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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — There’s always an air of excitement when a sporting event delivers a rare but proper Cinderella story, and Canada’s underdog status against Argentina in the Copa America semifinal was omnipresent no matter the lens one chose to view things from.
Trains to MetLife Stadium were full of fans clad in baby blue and white, singing songs en route to the venue while the dramatically outnumbered Canada fans sporting bright red stuck out like a sore thumb, even as they politely minded their own business. The same was true inside the stadium, where a tightly packed section of red made up just a sliver of the 80,000-strong crowd in attendance.
It did not take long for the difference to be felt on the pitch, too, offering a reminder that the question asked of Cinderellas about if they can go for one more game can be answered simply with a no.
Canada lost 2-0 to Argentina on Tuesday after the energy evaporated from them barely 20 minutes into the game, not helped by a hot, summer day that was accompanied by burdensome humidity. That is not to suggest that Canada crumbled under the weight of expectations; the first Copa America semifinal just became a slog that was meant to be survived, which is why a feeling of inevitability canceled out any excitement for an underdog story.
“I think that the tournament caught up with us a little bit,” Canada head coach Jesse Marsch said after the game. “Argentina rotated a lot of players throughout the tournament so that they were using different players at different moments so that they weren’t calling on the same players every match. There’s been heat, there’s been travel, there’s been a lot of challenges.”
It required each team to rely on their parts rather than the sum, which was always going to benefit Argentina. It was far from their best 90-minute showing but it did not matter as Lionel Messi finally got his first goal of the…
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