The day after beating South Africa in the Round of 32, Canada manager Jesse Marsch made a quick change of plan and travelled to Monterrey while his players boarded the flight to Houston for the game against Morocco.
Marsch wanted to watch the match between his team’s potential Round-of-16 opponents, the Netherlands and Morocco. He returned to the hotel terrified: “Preparing for Morocco is like a gory, horrible nightmare,” he later told the media. “It’s like, I don’t want to watch them play. They’re too good.”
Not that Morocco have scaled the dizzying heights of the Qatar World Cup yet. They have been disjointed at times and dug deep to accrue points, but they begin as outright favourites to flush the co-hosts out of the tournament.
The expectations are so meagre that Marsch calls the game a “free hit”, where his team would play sans the burden of expectations, or the pressure of playing in front of the home crowd, as was evidenced in their nervous last group game against Switzerland. Whether Marsch, a grisly midfielder in his day, was playing the underdog card is uncertain, but Canada’s ouster wouldn’t shock the world. Losing to a team ranked sixth would be no shame. Already, this is the deepest they have ever progressed in a World Cup. The country would not wallow in mourning. “Let’s go for it like we have nothing to lose. Everyone’s gonna expect us to lose anyway, so let’s really go for it,” he said.
But they could drink from the oasis of hope. The tournament has been a hymn to the underdog spirit; Paraguay upended four-time world champions Germany; Congo led England for almost 70 minutes; Cape Verde held Uruguay, Spain and Saudi Arabia. And Canada, theoretically, has a stronger, systematic group of individuals than the aforementioned sides.
They have deeper gears than teams think they have. The team’s identity was a high-energy, emotion-fuelled game underpinned by shapeshifting structures. There was an element of chaos, like Marsch’s Leeds days under Marcelo Bielsa. But against South Africa, and a pre-World Cup friendly against Colombia, they showed they could be a better organised group when they defend in a compact mid-block, press aggressively and stifle adversaries. Against South Africa, they were happy without possession, and ventured onto the front foot only when the opportunity was too welcoming. Morocco are not the happiest when tasked with breaching well-knit defensive blocks.
Living on hope
The Canadians could switch seamlessly through the gears, their transitions are fast, and unlike most other teams they have encountered thus far, Morocco’s wont is to attack, not sequester into low blocks. They have pace on the flanks and would look to exploit left-back Noussair Mazraoui immobility, even though defensively he has been excellent, compared to right-back Achraf Hakimi’s blinding pace. The Dutch frustrated them with five men at the back, suffocating the channels and dishevelling their fluidity. Morocco’s defence is a stop-gap one with injuries to the first-choice centre-back pairing of Ez Abde and Nayef Aguerd.
Almost all their build-ups are through the right side as well. Restricting Hakimi’s clout would be central to stopping them. If Alphonso Davies were optimally fit, it could have been the headline match-up. But with the imaginative Ismael Kone out of the World Cup with a broken leg, Davies could potentially start. For a more compact midfield, Marsch could employ Mathieu Choinière to break down Morocco’s midfield.
But Morocco, most of them bred in robust European football academies, are not only an incredibly technical side but also an intensely physical one. Marsch’s men have to match them physically. A fleeting relief is that Morocco have been aimless with their finishing, except when they pumped four goals against Haiti. In all other games, they nicked just a goal, that sufficed for a victory or draw. The defence is not entirely fool-proof, as Haiti showed, pumping two goals.