Canada's Christine Sinclair competes for the ball against Nigeria during the second half of the Group B soccer game at the FIFA Women's World Cup in Melbourne, Australia on July 21.Scott Barbour/The Canadian Press
There are ways in which Canada’s World Cup opener against Nigeria could have gone worse.
The bus might have broken down and the players could have showed up 10 minutes after kickoff. Or the Canadians could have missed two penalties instead of just one. Or they could have lost.
But on the ruthless scale that separates good sides from everyone else at a World Cup, a choppy 0-0 draw against the 40th-ranked team in the world won’t cut it.
Nigeria understood that. Once it ended, its outstanding player in the game, goalkeeper Chiamaka Nnadozie, dropped to her knees, bent her head back and roared. The rest of her teammates celebrated like they’d won.
Meanwhile, the Canadians wandered around looking highly aware of the fact they were still on camera, and that their reaction was being assessed. No one wanted to seem down. Only Christine Sinclair, the game’s tragic figure, looked ashen.
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Bringing a 40-year-old to a World Cup – even a 40-year-old with Sinclair’s résumé – is a risk. The game has a way of speeding up at big tournaments. What might have seemed like a good level in the last friendly game you played isn’t enough.
Sinclair had a nice start against a clearly nervous Nigerian side. She got the first semi-decent chance of the game, and put it wide. Then she began to fade from view.
She didn’t pop back up until just after the start of the second half.
Sinclair’s best play of the game was selling an iffy penalty. It is true that Nigeria’s Francisca Ordega stepped on her foot inside the box. It was probably less so that Sinclair, who was standing still at the time, needed to fall straight over because of it.
The Finnish referee didn’t want anything to do with it when she saw it in real time. But she was dragged back by the VAR replay crew and forced to admit that foot stomps are not technically allowed.
Usually, the resultant penalty would have been taken by Canada’s midfield motor, Jessie Fleming. Fleming scored the only goal in the 2020 Olympic semi-final that way. Same thing in regulation time in the final – the goal that sent it to a shootout. And then again in the shootout.
But Fleming was a late injury scratch from Thursday’s lineup. So Canada’s all-time goals leader stepped up.
Before Sinclair took it, you knew it was trouble. She just had that look. Her shot was neither hit hard nor to a good spot. Nnadozie saved it with a strong, outstretched arm. From that point until she was subbed nearly a half-hour later, Sinclair was a nonfactor.
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That’s the headline, but it isn’t the story.
Missed penalty or no, Canada should have won this game going away. Nigeria didn’t penetrate the Canadian half of the field until 20 minutes into the game. Whenever the Nigerians did get the ball, they looked out of sorts. The woman who is far and away Nigeria’s top player, Asisat Oshoala, couldn’t get any traction in the game.
Meanwhile, Canada had an automatic entry into Nigeria’s final third – give it to Ashley Lawrence on the left, let her waltz by a few green pylons, deposit it with forward Adriana Leon, who would then bust her way through whatever resistance remained. That play was on offer the entire first half, but Canada could not capitalize on it. The Canadians took plenty of shots (15). They just couldn’t get any on net.
Two mortal soccer sins undid Canada – passivity and lack of execution. Once Nigeria realized it needn’t fear Canada going forward, it began to risk some forward momentum of its own.
With the midfield of both teams taking the day off, the game turned into a formation-free, foul-happy, back-and-forth line brawl. At moments, it looked more like a karate demo than a soccer match.
One small piece of Canadian luck – a red-card foul on Lawrence in the final seconds that looked like a leg breaker when it happened did not apparently do serious damage.
Other than that, all of Canada’s luck was bad.
In an on-field interview immediately after it ended, Canadian manager Bev Priestman used the term “tournament football” three times. As in, “That’s tournament football.”
Which is true, to a point.
Weird things happen in major tournaments. The team that looked all over the place in the first game can turn into a perfectly calibrated machine by the third. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe the players needed to get punched before they could start fighting back. That’s what they’ll say after the team that was just hanging on starts to click.
But the flip side of that is opportunity. As in, you only get so many.
Canada didn’t need to beat Nigeria, but it sort of needed to beat Nigeria.
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Now it absolutely needs to beat Ireland in its next game, on Wednesday. There is a world in which Canada could draw with the Irish, or even lose to them, and still advance, but it is a highly theoretical one. The only way to take back any control is to win.
Based on its opener against co-hosts Australia, Ireland will be more difficult to push around than Nigeria. And Nigeria has given Ireland the tactical template against Canada – elbows up and don’t be shy about using them.
After that it’s Australia. Every elite team should think it can win every game, but beating Australia in Australia is an order so tall you’ll need a step ladder to get up and take it.
Canada has a lot of things to figure out before it gets that far. Not the least of them – who’s taking penalties? Because it can’t be Sinclair.
Like all other games, soccer is unfair. Sometimes the person who least deserves it ends up taking most of the blame. Were Canada to fall out of this tournament, that person would currently be this country’s best player in history.
If that isn’t enough motivation to prompt her colleagues to figure things out on the fly, then maybe it was not meant to be.