Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Yes, scorelines like 5-1 don't come along often on the men's side of Canadian soccer (in a positive way, anyway), but it's best to keep Friday's night's shellacking in U20 World Cup qualifying in context. Nicaragua's senior team is ranked #145 in the world, played more than half the match down to 10 men, and could reasonably assume their fate was sealed after a 3-0 drubbing by Cuba on Wednesday night.
So we should enjoy what we saw on Friday night -- some well-manufactured goals, some good strings of possession (in the game's latter stages, anyway) -- but not lose sight of what it all comes down to, which is what we all kinda figured it would all come down to: A one-off showdown with the United States with a berth in the U20 World Cup on the line.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
A number of Canadian youngsters acquitted themselves well on Friday night -- foremost among them was Caleb Clarke, with a pair of well-taken goals. Samuel Piette also launched one of his quickly-becoming-a-U20-trademark bombs to open the scoring, while Dylan Carreiro was solid in the midfield. The backline, which was victimized on several occasions against Cuba on Monday, would have also gotten a confidence boost from the comfortable result on Friday.
So, what's next?
The U.S. made its way to the quarterfinals with a 2-1 win over Haiti and a 1-0 result over Costa Rica. But Canada's had some good luck against our cross-border rivals as of late, particularly at the youth level. Beyond the pair of 0-0 draws the senior men's national team has earned in the last 12 months, the U23 side nabbed a 2-0 win in Olympic qualifying last spring, and the U20s got a 2-1 victory at the Marbella Cup in Spain last October. That's where Piette potted the long-range bomb that started the trend:
Head coach Nick Dasovic has some important decisions ahead of him for that match. While Keven Aleman undoubtedly has some individual skill, he was benched for the entirety of the Nicaragua match. Will he see the field against the Americans? Has Clarke sufficiently established himself as the focal point of the Canadian attack? Will there be a showdown for a spot between a pair of QPR teammates, Carreiro and Michael Petrasso?
And, most of all, which Canadian team will show up against the Americans on Tuesday?
The team that we saw against Cuba -- disjointed, often tentative and lacking in urgency until the very end of the match? Or the team we saw against Nicaragua -- poised, confident and even willing to show a little bit of swagger?
This team has talent. That much was suspected coming into the tournament. But in the same way the Cuba result wasn't the end of the world, nor is the Nicaragua result the dawning of a new era. The real test is the game where everything is on the line. Canadian teams don't generally come out on the positive end of games framed in that way.
But then again, Canadian teams don't generally come out on the positive end of games that end 5-1, either. So the hype, the bluster, the rhetoric, they all mean nothing. All that means anything -- all that ever means anything -- is what the team can do on the field. And right now, we have no clear way of knowing just how that'll all come together.
That, in the end, is why they play the games.
.