Canada routed Qatar 6-0 Thursday night at BC Place, “sending the sold-out stadium into celebration” over the team’s first World Cup victory. But the “excitement surrounding the game had begun long before kickoff.” National pride was “on full display, with Canadian flags mounted on hockey sticks bobbing above the crowd and bursts of red smoke billowing overhead.” The World Cup atmosphere also “extended well beyond” BC Place to “watch parties scattered across Metro Vancouver” (Vancouver PROVINCE, 6/18). The announced attendance at BC Place was 52,497 (SBJ). It was “Vancouver’s greatest sporting moment.” The game result, a “dominant win for the home team, setting up a titanic encounter with Switzerland next week, was all the better.” Canada “marched to the stadium with expectation and the players delivered.” More fans are “sure to be won by this game, by this day, by this tournament” (Vancouver PROVINCE, 6/18).
The run-up to the World Cup in Vancouver “has been a difficult one for the sport in the city, dominated by discussions around the future of the Whitecaps” and whether the franchise “might be set for a move to Las Vegas.” But on Thursday, “all that faded into the background,” and the win “put Canada top of Group B on goal difference ahead of Switzerland.” Should they emerge victorious from the group, they will stay in Vancouver for the first knockout round (REUTERS, 6/18).
If the 1994 World Cup, the first held in the U.S., “forever altered the direction of American soccer,” this summer’s tournament “has the potential to do the same” for Canada. This tournament is “already the most successful on the field for Canada,” which had lost all six previous World Cup games it had played. Now the team is “poised to advance to the knockout rounds for the first time ever.” And while that success on the field -- “costly or not -- is significant,” former Canadian Soccer Association President Steve Reed, who “was instrumental in bringing the World Cup to Canada, said the real goal wasn’t to win games as much as it was to win over the public” (L.A. TIMES, 6/18).
Meanwhile, three-and-a-half years after “its biggest failure on the World Cup stage in half a century,” the Mexican national team “needed only two games to advance to the knockout round of this year’s tournament” as winner of Group A after taking down South Korea by a score of 1-0 Thursday night at Guadalajara Stadium in front of “a fiery announced sellout crowd” of 45,522 (L.A. TIMES, 6/18). San Pedro Square in San Jose drew “hundreds of people” to watch the Mexico-South Korea match (San Jose MERCURY NEWS, 6/18).
