BOCHUM, GERMANY

After having her nose resculpted by a German elbow and then a German doctor, Christine Sinclair went online and declared the results “amazing.”

She was apparently kidding.

The day after she fought through a shattered beak and scored a thrilling goal against the up-till-then invulnerable German backline, it just looked painful.

Sinclair is wearing a brace across her nose. Her voice is nasal. She hasn’t got any shiners. Yet.

On Monday morning, she was fitted out for a face shield that she’s already trying to convince her coaches she doesn’t need to wear.

And now, Canada’s warrior princess is hiding behind a wall in a hotel lobby trying to get the team’s press liaison to convince a bunch of journalists that they don’t need a picture of her.

But they do. Canada needs to see how tough one half of this game is.

“(Team doctor) Pietro (Braina) came out and asked what happened. I told him I broke my nose. So he sort of looked at it, and he’s, like, ‘Yeah, you did.’”

Sinclair is describing the remarkable scene on the sideline right after she’d just had her face rearranged by German defender Babett Peter.

“It wasn’t bleeding or anything. So I said, ‘All right, let me back on,’” Sinclair said. “They put some freezing stuff on it and he said, ‘You can’t play.’ That’s when the whole thing happened.”

The “whole thing” involved Sinclair physically fending off Braina’s attempts to treat the nose. Frustrated to the point of tears, she went over the doctor’s head by looking past him to her head coach, Carolina Morace. To Sinclair’s recollection, Morace shrugged and pointed Sinclair back onto the field.

Braina tried again.

“He said, ‘You can’t play with a broken nose’. I said, ‘I do it all the time.’”

Poor Pietro Braina. You can’t be too hard on him. He is a member of the weaker sex.

It is true that women’s soccer is not as fast as men’s. However, in terms of manliness — in the most positive, gender-neutral sense of that word — it towers over the men’s game.

Playing high-level women’s soccer means you do not whine or writhe or fake injury when you are taken out on the ball. You get up. You pop up right away and keep going. You leave the penalizing to the ref. If you’re hurt, you limp. But you limp back upfield.

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“We’d play through anything to stay on the field. Sometimes you might not see that in a men’s game,” Sinclair said, playing the diplomat.

Earlier in the day, one of the game’s greats, American Mia Hamm, was more pointed.

“Some of the dramatics on the field in the men’s World Cup, people playing up tackles, or a guy gets bruised and it’s like he was knocked out in the final round of a 12-round fight,” Hamm told the German Press Association. “You would never see a German women’s player rolling around on the field.”

The code of women’s football, because that’s what it is, is like all sports codes. It is acquired through osmosis. Its origins are nebulous.

“I don’t know where it comes from. I have no idea,” Sinclair said. “But we’d train with a broken leg if we could.”

Playing sports psychologist for a second, we might presume that a sport which is constantly run down by some men as a poor imitation of their own might rebel by absorbing and venerating the best masculine attributes of the game by way of rebuttal. Sadly, men have largely forgotten them.

Men’s professional and international games have gotten so out of control that fans have given up hoping for a change. The apathy is so thick and the cynicism so pervasive, that many top male pros enjoy bragging about their disgraceful conduct.

Christine Sinclair is in Bochum right now. She’ll be here for a few days. If you’d like to see how it’s done right, pay a visit. Not enough people will.

She’s a lion on the field, just like her teammates. Off it, she’s desperately shy. The news that she made the cover of every newspaper in Canada on Monday morning knocked her back a step.

“Oh God,” Sinclair said. “I haven’t even called my parents.”

Call your mom, Christine — that’s also part of the tough-guy code.

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