et us be kind and call it a work in progress. Let us understand that Rome – or AS Roma – wasn’t built in a day.
Canada’s national women’s soccer team is in the early stages of an extreme stylistic makeover right now, a trip from the sport’s aesthetic alpha nearly to its omega.
For a long time they have been very good, but never quite cracked the world’s elite. Now, Canada is following the larger path of the women’s game, which increasingly has become a showplace for fine skills and intricate passing rather than whacking it long and hoping for the best.
This is Marta’s world now, the Brazilian superstar having redefined what the best female player in the world looks like.
It is a game where more and more the ball is played on the ground, with long, deliberate buildups, and with finishers who have both power and finesse.
That’s what Carolina Morace was hired to teach the Canadian women, and on the evidence of last night’s 4-0 loss to the world No. 1 United States in an exhibition match at BMO Field, there is plenty of work to be done between now and the next women’s World Cup in Germany in 2011.
Morace was in her time the greatest female player in Italian history, a prolific scorer who once, briefly, served as a coach with a third-tier men’s team. Last night was just her fifth match at the helm, and already it’s obvious that the transition from the Even Pellerud years is well under way.
Which is not to slight Pellerud even one little bit. When he arrived as Canada’s coach in 1999, taking over the program following the ugly World Cup meltdown, he instituted the same long-ball style that he’d used to win a world championship for his homeland, Norway. To a large degree, that was the norm in women’s soccer then, and it was also a way for Canada to take advantage of the size and fitness advantage it enjoyed over many other sides.
Under Pellerud, Canada was never better than ninth, never worse than 13th in the FIFA rankings, and peaked with a fourth-place finish in the 2003 World Cup. But by his final tournament – last summer’s Beijing Olympics, where Canada was eliminated by the Americans in the quarter-finals – it was obvious to him, obvious to the players, obvious to everyone, that it was time for a change.
Shifting gears strategically was also the right call, not just because the short passing game is a whole lot nicer to watch, but because it now seems the only path to the top of the world.
To succeed, though, you have to have the horses, they have to be comfortable in the system, and perhaps playing the best team in the world on the balky BMO turf wasn’t a fair test to begin with. Still, it was hard not to sense the discomfort on the Canadian side, watching the many misdirected passes, the endless dispossessions in the midfield, and seeing their best player, Christine Sinclair, wracking up all kinds of mileage up front all alone, with no one to get her the ball.
In the old days, at some point, Sinclair would have run under a rainbow, brought it down to her feet, and at least created a chance. Last night, in a fruitless search for her 100th goal for Canada, she was never a factor.
The Americans, on the other hand, can play it any which way. They took advantage of some uncertain Canadian defending to score two goals in each half, and had the lion’s share of the possession, playing with much the same lineup that won the gold medal in Beijing.
Right now, the gap between the two sides is greater than it was last August.
But it’s not right now that matters. Morace gets her report card in the summer of 2011, and only then will it be clear whether she can succeed in imparting teachable, transferable skills, or whether she’s stuck trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
