he inaugural game of the opening FIFA World Cup final qualifying round unfolds before me, in air thick with a late-summer storm. In the stands, more than 11,000 spectators: families, couples, men draped in scarves. The most ardent, shirtless and drunk, gather on the terrace’s southeastern corner. They call themselves the Voyageurs, and they are singing songs — not singing, but roaring. They use expletives as verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, past participles; they rhythmically thump the stands underfoot. Nowhere else in this country will you hear “O Canada” sung with such blood lust. When the anthem is over, I follow along from a lyric sheet, handed to me in a bar by a man wearing a red cape:We’re going to Brazil,
we’re going to Brazil
And now you’re gonna believe us
And now you’re gonna believe us
And now you’re gonna believe us
We’re going to Brazil.
From my vantage point, high in the press box at Toronto’s BMO Field, the soccer pitch looks as bright as an aquarium. The blue fish represent St. Lucia. The red fish are the Canadian Men’s National Team, known as the Reds, or Les Rouges. They have been pressing since the first whistle, circulating the ball through the midfield, bouncing it off confused attackers within St. Lucia’s penalty area. The score should be 10–0 in favour of Canada. Instead, it is 1–0. I am told that coach Stephen Hart, a rumpled figure on the field below, likes his players to have good ideas. Goals would be nice, too.
A cross to a striker; a whiff. “Finish,” hisses a reporter beside me. For there is something unmistakable in the air, along with the stench of fry grease and cotton candy: expectation. To win this first round, Canada must also dispatch Puerto Rico and St. Kitts. The Reds will need to top at least one more round to earn a berth at the greatest show on earth: Brazil 2014. (Canada has qualified for the World Cup just once, in Mexico in 1986, losing three games and faring about as well as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did.) Tiny St. Lucia should not pose a problem; it is a trifle bestowed on Canada by the Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). In later rounds, the issues become Honduran and Mexican and American in nature. Up to four teams from the federation will secure World Cup spots. St. Lucia, as far as the official narrative goes, is chum.
On this occasion, the chum is nibbling back. The Canadians seem febrile, unsettled; every pass lands as a surprise. I watch a St. Lucian fullback boot a long, fatalistic kick from his goal line. Les Rouges stop to ponder the implications. A dreadlocked St. Lucian midfielder picks up the pass, moving fast along the left wing, and makes a hopeful strike, the thunk of which takes a long second to reach the press box. Canadian keeper Lars Hirschfeld doesn’t dive so much as topple. The ball rolls past him: tie game. The Voyageurs shriek obscenities into the muggy night.
While the players reorganize on the field, I recall a line by Uruguayan dissident Eduardo Galeano. “Show me how you play,” he once wrote, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” When he wasn’t covering the beautiful game, he wrote about a disappearing continent. South America, during the 1960s and ’70s, specialized in erasing people and histories. One of the few ways to understand, or to commemorate, the soul of a place was through football. The Brazilians were Canarinho, or “the little canary”; their samba style was as much a dance as it was football. The Argentines were La Albiceleste, or “white and sky blue”; their teams served as the framework for feats of astounding individual achievement. In their style of play, the South Americans safeguarded their national characters for better times.
The quote has a different resonance for a new country on the cusp of maturity. Galeano would argue that hockey and lacrosse, respectively Canada’s unofficial and official sports, offer no satisfying explications of national self. While this might earn him a late headshot from Don Cherry, it’s worth noting that over the course of the twentieth century soccer has defined the local ethos. When it wasn’t retreading history by pitting France against Germany, or Bolivia against Spain, football was satirizing it: Argentina beating England with the Hand of God in ‘86, shortly after the Falklands War; or everyone thumping the Americans.
Soccer — 6,000 square yards, ninety minutes, twenty-two players, and a ball — is generous enough to articulate dozens of styles and sensibilities. As the world flattens, so has the game evolved: it is globalized, multi-ethnic, corporate, postmodern. Brazilian football has changed because Brazil has: less joy and more discipline, the game of a suit and tie rather than a favela urchin. No other sport allows for such a narrative arc, such a range of expression. While hockey is a comic book, football is Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (and I say this as a fan of both hockey and comic books, and as someone who has only read the first volume of Remembrance). Thus, for those of us who love the game, Canada remains unarticulated.
But what exactly, one wonders, is being said here on BMO Field, on this Labour Day weekend? Les Rouges’s game remains unreadable. They will go on to win the match, beating St. Lucia 4–1, largely because the visitors spend the bulk of the contest writhing around on the turf as if they’ve been napalmed. Come full time, the Reds will stroll the length of the pitch, applauding the Voyageurs applauding them in turn. Victory aside, the wonks in the press box are dismissive; Brazil 2014 might as well exist in another dimension. Les Rouges are a punchline that masks an existential anxiety: somehow, we are diminished by not belonging to the international family of pronking, faux-hawked soccer gods. That anxiety, reassembled as a question, becomes: who are we, and how should we play?
My garden shed
My garden shed
Is bigger than
Is bigger than
My garden shed is bigger
Than your country.
o know how we should play, we must know how we have played — badly, as it turns out. But we have played for a long time, longer than anyone other than the British, and perhaps even longer than they have. North American soccer, or a species of it, predates Columbus: the Pilgrims recorded a Native American game called pasuckquakkohowog, or “they gather to play football.” But no serious historian, of course, attributes the game as we know it to anyone other than the British. The Midlands’ foundries churned out football clubs as they did the locomotive and other emblems of the industrial age; the clubhouse was the only place an itinerant workingman could call home. Selfhood was bequeathed by the team, and sensibility by how that team played.
