Question of injured Alphonso Davies's participation in World Cup a cloud over Canada's training camp

< warm>Chris mother jones reports on Canada's domain transfuse team up from Charlotte, N.C.

A kind of crackle, like bad weather, can spark when one man’s certainty meets another’s doubt, when one man’s comfort coincides with another’s more desperate hours.

Jesse Marsch, the head coach of Canada’s men’s soccer team, knows better than any of us how he will spend his next four years. After Monday’s announcement that his contract has been extended through 2030, he knows that regardless of the results at this summer’s World Cup, he will, barring disaster, stand on the touchline at the next one.

If he isn’t, it will be because he’s decided to stand somewhere else. He’s 52 years old, splits his time between homes in Italy and Mexico with his wife, Kim, and three children who adore him, and is entirely at ease with his place in the world.

He is a man without needs, or even wants. All he has left are wishes.

And now, for those same four years, he must find a way to share space more comfortably with his opposite: Alphonso Davies, a man who doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring.

Davies likely won't play in Canada's World Cup opener: coach

After three muscle and hamstring injuries since February — which have followed his 15-month absence from the national side after he tore his ACL playing for Marsch — Davies must sometimes wonder why he’s been betrayed so often by the game he still fights to love, like soccer’s Bobby Orr.

He’s 25 years old, a refugee who is rich beyond dreams, but he’s also in the middle of learning one of life’s toughest lessons: There is no guarantee that soccer, or any other object of your affection, will love you back.

Marsch is the rare lucky one who’s been loved back. On Tuesday afternoon, he led 31 men onto an immaculate grass field in steamy Charlotte, N.C. He kicked a ball around with his coaches, and then he summoned his side to gather around him, which they did, like schoolkids trying to get a look at something special in their teacher’s hands.

Only there should have been 32 of them. Davies remains in Germany, receiving treatment at Bayern Munich, his club team in the Bundesliga, for his latest suffering. Right now, he should be at the centre of Canada’s soccer universe, about to captain his country in a home World Cup. Instead, he is once again cast in a role that no young man wants to play: a patient, a subject, an observer, a satellite.

Predicting who makes Canada's World Cup roster

To Bayern executives, he is also an asset of considerable but declining value, and they have let him know, directly and indirectly, that they would prefer he take the summer off and commit to returning next season fully fit, if he can be fully fit anymore.

Otherwise, they might have no choice but to cut their losses and sell him.

On Monday, Marsch downplayed that drama and said he believes Davies will play for Canada this summer — not in its opener against Bosnia and Herzegovina on June 12 in Toronto, but sometime. Davies isn’t expected to join the team at all until Sunday, in Edmonton, his hometown, where he will watch his teammates play a friendly against Uzbekistan without him, living out his former dreams.

“Obviously, we all want Alphonso here as soon as possible,” Liam Millar said Tuesday. “We all want him to be playing every game. He’s a big part of the group and a big player for this team.”

That can be true, and there can still be some hard questions that demand asking.

Can someone who has been away from a team for so long still be its captain? Is it fair to sit a player who has been present for a player who has been absent, even if his absence is no fault of his own? Where’s the line between courage and self-harm, and does anyone have the right to decide it for anyone else?

For now, Jesse Marsch has time to give the easy answers: “Alphonso’s status as captain doesn’t change and doesn’t need to change,” he said Tuesday, after lightning interrupted his training session, the way nothing, really, is as certain as we might like to imagine it is. “He’ll come in and have a presence again.”

But soon, in a strange way, Marsch’s own gifts will enter and complicate the equation, because he has the luxury of needing to think beyond 2026. He knows where he will be in 2030; now he must start to wonder who he will want to see standing next to him.

He must ask himself: How do I give Alphonso Davies more of what l have? How do I share with him the blessing of a bright future?

The answer, painfully, might be a seat.

Senior Contributor

Chris Jones is a journalist and screenwriter who began his career covering baseball and boxing for the National Post. He later joined Esquire magazine, where he won two National Magazine Awards for his feature writing. His memoir, Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies, will be published by Random House in June.

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