John Herdman sure laid it on a little thick last week out of the Cyprus Cup, where his Canadian women’s team finished their final pre-World Cup competitive paces with a loss to England in the final.

Now it’s all downhill from here to kickoff June 6 in Edmonton, and although Herdman said he was satisfied, it’s hard to take him, or more precisely the Cyprus Cup, particularly seriously on that count.

Trying out formations and personnel is fine, but no one seriously wants to lose the last-chance game before the real thing begins. But perhaps he’s just stating the obvious in a different way: when that World Cup finally does begin, it’ll amount to a trip to the outer limits of the galaxy for the Canadians next to that low-key Mediterranean sojourn. So says someone who has been in that unique position, anyway.

“It’s quite nice to have the feeling of the country on your side and willing you on, but that in itself brings enormous pressures,” says Hope Powell, who as manager of England hosting the 2005 European championships and helming the London Olympics’ Team GB has been in that unique position more than once. “We had a lot of media coverage (going in) so they were used to that. We kept them abreast of situations, just trying to say, ‘the expectation could be this . . . you could experience this.’ But until it’s done, you can talk all you like. If you’ve never experienced it, you never really know.”

Canada’s recent experiences in the role, albeit at age-group restricted global championships, have not been cheery. The under-20 women staggered out of the gate here in Toronto last summer, nervously losing their opener. That they were able to pick themselves up from there was some consolation, but that loss meant a less favourable draw in the knockouts and they were eliminated. Their under-20 male counterparts did even less, going a miserable three-and-out in hosting their 2007 event.

Powell’s England team began hosting the ’05 Euro in Manchester in front of a then-unprecedented crowd of 29,000 and a national television audience. It staggered them.

“If you ask them now they probably can’t remember any minute of the game — they were in a daze,” she recalls. “I could visibly see it from the touchline that they were sidetracked, for want of a better word, with the crowd. They couldn’t believe the atmosphere, the noise.”

At the Olympics, an entirely different more carnival-like environment, those kind of experiences helped in terms of handling the weight of expectations that came with playing (and winning) a deciding group game at Wembley, in front of more than 70,000.

“People always ask me — what was that like. I didn’t hear it and I didn’t feel it,” she recalls of those Zen-like moments at the centre of the storm. “The focus is the game. It has to be.”

The 48-year-old Powell has spent 30 years as a certified soccer coach from the grassroots on up, so she’s a pretty good guide. She’ll be in Waterloo this weekend for the Ontario Soccer Association’s developmental conference, talking to a roomful of coaching candidates about the demands and intricacies of that career path, and leading a couple of instructional sessions with young players.

She knows quite well the Canadian women, too — they bundled her Team GB out of that Olympic tournament at the quarter-finals on their way to a bronze medal, and a little more than a year later she was sacked as England boss. She singles out 19-year-old Canadian centreback Kadeisha Buchanan as a rising star — “she’s got pace, she’s tenacious, she tackles well” — while noting again that especially for younger players like her, World Cups are uncharted territory.

More conventional unpredictability comes from the sport’s ever-mercurial development. Every one of these World Cup cycles, it seems, throws up indications of more sophistication, programs on the rise, new ideas and, now more than ever before, an emphasis on 90-minute fitness and endurance.

“Players, staff, coaches are more tactically astute now, more aware of the opposition, and they prepare more for the opposition and what they can and cannot do,” says Powell. “It almost becomes a little bit like chess.

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“Players now know what they’re up against.”

That would be an opponent and, for the hosts, their emotions.