Canada's forward Jacob Shaffelburg celebrates scoring a goal in first half of an international friendly football match between the U.S. and Canada at Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kansas, on Sept. 7.TIM VIZER/AFP/Getty Images
Whenever you start to think that sports make sense, consider Jacob Shaffelburg.
Six years ago, the 24-year-old forward from Kentville, N.S., was playing in the second division of American soccer’s second division.
Toronto FC had him for a while, but gave him away to Nashville. You might call this being sent to soccer’s hinterlands, if that didn’t describe nearly all of Major League Soccer.
Today, Shaffelburg makes a busy doctor’s salary to not score often. He is that vanishing type of professional athlete – a jobbing pro.
But put him in the colours of his country and Shaffelburg turns into the Bluenose George Best. He was at it again on Saturday against the United States.
The game was a friendly and so not meant to matter. But this one did, to both teams.
The U.S. men’s national team is currently in disarray. It had had to get rid of the manager it should have got rid of after the past World Cup, Gregg Berhalter, except he got in a fight with a star player’s parents, so the team kept him to prove a point. You know what they say about proving points.
The U.S. team has agreed to hire its first big-time manager, Mauricio Pochettino, but it hasn’t announced it yet. Saturday, the team was coached by interim manager Mike Varas.
This is a bit like insisting on driving to your dealership despite the fact that smoke is pouring from under the hood. The closer you get, the worse it will be.
An added wrinkle – Canada’s men’s team had not beaten the United States in the United States in 67 years. On Saturday, that happened.
Shaffelburg had the first goal in a 2-1 Canadian victory. The scoring play was a microcosmic expression of how these two teams have changed identities over the past year.
Instead of hoofing the ball up the field, the Americans tried playing it out from their own end.
They couldn’t make it two passes before Canada intercepted.
While the Americans were falling back like something out of a Minions skit, Canada slid the ball around for one pass too many. Didn’t matter. Shaffelburg pushed it by the American ‘keeper, who appeared to be vogueing in place or something.
America’s team has a lot of problems, but you can reduce them to one data point – if a guy who isn’t scoring against the San Jose Earthquakes is scoring against you, it’s time for a rethink.
The result was big news in Canada and among the small segment of the United States that cares about soccer. You can’t say a new rivalry is born. More like an old rivalry has been resuscitated from flatline.
This also might be the rare instance in which a disaster of a game is the best-case outcome for both participants.
Losing to Canada is American soccer’s nadir (American soccer hopes). It’s like losing a baseball game to Luxembourg.
The only way from here is up. The new guy comes in, wins one against Guatemala or Peru and they’ll blow out a wall at U.S. Soccer to build a bigger trophy room.
For Canada, it’s more of an investment win.
The future of Canadian soccer has never been clearer. It’s two things – however the promised spying-scandal investigation turns out, followed by the men’s World Cup in 2026. The order is not in question, but the timing is.
What is the optimal moment to light your place of business on fire? Easy – when no one’s there.
The first move is to insulate the key players – who, in this case, are actual players. Who knew? How much did they know? How much have they said about how much they knew, and can that be tidied up?
Depending on those answers, some people can be moved on. Maybe a lot of people.
Despite being vaguely connected to it in the early stages via anonymous reporting, the men’s team has managed to do what the women’s team could not – say nothing.
Beyond the players, who handled the material? Who gave the orders, and to whom? Are they still around? Then they can be shuffled off as well.
Nobody’s exactly hopping to it. Canadian women’s national team coach Bev Priestman was suspended for a year during the Olympics, and that’s the last we’ve heard of it.
Whenever a team that should be taking obvious steps to move on from a scandal has instead entered hibernation mode, the mind tilts toward conspiracism.
It’s 22 months until the World Cup begins. When would you think it’s best for that investigative explosion to go off?
Later always seems better to administrators. But then you’re left trusting that some axe-grinding former employee and/or a reporter doesn’t get there first and light off your ammunition dump. That would be worse.
What if someone you really don’t want to get rid of is implicated? That pushes things off even further. The longer you wait, the worse it gets. The worse it gets, the longer you’d prefer to wait.
In the interim, only one thing can help you – winning. Not just any sort of winning. Someone who wasn’t supposed to win has to start going bananas.
It can’t be the women’s team. They are too compromised. The less they are seen until this is over, the better.
Enter Shaffelburg and the Canadian men’s national team. From this summer’s appearance in the final of the Copa America to Saturday’s humiliation of the United States, no team in the world is turning more heads than Canada.
It hasn’t been an underdog for a while, but it has never been an overdog. Is that possible? Going into a home World Cup? Saturday’s win suggests that it could be.
The future for the Canadian soccer program and the people running it is dim, but the future of the Canadian men’s team may be bright. The next two years will be about determining which of those stories gets told more often.