Call it a “breathe” weekend.
For the first time this summer, and the only time in what will end up being seven weeks, neither of Canada’s senior soccer teams are involved in a major competition this Saturday and Sunday. The men recently concluded their impressive Copa America campaign in the United States, and the women will shortly kick off their Olympic gold medal defense in France.
This, right now, is the break in between – the coming-up-for-air before the next plunge.
Captain Jessie Fleming is the heart of Team Canada’s midfield. (Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP)
Of course, just because they don’t have a match today or tomorrow doesn’t mean the women aren’t, or haven’t been busy. They’ve played four friendlies since the start of June, the most recent a closed-door contest with Nigeria in Marbella, Spain. When the Olympics enters its knockout stage in August, they’ll have been together for more than two months.
It’s a lot of preparation, but the upcoming tournament – which begins a day before the Opening Ceremony in Paris – happens very quickly. There’s not a lot of time to recover between matches, so fitness is at a premium.
When Canada open Group A against New Zealand in Saint-Etienne on Thursday (9:30 a.m., CBC), they’ll be commencing a marathon schedule that will also include showdowns with France and Colombia in a seven-day span. They’d typically have twice that in a World Cup group stage, so much of their broader planning for those first three outings will have been done in advance.
The formation, for example, should be pretty much set.
Manager Bev Priestman seems to be sticking with a back three, and it’s Simi Awujo who seems most likely to play alongside captain Jessie Fleming in the heart of midfield.
Fleming, who set a National Women’s Soccer League transfer record earlier this year when she moved from Chelsea to Portland Thorns, skippered Canada for the first time at a major competition when she wore the armband at the 2024 Gold Cup, replacing the retired Christine Sinclair.
This Olympics will be the national team’s first without Sinclair, and viewers who last tuned in during the 2023 World Cup will notice not only the new captain and ascendancy of Awujo, but also the absence of longtime internationals Allysha Chapman, Desiree Scott and the retired Sophie Schmidt. They’ll also see an attack that prominently and consistently features Aston Villa’s Adriana Leon, who has scored nine goals for Canada this calendar year.
The women landed in Paris having not lost a regulation match in 2024 (their loan defeats coming on penalties against the United States), and while their group is a difficult one they should still be advancing to the quarter-finals, where anything can happen.
Neither Great Britain nor the Netherlands qualified for the Olympic Games, and with the United States much diminished it’s really only Spain who can claim to be pre-tournament favourites. This new-look Canada side, however, will take some beating.
Much like the Canadian men the last few weeks.
Only World Cup winners Argentina managed to see off Canada over 90 minutes at the recent Copa America. As a whole, the event was a huge success for new head coach Jesse Marsch and his group. So much so that finishing fourth was somewhat disappointing, if only because they performed well enough to beat Uruguay in the third-place play-off.
In fact, Canada’s play was among the few positive take-aways from the competition, what with the poor showings of Mexico and the United States, the embarrassment that was Brazil and the racially-tinged celebration from Argentina that now has Chelsea investigating one of its players.
Then there were the awful pitches, sub-standard facilities and a chaotic final that revealed organizational ineptitude and the Americans’ shocking unpreparedness ahead of the next World Cup.
Canada’s takeaways, meanwhile, include the emergence of Maxime Crepeau as the undisputed number-one goalkeeper, the stand-out performances and post-match interviews of Jacob Shaffelburg and a defensive partnership imagined almost as a stroke of genius by Marsch and executed brilliantly by Derek Cornelius and Moise Bombito.
Put it all together and you have a team that just climbed eight places in the FIFA men’s ranking to 40th, ahead of competitors such as Algeria, Chile, Scotland, Czechia, Slovenia and Cameroon.
Yes, a deep breath is probably needed after the Copa. After all, Canada’s soccer summer has only reached half-time.
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