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Jason Arnold walked out of a meeting in Edmonton last week, got in his car and immediately went to see his chiropractor. It was the day before he caught a series of flights to his old hometown, Melbourne, and he figured there was no harm in assessing the condition of his back.

As he drove, Arnold listed the difficulties of fielding a national Australian rules football team in Canada. The weather prevents you from practising outside for half the year, he said over the phone. Because the country is so vast, the team almost never trains as one. And since the federal government doesn’t fund the sport, players have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket to travel anywhere — say, to an international tournament.

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Not that any of that has thwarted the Canadian women’s team, who were due to follow Arnold to Melbourne for the International Cup, Australian football’s approximation of a world championship. The last time the event was held, in 2014, Canada’s women won it all.

“We were really the dominant team during that tournament,” said Arnold, the team’s head coach. “The whole tournament was pretty special.”

In the last decade, Canada has become a rather improbable powerhouse in women’s Australian football, or footy. The number of women who played in sanctioned leagues across the country last year is small enough to be made precise: 212, according to AFL Canada, the game’s governing body here. But the best of those players have banded together to form the No. 2 team in the world — behind, you probably could have guessed, Australia.

Australia doesn’t play in the International Cup; too many of their players were weaned on the sport and might reasonably be expected to decimate all comers. Instead, Canada’s stiffest competition is Ireland, the squad they lost 39-8 to in the 2011 Cup final — and beat 38-12 for the title in 2014.