By Ben Knight

 

Author’s note: No, I can’t really explain to your dear, patient people why it should ever take this many days to get a breezy little blog item out of my head and onto the Internet.  Some combination of work, lack of work, exhaustion, romance, living in two cities, covering Juve-Fiorentina for CP, a heatwave, car woes, dental distraction, a doctor’s appointment and One Other Thing ©.  With all that said – and before we all watch the Venezuela match tonight – let’s go back to Buenos Aires:

They’re so fast – relentless.  They leap on mistakes like pumas on a wounded bratwurst. 

In a packed park in Buenos Aires, World Cup-bound Argentina laid a 5-0 sledgehammering on a game but exposed Canada, in their final tune-up game before next month’s World Cup in South Africa.

Canada didn’t play all that badly overall, I thought.  But any margin they’d usually have – that half second before the tackle, that yard of space you’d normally have to work with – was simply gone. 

Relentless Argentine ball-hawking and layered, almost rugby-style fast breaks rendered Canadian intention and strategy irrelevant.  The lads in red did what they could.  What was done to them could not be reasonably withstood.

So – a disaster?  An embarrassment?  Honorary mention at the world avalanche-eating championship?

I’m going to take the minority position – that this was actually a useful exercise.

I mean, we’ve finally got a Canadian Soccer Association that actually gets the men’s team playing in the run-in to the World Cup.  An away match with Argentina would have come along negative-once in a lifetime up until now.  Everyone from the players to the coaches to the fans knew Our Lads could be in for a freight-training. 

That was never going to be the point.

Canada’s players got to see something very few professional players ever experience: the full flow and fury of the Argentines – up-close and live – in a gigantic stadium filled with roaring, passionate South American fans.

It’s one thing for you and me to watch the match on television.  We see pretty much everything that happens out there, but that’s just the surface stuff.  Canada’s players, were they in the stands watching Argentina dismantle someone else, would see more – the way a slight hesitation here turns into a bad result there. 

But from the seats, they would see the Argentine ballhawks swoop.  When Andre Hainault got his pocket picked on one of the goals, he never saw the predator’s approach.  Dwayne de Rosario, harried to the sidelines, knew he was badly outnumbered, and tried to play the ball to safety down the wing.  I doubt he ever saw the opponent who stormed out of nowhere, and buried the ball with an outlandish outside-of-the-foot long volley deep into the Canada net.

What Canada saw last Sunday afternoon was How It Is Done.  They understand, better than ever before, how suddenly and fatally the counterthrusts can come.  If that makes anyone on the roster sharpen his game, that’s good for everyone.  If any of the Canucks found a flaw in their thought patterns or assumptions, maybe that saves us a goal-against in a game that matters down the road.

You don’t play a game like this to win, folks.  You play because maybe it’s the only chance you’ll ever have – short of actually qualifying for a World Cup – to play the very best, on their turf, on their terms.

In that sense, a 0-5 paste job is likely more beneficial than a tight loss, or even a draw.  And while it would have been sensational if Canada’s attack-oriented formation had actually magicked home a goal, that gleaming moment of success might have overshadowed the deeper, more urgent lessons of this rare and scarce opportunity.

Argentina took Canada apart with speed, deception, tenacity, toughness, off-the-ball movement, vision, skill, passion, fury and joy.  If the Canadian players went south with any holes in any of those parts of their game, they know it much clearer and better than they ever did before. 

For the older players, this match was both a reward for service rendered, and an ultra-intense footballing reality check that should serve them very well in future coaching days.  The youngsters – the ones who may, one day, tread a World Cup pitch in real World Cup matches – just got the best view possible of how the best do business. 

There’s nothing about playing the Houston Dynamo, or grinding out midwinter matches in Scotland or Norway, that will ever, ever look like that.  It was a bad loss on the afternoon – but an excellent set of lessons for the future.

Onward!