HOUSTON — Jesse Marsch has a pretty clear idea of what he wants his team to do to Morocco on Saturday. Make them miserable. Make everything hard. Make it feel, as his players once put it themselves, like hell.
That phrase came out of a team meeting last November, when Marsch split the squad into groups and asked them one question: how should opponents feel when they play Canada? Every group came up with basically the same answer. Unrelenting. Suffocating. Hell.
It’s not a bad mindset to bring into a Round of 16 match against a Moroccan team that has, according to Marsch himself, “literally zero weaknesses.” He called watching their film a “gory, horrible nightmare” earlier this week. That was before the real nightmare arrives on Saturday night at Houston Stadium.
This is Canada’s first ever men’s World Cup knockout match. They earned it by beating South Africa 1-0 in Los Angeles last week, a game that drew 11.2 million Canadian viewers and became the most-watched non-final knockout match in the country’s history. The moment is real. The buzz is real. But so is the reality that Morocco is a brutal matchup.
The 2022 Rematch Nobody Asked For
Four years ago in Qatar, Canada lost 2-1 to Morocco in group play. That was the old Canada. The one that snuck into the World Cup and was just happy to be there. This version is different. Since Marsch took over in 2024, they’ve played scoreless draws with France, Colombia and Ivory Coast. They lost 2-0 twice to Argentina at the Copa América, which is basically a respectable result against the world champions.
Defender Alistair Johnston was on that 2022 team. So were six other current players. He’s been telling the younger guys to focus on the game, not the spectacle. “It’s going to be loud,” he said Friday. “There are going to be noises that you didn’t even know were possible to be made in a stadium. It’s going to be unbelievably tough to focus. But we need to remember we’re all in this together.”
Johnston is part of a backline that has quietly become Canada’s backbone. He and Richie Laryea bring experience at fullback. In the middle, two 20-year-olds — Luc De Fougerolles and Moïse Bombito — play alongside veteran Derek Cornelius. Marsch called the group “a really good statement on what’s been developed with this team.”
One More Push Before the Beers
Marsch said he’d be the one buying the beers when this is all over. The guy who ditched his suit and tie for a quarter-zip and jeans in the knockout round is planning to thank his players for the ride. But he’s not ready to do that yet. “It’s too early,” he said Friday. “We still have so much that we want to and hope to achieve.”
Morocco beat the Netherlands in a 120-minute slugfest that went to penalties. They know how to grind. Canada is going to have to play the best game of its life to keep going. Maybe get a little luck. But the shift from 2022 to now is real. They don’t just want to be here anymore. They want to make the quarterfinals. They want France or Paraguay on July 9 in Boston. And they believe they can do it.
Johnston put it simply: “I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror after this World Cup and say we left it all out there.”
Saturday is the test. The whole country will be watching.
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