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Memories of '86

When Canada plays its first match of the 2022 World Cup tomorrow versus Belgium, it will have been 36 years since we competed on soccer's biggest stage. Much like this year's run, Canada’s first and only other World Cup appearance defied expectations.

A specific kind of optimism began filling the air in the months leading up to November’s World Cup festivities. It happened in this country just once before: in the mid-1980s, when, for a fleeting moment, Canada was a rising force in soccer. To much of the sporting world, our appearance at the Cup was, like now, a shock. Canada? We’d never managed to qualify in the tournament’s 56-year history. What happened when we finally did is the stuff of soccer legend, and a story that holds a few lessons for the athletes of 2022.

...What the ragtag Canadians lacked in fancy footwork, they made up for in other ways, says Ian Bridge, Canada’s starting centre back at the 1984 Olympics. “We were not necessarily the most skilled team,” Bridge says. “But we were the best in terms of tactics, fitness, a real work ethic.” Facing down World Cup qualifiers, the players were determined to prove their Olympic run was no fluke. In the first round, Canada dispatched Haiti and Guatemala. Three hard-fought games late in the summer of 1985—in Toronto, Honduras and Costa Rica—set the stage for the deciding match at home against Honduras.

It was a drizzly September Saturday at a makeshift pitch in King George V Park in St. John’s. A raucous 7,500 spectators cheered from temporary bleachers. George Pakos—on unpaid leave from his job as a water-meter mechanic for the City of Victoria waterworks—scored the vital goal. “I just hammered it off the keeper and into the net,” he says. “It was so exciting.” The final score was 2-1 for Canada.

For the rest of the day (and night), a party followed the boys of Canada wherever they went. That included the home of St. John’s mayor, where a few players combined efforts to empty his worship’s fridge. Bruce Wilson, Team Canada’s captain at the time, has warm memories of it all. That it happened in Newfoundland seemed fitting. “It was one hundred per cent Canadian,” says Wilson. “The fact that we got the big result there was classic.” The comforts of a qualifying win at home would be a salve for the drama awaiting the Canadians on the world stage...

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