The Canada women's soccer team will face New Zealand on Thursday in the Olympics group stage—but will do so without head coach Bev Priestman, assistant coach Jasmine Mander, and, uh, "unaccredited analyst with Canada Soccer" Joseph Lombardi, casualties of what I must say seems like an incredibly boneheaded cheating scheme on Canada's part.
Bear with me: All the reporting on this so far has been maddeningly light on details. What's known, so far as I can tell, is that on July 22, members of New Zealand's team spotted a drone flying over their practice session and reported it to police; police found and detained the drone's operator, who turned out to be a member of the Canada team's staff, presumably Lombardi. This turns out to have been the second such incident: A drone (the same drone?) flew over New Zealand's July 19 practice as well.
In any event, using a drone to spy on practices is cheating. Lombardi is fired, as is Mander, the assistant coach to whom he apparently reported. Priestman, the head coach, is not fired—not yet, anyway!—but has voluntarily ("voluntarily") withdrawn herself from coaching Canada's match against New Zealand, presumably to reassure everyone that Canada will not benefit in that match from any illicitly gained insights into New Zealand's tactics.
Or, as Priestman put it in Team Canada's statement, "In the spirit of accountability, I do this with the interests of both teams in mind and to ensure everyone feels that the sportsmanship of this game is upheld."
There's still plenty to learn, here! Who knew what about this scheme, and when? Does this one go all the way to the top? Did they think nobody was going to detect the buzzing drone, flying directly above them, in the sky? Was Lombardi bricked into the wall of the practice facility months ago, like a Harkonnen assassin? And, perhaps most mystifying, what the hell could anyone hope to find out by using a drone to spy on a soccer practice?
The most obvious and probably correct answer to that last question is "set-piece tactics," really the only part of a soccer game in which teams use, and can be expected to use, tightly scripted movements. But that's at best a medium-sized component of any game, where even the smartest of tactics are outweighed by protean in-the-moment stuff, like one player accidentally stepping on another's foot or the set-piece taker sending the ball in a foot too high; no particular set piece is all that likely to result in a goal. The edge to be gained by spying on this in practice seems microscopic, especially measured against the risk involved in so obviously cheating—namely that you will have to play the entire game in question without a significant chunk of the coaching staff, in a cloud of scandal and shame.
Here it seems worth pointing out that New Zealand comes into Thursday's match ranked 28th in the world by FIFA. The Football Ferns scored a single goal in the 2023 World Cup, which they only appeared in due to the automatic berth granted to tournament hosts, and became the first hosting team ever eliminated at the group stage. They might mop up the various microscopic island nations that comprise their qualifying group, but they lost their last two friendlies against worth-a-damn competition—Japan, ranked seventh by FIFA, one place higher than defending Olympic champions Canada—by a combined score of 6-1.
What I am getting at here is: Whatever New Zealand might have been practicing, against its own players, it was not especially likely to execute with great precision against Canada, even if the camera drone had never been invented. Simply remembering to bring the Canada women's national team to the game should give Canada's coaches all the edge they need against the modest Football Ferns.
Here again technology exceeds our hapless Canadian neighbors, whose national bafflement when handed an iPad gave the world hitchBOT, the twee, vaguely anthropomorphic pile of inert garbage that slumped its cutesy way across various parts of the world until it first encountered anyone with self-respect, and then immediately was destroyed. Now they have used drone technology to eliminate three members of their own coaching staff a day before a match they could have expected to win blindfolded. Stay out of this business, sweet Canucks! You were not meant for it.
