'We are ready to get after this': Canada eager to open World Cup against Bosnia and Herzegovina

It’s allay firmly to ideate, even out though we’re at present only hours from kickoff rather than months or years away. Canada was awarded co-hosting duties for this summer’s World Cup in 2018. On Friday afternoon, the first game in Toronto will finally be played.

For the first time in their program’s hardscrabble history, Canada’s men will take on Bosnia and Herzegovina, and next the world, here at home.

The interminable wait for action has been occupied with thousands of questions. We now know the answers to many of them.

Iran will participate, even though it’s being bombed by the U.S., another co-host. A Somalian referee won’t, after FIFA president Gianni Infantino declined to intervene in his American visa dispute. Tickets will stay expensive. Local economic impacts won’t meet promises. A shadow shaped liked President Donald Trump will loom over everything.

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But now comes the soccer — the way it always does, as though in defiance, the antidote to every poison.

Now comes the gooseflesh and tears.

For the players, Friday afternoon will come as a relief, as a release. It’s as though they’ve been actors waiting backstage while their theatre is being built around them. (In Toronto, that’s literally true: BMO Field— renamed Toronto Stadium for the tournament — has gone from 28,000 seats to nearly 46,000 in amazingly short order, a cottage by the lake turned into a fortress.)

“I just want to get started,” Ismael Koné, who’s bounced back from Wednesday’s fever, said earlier this week. “We’ve been practicing and pushing and speaking about tactics, speaking about the opposite team, speaking about ourselves, speaking about the moment… The moment is now.”

After years of experiment and months of debate, Canada’s 26-man roster was finalized on Thursday afternoon, FIFA’s last deadline met with 13 minutes to spare.

Central defender and personality Moise Bombito, thought too damaged to keep his spot less than a week ago, has somehow shown enough to reclaim it. 

“Moise has made incredible progress,” head coach Jesse Marsch said at Thursday’s suddenly crowded press conference. “It made the decision relatively easy to keep him in the group.”

Fellow defenders Ralph Priso and Zorhan Bassong, who have been training with the team in case of emergency, will fall just short of their dreams.

Alphonso Davies, Ali Ahmed, and Jacob Shaffelburg will also be included despite their own injury concerns, though Davies, Marsch said, will be unavailable in any capacity on Friday. Jayden Nelson, who replaced a stricken Marcelo Flores earlier this week, was the last lucky man through the door.

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Marsch, either through words or actions, has even filled in the more granular blanks of his starting lineup. The names of the first 11 Canadian men to hear their anthem at a home World Cup are no longer conjecture. They are fact.

Maxime Crépeau will feature in goal. Luc de Fougerolles, Canada’s youngest player at 20, will take Bombito’s place. Jonathan David and Cyle Larin will start up front. In Davies’s absence, Stephen Eustaquio will captain from the midfield. (“A dream come true,” he said.) Liam Millar will almost certainly start on the left. Tajon Buchanan will absolutely start on the right.

“Man, we are ready to play some games,” Marsch said. “We are ready to get after this.”

At bottom, there are only 104 real questions left — 102 after Thursday’s tournament openers in Mexico: the results of each game to be played. Which teams will be among the 32 to make the knockout round, the largest single-elimination field in the competition’s history?

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Canada, having never won a game in its two previous men’s World Cup appearances, finds itself under the unfamiliar weight of expectation. If Marsch’s men don’t advance out of their group — they’ll face Qatar (June 18) and Switzerland (June 24) in Vancouver — they will be considered disappointments, maybe something like failures.

Four points should be enough to get through. They will probably beat Qatar. They will probably suffer against the Swiss. That makes Friday’s opener their likely fate decider, in a nervous-making way. The beginning feels like a possible end.

“We understand what this is,” Marsch said. “By the way, if you do this for a living, this is where you want to be… Nobody here is afraid of that. Yeah, it’s responsibility. Yeah, it’s pressure. But that’s what we want. That’s meaningful.”

On paper, it shouldn’t be much of a contest. Canada is ranked 30th in the world, Bosnia and Herzegovina 64th.

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But Canada is a little battered. The visitors are the tallest team in the tournament and, arguably, the most physical. The forecast has improved over the course of a hot and muggy week, but there is still the potential for bad weather. Bosnia and Herzegovina qualified by out-muscling and out-willing 12th-ranked Italy in the rain. 

“When you give your heart, and you put your heart into it, it’s always going to be fierce,” Sergej Barbarez, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s head coach, said when he was asked what he expected from his collection of giants. “I hope it’s going to be intense.”

In the eight years since Canada was named co-host for this World Cup, a different vision for Friday danced in many heads. The skies were supposed to be sunny, not stormy. The afternoon was supposed to be a street party, not a battle.

The reality won’t quite meet the most glittering version of our dreams. In life and in soccer, it rarely does.

But it’s also true that the hardest questions sometimes offer the most satisfying answers.

Now it’s time for Canada to provide the last of them. 

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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