when he was hired two years ago. Canada Soccer president Peter Augruso recalled what Marsch said in a recent Globe and Mail profile of the coach. “I don’t want to lose the Canadiana in you,” the coach urged the players, “but you got to get a little more American.”
Playing Switzerland will test the team’s identity forged under Marsch. There’s the somewhat safe allure of a draw to win the group but playing for a draw too often leads to losing. Yet Canada’s attack at times leaves it vulnerable to counterstrikes. And Koné’s absence in the midfield is a big hole.
The best way to secure at least a draw is score first on Wednesday.
“Playing to win,” said starting defender Derek Cornelius on Sunday of the strategy.
As Cornelius put it: at home, carried by the cheers reverberating in a sold-out BC Place, almost everyone again in Canadian red, attacking more than defending.
Full throttle.
“Stick to who we are,” Cornelius said, “and how we play.”