They’d done the hard part without him. Not just hard. Historically hard.
When the Canadian men sealed a place at the World Cup for the first time in a lifetime in March, the most remarkable part of this most remarkable journey was that it had been sealed without the country’s talisman. Alphonso Davies had missed the entirety of the second half of Concacaf qualification as John Herdman’s unlikely, unheralded men from the north topped the continent to book their spot in Qatar.
The party? That should have been the easy bit. Instead, Canada begin their first post-qualification window in Vancouver on Sunday in dire need of some Davies magic.
In a damaging debacle that started out in slow motion before picking up speed and rapidly running away from them, Canada Soccer managed to sour at worst some of the feel-good factor that the team had worked so hard to build up. Twelve months of positivity and light shadowed in just two weeks of bumbling bureaucracy.
Having left it particularly late to book just a single opponent for the current window (rivals Mexico and USA by comparison both had two friendlies confirmed weeks before), Canada Soccer unveiled Iran in mid-May as opposition for the first home game since qualification. It sparked an immediate firestorm.
In January 2020, 85 Canadian citizens and permanent resident were among 176 killed when Ukraine Airlines flight PS752 was shot down by Iranian missiles shortly after take-off from Tehran. Inviting the country’s national…
