Uruguay, Canada, coping and the Copa: football and a four hour dirge

Sometimes you listen to a coach speak and you just have to shake your head and admit, nobody else does it like this, nobody else could do it this way.

"We balled them! We were better, in every sense of the fucking word. Okay?"

This was Jesse Marsch, obviously, speaking to his Canada players in a huddle moments after they'd let a deserved 2-1 lead slip to Uruguay in the final moments of the Copa America 3rd place play-off, and a few minutes before the players lost the match on penalties.

Better, though! In every sense of the fucking word! What else was better?

"We were better than France! Right?"

Presumably, again, in every sense of the fucking word. Except the scoreline — it was a 0-0 draw — and the run of play in this friendly game a couple of months ago, when Canada didn't have a shot on target (they did hit the post) compared to France's four, and had two shots from inside the box compared to France's ten. Right!

So much, so fist-pumping after a 0-4 defeat against Manchester City as a way of sending important messages through the media; it's something about knowing the camera is on you, calculating how you can celebrate the moment, putting your fist in the air and shouting 'Fight! Fight!' We saw it all from Marsch while he was at Leeds, and while there's a chance it'll work better with Canada — I don't know if they balled them, but a second-string selection did play better than Uruguay — I still feel like Jesse is out there, yet again, getting all riled up about the wrong things, creating his own confusing zone of grievance and dragging everyone else in with him. "You should be fucking proud to be Canadian," he was yelling, "to be part of this team, and know that we have an amazing future together. Okay men?" Okay!

Marsch was like this all through the Copa tournament. He started by complaining about how long Argentina took to come back for the second half of their opening game, calling out the Argentinian media in the process: "Argentina should be fined. Okay? Fined. Write that, Olé, La Nacion."

And he was still going amid the controversy, after the semi-finals, about Uruguayan players fighting Colombian fans in the stands, after the players saw their families being threatened. Marsch, somehow, turned this into a lament about how Canada have been ill-treated as Concacaf federations guests in a Conmebol tournament.

“I know if our team would have responded like this, there would be heavy sanctions because of the treatment we received in this tournament the whole time ... We’ve been treated like second-class citizens ... The yellow cards per foul rate is way higher for every Concacaf team. I watched the Uruguay-U.S. game and it was one of the most biased-reffed games against the United States that I’ve ever seen, on their home soil.”

Marsch had some points, particularly about calling out racist abuse of his players, but I wondered about him whirling it all together into a thesis that, somehow, the world and Conmebol are all against Canada and the USA. It's reminiscent of his insistence that he was never given a chance in England due to anti-USA feeling, at the club where fans quite happily sang 'American Boy' about Brenden Aaronson and 'USA! USA!' chants started up during the brief but deluded good times. Marsch has always had a focus on the individual that I'm not sure translates to football, a team sport; in New York, he'd set players in-match challenges to earn bespoke development 'points', like staying onside or making a certain number of clearances. A group of men meeting individual challenges together will cohere into a team of sons of bitches, I think that's the theory. Increasingly, and perhaps it's Leeds United's fault, Marsch's individualism has felt focused on personal grievances. "I have no interest in the U.S. job," after Gregg Berhalter's firing, he said last week, adding with a passive dollop of aggression, "And to be fair, unless there's a big shift in the organisation, I don't think that I'll ever have interest in that job in the future."

The sincerity of Marsch's protests kinda collapses beneath the weight of being 'Better than France!' Rather than driven by injustice, these outbursts have felt like part of a desire to create a feeling of injustice that the Canada national team can use to smash their way into elite international football. Despite Marsch's claims to learn from other cultures when he travels around the world, and his publicised debriefs with key players to find out what 'being Canadian' means to them, this tactic doesn't feel like a fit for the national team he's coaching — a layer of Canadian comedy Kids in the Hall's sketch about being 'Sick of the Swiss' was about two of the globe's mildest nations starting beef ("Move over America, there's a new asshole on the map!"). It feels like the same as Marsch tried with his huddles at Leeds, the same as he'd try anywhere, the same as Dave Bassett instilled into Wimbledon's Crazy Gang in 1988: no one likes us, we don't care. Now it's all run through a 21st century Powerpoint template to fit with notions of 'winning mentality', of celebrating what would surely have been a Copa America winning moment if only it wasn't for anti-Concacaf referees.

That might get Canada so far, but there's a problem with trying to instil a 'winning mentality' in a team that, with no offence to Canada because I would also say it about 2021's Leeds United, will not be winning anything. Were Leeds going to win the Premier League, with Marsch or with anybody? No. Will Canada be winning the World Cup they're co-hosting in 2026? I doubt it. And as any bro on Twitter will tell you, 'winning mentality' involves belittling 'loser mentality', which is fine until you inevitably become that loser and don't have any way of dealing with that fact. Except, perhaps, to celebrate what moments you can. "We were better than France!" Is that really the way to get you through those long post-knockout nights?

Perhaps it is. I can't say I recommend Marcelo Bielsa's response to defeat, of locking himself away in a nunnery for three months, although I would add that he learned a lesson from this: when he realised that he was being affected more by losing a football match than by the dangerous poor health of his young daughter, it was a wake up call, a realisation that football — sport — life — is about not winning, more often than you can ever hope to win, and it's important to remember that. Lionel Messi, at the weekend, won his second Copa America with Argentina. It was his seventh time of trying — a two time winner but a five time loser. Now aged 37, the second half of his life is ahead, in which he won't even be able to play, never mind win.

A sense of the bigger picture is what Marcelo Bielsa brought to his press conference last week. To him, the situation after the Uruguay - Colombia semi-final had been simple. The players had seen their families at risk of violence. They acted naturally to protect them. The fault, for this, was with the organisers: "There should be a procedure so that [the risk to families] does not happen, and a procedure so that if it does happen, there is an escape door." But those same organisers, Conmebol, have opened an investigation and threatened sanctions against the players. And the media, a percentage of which always works in favour of corporate interests and in protecting the powerful, has framed the case as being about the players and their bad behaviour. If the media was doing its job properly, it would be interrogating the organisers, who have held press conferences to insist that their tournament is well-run and in particular the pitches and facilities are good, while Bielsa has the evidence that the media should have been looking for that Bolivia could not even train on the pitches they were given.

The important thing, to Bielsa, was that what he was saying was true. He confirmed that in his post play-off press conference, when he was asked how he felt about the reaction to his pre-game comments:

"What I can affirm is that my statements cannot be interpreted as untrue. I know that press conference showed a level of outbursts on my side, and I reviewed what I said. And everything I said is a stark truth. That cannot be challenged.

"But, a caveat. When one says that what he or she's saying is a stark truth and it cannot be challenged, it is tough to avoid seeing that person as an egomaniac.

"But I am affirming this - it would be shameful to say the things that I said if there was a chance of that being untrue."

This was not about the world against Uruguay. This was a continuation of the spotlight Bielsa was putting on football's structures in his press conference the week before, about the media seeking sensationalist angles, and football's failure to look after the game, while its leaders pursue profits. And this was consistent with a press conference at Leeds, back in November 2018, when Bielsa said:

"We are destroying football, and in the future we will see the negative effects of this ... I think that the commercialisation of football, when the clubs are owned by private people, means that now the result is more important than anything. But the most attractive thing in football is the beauty of the game. Those who invest in football should be aware, or take precautions, to keep the level of the business they bought."

If there was any doubt that this was about more than Uruguay, or Leeds, or Canada, then in the conclusion to this summer's Copa America, without Bielsa involved, events frantically underlined his words. Thousands of fans taking advantage of shambolic organisation to force their way into the stadium. Kick-off delayed by 75 minutes. The second half delayed by ten minutes more than the usual fifteen, for a half-time show by Shakira. The game, already poor, won in extra-time played thanks to a late rule change after all the previous knockout games went straight to penalties. Lionel Messi, victorious in his last Copa, ending the match on the bench with an ankle like a balloon after one too many slips and bumps from the hastily laid pitch. Ninety minutes of football became a four-hour dirge in which the best player in the world became a broken sideshow. At least Messi was fit for the trophy ceremony, so if you only put that plus the winning goal plus a bit of Hips Don't Lie on YouTube, nobody needs to worry about the rest. Right?

Bielsa has not been a lone voice at the Copa. Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni and goalie Emiliano Martinez defended Uruguay's players after the semi-final, speaking about the need for better organisation to avoid a repeat at the final. And Colombia's head coach Nestor Lorenzo was fuming in advance of Shakira's show, pointing out that his and other teams had been fined for arriving late for second halves, and that he'd known nothing about the concert. "I had heard about it yesterday but I wasn’t sure if it was true," he said. "I was told not to worry about it but I found out today it was happening."

There is a sense of common opposition growing among coaches and players from different nations and clubs and federations, as they feel increasingly that the sport's organisation is working against them all, not one or another. Some of them, anyway. As Bielsa put it back in 2018, "The head coaches have power, the owners of the clubs have power, the media have power and the fans have power. But they don't use it."

Another power, of which Shakira would approve: my highlight of the Euro final between England and Spain was Real Madrid's 21-year-old Jude Bellingham in his own penalty area realising he was being challenged from behind by Barcelona's seventeen-year-old Lamine Yamal and sending the younger player in four directions at once with one belligerent shimmy. When we talk about protecting the players so that, in Bielsa's phrase, there are still "footballers who deserve to be looked at", this was a moment I wanted to celebrate, all the history and economics and politics of the clasico redefined by one kid grinning cos he'd outsmarted another kid. ⭑彡