Newspaper Coverage of Canada's 1986 World Cup
Back in the time machine
Newspaper Coverage of Canada's 1986 World Cup
As you may or may not know, Canada went to its first World Cup in 1986.
And it was a disaster.
Canada did very well in qualifying, defeating a number of really good teams along the way. Its match against Honduras in September 1985 to officially clinch its spot was simply amazing.
However, the 1986 World Cup was an absolute disaster for Canada.
It lost its first match to France. Now, the French team was recognized as one of the best teams in the world in 1986. The fact that Canada only lost by a 1-0 margin was treated as a sort of victory in the home newspapers.
However, things became more difficult for Canada when France and the USSR drew in their second group match.
And then came the true disaster — Canada’s 2-0 loss to Hungary.
The USSR had effectively already punched its ticket into the knockout rounds before Canada’s third and final match. It put out a significantly rotated team — and still dominated.
Now, there was an interesting storyline going on in the background. The oddsmakers predicted that Canada wouldn’t score a single goal — and they turned out to be correct.
Even though Canada had generally had more exposure to soccer than the United States, there was also quite a bit of grumbling from the Canadian press about the quality of the games themselves.
You can see those commercial breaks if you watch most of the matches on YouTube, since most of them were recorded from the CBC broadcast. It amazes me that even the CBC couldn’t resist having numerous commercial breaks in the middle of the action.
Some of these complaints are probably just sour grapes — but some of them are legitimate, particularly the ones about teams being more than happy to settle for a scoreless draw.
A lot of that has been fixed over the years, thankfully. But it’s still interesting to go back and see how people saw this at the time.