Fourth Place

Back in December I had quite a bit of Irish coffee and decided, having watched the Women’s World Cup draw, that Canada was likely to finish fourth in the tournament. Now it’s a day before kickoff and that’s no time to get wishy-washy.

That’s right. Fourth place for Canada at home in 2015, tying our best-ever finish and only four years after coming dead last in Germany 2011.

Back at Christmas this prediction came off as crass optimism, but fortune favours the bold. Gregor Young, no pie-in-the-sky optimist but a genuine expert, also predicted Canada would probably reach the semifinal. The statistics nerds at 538 have Canada as the fourth-most likely team to reach a semifinal. The consensus is that Canada will win their group, and from there we have as clear a run to the semi as you’re ever going to get at a senior World Cup. The possibility of a medal beckons.

To an extent this is a reflection of confidence in Canada’s form. While obviously not on the level of Germany, France, or Japan, Canada has done well hanging around with the second-tier countries and maybe even solidified their position. Both Koreas and Brazil are backsliding, England is improving but Canada just ran them off the pitch in a friendly, and while teams are moving up to that level nobody has moved from the second tier to the first since Japan half a decade ago. I say, without hesitation, that this team is better than the one that went into the 2012 Summer Olympics, and yes that team had a lot of luck on their side, but the bronze medal game was the only time they won a match they deserved to lose.

Consider Canada’s group opponents. The much-ballyhooed loss of Chinese top scorer Yang Li is overrated: Li was a non-entity on the world stage until she started pumping four-goal games past ultraminnows at the Asian Cup. They also remain something of a mystery, and one such team always springs a surprise in a women’s tournament. But they’ve had a very rough 2015, including an Algarve Cup that saw them lose to Portugal for God’s sake and finish dead last. Their team is mostly young and inexperienced at the top level. They’re four years away. Dangerous, but Canada should beat them.

The Dutch, in their first World Cup, have gotten much hype, particularly for 18-year-old ace forward Vivianne Miedema. Certainly they have made big strides and they are widely pegged as a tournament darkhorse. But UEFA can flatter to deceive: the panoply of groups and an overwhelming number of countries not taking women’s soccer seriously mean that a team like the Netherlands can stroll through qualifying without playing anybody serious. The Dutch did a good job against Italy but the Italians have lost relevance on the women’s side. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t look past the Netherlands, they have a very well-balanced attack, but they too are awaiting their prime years and I can’t make them favourites to beat Canada yet.

That leaves New Zealand, John Herdman’s old employer. Another team moving up in the women’s game, but they had a long-ass way to move. Their qualifying consists of showing up. In pre-tournament preparation they’ve been hosed by the Americans, drawn nobody above the level of North Korea, and beat Denmark. They gained respect for losing to Japan without too much dishonour but hell, we’ve done that. Too good not to take seriously but no, I’m not losing any sleep over the kiwis. This group could go to anyone but you must say, home field advantage and all, Canada really ought to win it.

If Canada does so, they face the easiest draw out of anybody in the knockout stages. The travel will be easy; we’ll never have to leave western Canada. It’ll be hard for our opponents, who fly all over this huge-ass goddamned country. Finish first, and we start with a round-of-16 match in Vancouver (before an insane BC Place crowd) against a third-place team from groups C, D, or E. The best team likely to come out of that is Australia, who Canada really should leave for dead. That leaves the quarterfinal, still in Vancouver, against the winner of the second-place team in group F and the second-place team in group B: barring upsets, this is most likely England and we know what Canada can do against them. Obviously there’s a possibility that Camille Abily slips on a banana peel in a group game and we instead face eleven furious Frenchwomen firing a fusillade at Erin McLeod for ninety horrifying minutes, but England is the most likely.

In the semifinal real teams start to show up, and we probably get Japan. Again Canada has the travel advantage, needing a short flight to Edmonton, but this is Japan so we probably lose that one. The other semifinal teams are likely to be Germany and the United States, so we face the Americans in a third-place game and I really want to say Canada will win that, but we probably won’t. Fourth place. Done.

That said, if we spring just one upset… but no, no, I refuse to look so far ahead.

There is a strange meta-narrative about this tournament, where we who pay attention to the women’s team seem to expect that casual fans expect Canada to win the whole thing. I haven’t seen such vulgar ignorance on display. Talking to random non-soccer-people around town, I’ve yet to hear a sentence more optimistic than “we’re pretty good at women’s soccer, aren’t we?” I’ve said “fourth place” a number of times and people have been pleasantly surprised. The real mass narratives have been things like “these are very nice women who work very hard” and “Christine Sinclair is amazing”; puffery, but it has the merit of being true. We may not be the most soccer-literate but we aren’t dummies, we know we were both unlucky and very lucky indeed to win that bronze in 2012, we know that Sinclair turns 32 during the World Cup and has faced soccer’s toughest sledding for almost fifteen years, we know, in short, about where we belong. So if Canada does go down in a semifinal, even if they go down pretty hard, I expect a lot of good support for an attempt to win bronze. Bronze has done well by us.