Long-suffering.
If there's words that describe my sports fandom best its those two. Long-suffering.
I've been a Vancouver Canucks fan since the late 1970s. That qualifies me as long-suffering, as in a long-suffering Vancouver Canucks fan. That's me.
And as bad as that is – and it's bad – I have to compound it with another affliction. I am also a long-suffering Canada soccer fan. Sorry, football fan. The men's national team that is. The women's team is a different ball of wax. They came in respectable, maintained respectability and are one of the top teams in the world. For a Canadian soccer fan, they're a refuge, a place to go where everything is goodness and light. We have an Olympic gold medal, for goodness sake. One of my fondest sports memories is getting up early in 2020 with my daughter to watch Canada's gold medal victory in the Tokyo Olympics. Oh, this is what it feels like to win.
For a moment I forgot about the decades of futility when our only international soccer program was the Canadian Mens National Team (CMNT). For a Scottish immigrant lad whose family sport was football, it was natural to become a Canada football fan. I quickly took to hockey, of course (I remember watching Paul Henderson's magic goals in the 1972 Summit Series) and what a glorious experience that has been. But football was to be a place of pain.
It was looking good there for a while. We qualified for the 1986 World Cup. Hooray! We're on our way. I watched with intensity. We almost tied France. We almost scored on them. Ian Bridge bounced a header off the post! I still remember the snobby English play-by-play announcer saying, "Oh, that'll cheer them up!"
That was as good as it got. Along the way was more disappointment, embarrassment, defeat after defeat. We weren't to get our first men's World Cup goal until 2022 – 36 years later!
I remember reading one article where an observer looking at the CMNT remarked, "They're fit, they're athletic, why can't they win?" Canadian soccer just didn't have the killer instinct (compared to other players in the world to whom football was life or death). Oh, it wasn't all doom and gloom, not completely, for every 8-1 collapse at the hands of Honduras in a game where the winner qualifies for the World Cup (more on this later) there was the surprising 2000 Gold Cup victory. Maybe we'd turned a corner! No.
Back to battling with Cuba for a chance to qualify for the World Cup. Cuba, which couldn't even grow decent enough grass to play a game on. Mind the divots.
But as you've probably heard, that record of futility has finally been halted. and it looks like it's actually going to hold (he cringes, looks furtively about for the bolt of lightning from the sky to strike him down). Just over half a decade ago, things actually did start to look up. We had a football phenom in our midst and while Alphonso Davies was head and shoulders above everybody else, he did have a supporting cast of teammates with a level high enough to impose their will on our football region's best. the U.S. and Mexico started looking over their shoulders at the upstart.
We qualified for the 2022 World Cup! And we earned it. We beat everybody else, topping the region's (CONCACAF) qualifying table. There we were in ... Qatar, okay ... to play the world. Okay, it didn't go as well as we'd hoped. We almost beat Belgium, no small feat (shades of France 1986). Earned some kudos. And then our coach had to blast his mouth off and disrespect Croatia. Good idea, John, infuriate one of the best teams in the world. Brilliant.
Well, at least we scored a goal. Fonzie! Our first ever World Cup goal. FIFA made a social media post celebrating firsts in the tournament. Scoring a country's first-ever World Cup goal – Canada. If you think too long about that it's almost embarrassing actually. But we're being positive now. Things are on the up and up.
We came back from Qatar with renewed purpose and, what's more, the momentum continued. The men's team actually got better. Now we've rolled into this year's Gold Cup (CONCACAF regional championship) with North American soccer pundits arguing whether we're the favourites or not. And that argument got a boost in our first game with a 6-0 drubbing of Honduras. Not only did we outscore them but we dominated them. We looked like thoroughbreds. We played with verve, daring, skill.
Well into the game I had the thought, "Is Honduras the team that pounded us 8-1 in that win-and-you're-in qualifying game a few years back?" Then moments later one of the announcers confirmed it saying something like this will help exact a measure of revenge for that 8-1 loss to Honduras a few years back. I knew it! And yes it did feel good.
So, now the Gold Cup is underway. It's our last real test before we host – co-host – the World Cup next year. Regardless of whether we win the Gold Cup, the very fact that we're feared by every other team, instead of being the doormat, may be victory enough for a long-suffering CMNT fan. Maybe.
