Canada's Lucas Cavallini and Luca Koleosho warm up before a friendly match against Qatar at Estadio Franz Horr in Vienna, Austria on Sept. 23.LISA LEUTNER/Reuters
The first time Lucas Cavallini stepped onto the pitch to play a competitive game for Canada was not exactly the stuff dreams are made of.
Down 6-0 in Honduras, then head coach Stephen Hart sent the 19-year-old Toronto native to replace Simeon Jackson in a 2012 game Canada would ultimately lose 8-1, bringing yet another World Cup qualifying journey to a jarring halt in what was arguably this country’s soccer nadir.
Cavallini wouldn’t pull on a Canadian jersey again for another three years, turning down the opportunity to play in the 2013 Gold Cup for personal reasons, and ultimately focusing on his career in the Uruguayan top flight.
How times change.
Ten years on from the disaster in San Pedro Sula and Cavallini is one of just three players remaining from that squad, along with captain Atiba Hutchinson and goalkeeper Milan Borjan. Current head coach John Herdman will announce his squad Wednesday for team’s penultimate World Cup warmup match on Nov. 11 against Bahrain.
“Oof yeah, it’s been a big stretch since Day 1,” a reflective Cavallini says now. “I think the last four years have been key. Of course, ever since John took over I think he built something incredible and the players believed in him, we trusted him. He believes in us so, at the end of the day, it was something beautiful.”
The striker, who just wrapped up his third season in Major League Soccer with the Vancouver Whitecaps, is not one of the first names on Herdman’s team sheet. In fact, he rarely makes the first 11 at all, making just one start in the 14 final-round World Cup qualification games, the rare honour being granted in a largely meaningless game away at Panama with qualification already secured.
But with 17 goals in 32 appearances for the country of his birth, Cavallini provides valuable scoring depth behind first-choice strikers Jonathan David – third in scoring in France’s Ligue 1 behind Kylian Mbappé and Neymar – and Cyle Larin, the national team’s career scoring leader with 25 goals.
So while Cavallini is hopeful of getting some starting assignments in Qatar later this month, he’s not losing any sleep over the possibility of losing out to his teammates.
“That’s football. That’s competition. That’s sports,” he says. “So you need that if you want to grow as a team. There’s no long faces at the end of the day who gets benched, who starts, because we’re all going to be supporting each other.”
One talking point that always gets brought up when conversations turn to Canada and the men’s World Cup is the long shadow that hangs over the national-team program stemming from its failure to score a goal in its three matches during its lone appearance 36 years ago in Mexico. But Cavallini says the current crop of forwards are looking to put that right, and it’s an object of desire that extends far back of the forward line.
“I don’t think it’s only the strikers,” he says. “I think it’s every position, whether it’s a midfielder, a defender, maybe Milan [Borjan] wants a crack at it. I mean, who doesn’t want to score the first goal ever for Canada?”
Coming off a season in which he scored nine goals in 24 appearances for Vancouver, Cavallini’s three-year contract with the Whitecaps is up at the end of the year. The club holds an option for 2023, but the player is far from worried and is happy for his agent to sort out his future.
Besides, the World Cup has a long-standing habit of opening doors for its participants, from England’s Gary Lineker, who moved to Barcelona from Everton after finishing as top scorer in the 1986 World Cup, to James Rodriguez, who secured a move to Real Madrid after winning the 2014 Golden Boot.
“World Cups are World Cups,” Cavallini says. “They can make a difference for anybody. We’ve all seen it where guys don’t end up starting, but guys coming off the bench and having their first crack on net and scoring and [eventually] at the end of the tournament, getting sold to a big club in Europe. Everything’s at stake.”
One hallmark of the Vancouver forward’s game that he might do well to curtail in Qatar is his often overt aggression. He picked up nine yellow cards this season, and received a red – and an accompanying four-game suspension – in a September loss to Nashville when he stepped on an opponent’s head.
Cavallini is far from alone when it comes to applying a belligerent tone in the thick of the action for the Canadian men. Both Mark-Anthony Kaye, who earned a red card in a 1-0 World Cup qualifying loss in Costa Rica in March, and Stephen Eustaquio, who was dismissed inside of 27 minutes for two yellow cards in Porto’s loss to rival Benfica in the Portuguese league 11 days ago, can sometimes let their emotions get out of control.
“We’ve created an identity in the team which is always to be ruthless, relentless and just always have that edge,” he says. “I think that that aggressiveness just came naturally just from building a brotherhood and just always sticking up for our brothers.”
Though Cavallini says he texted Eustaquio to tease him about the red card in a top-of-the-table clash – because Eustaquio had done the same to him following his dismissal – he adds that the team’s uncompromising approach is just part of the journey in which Herdman’s team has moved to a ranking of 41st in the world from 72nd.
“We had some laughs and this and that, but you know, it’s just something we bring,” he says. “Canada soccer has changed, right? So I think we’ve improved on a lot of things and I think this, this part of us helped us grow a lot as well.”
Few on the team have done as much growing as the Whitecaps No. 9, however, who left Canada at 16 to move to Uruguay and play for the academy of Nacional, the same Uruguayan powerhouse that produced Luis Suarez. The thought of the 13-year journey that has brought him to the brink of the World Cup leaves him emotional, particularly talking about his brother Cristian, who also had ambitions of making it as a professional soccer player, but who had to settle for the regular nine-to-five existence that steals the dreams of so many aspiring athletes.
“To be honest, just from the history of Canada [soccer], where the team was at the start, it’s hard for me to believe this,” Cavallini says. “My dream always was to share the pitch with my brother wearing the Canadian jersey in a World Cup for sure.
“Not being able to share it with my brother is something that was lost in the journey, but I mean, he’s happy for me, so at least one of us is there and just the fact that Canada is in a World Cup, it’s amazing.”