O Captain! My Captain!

Atiba is a legend. Saying goodbye will be difficult.

Photo by Virginia Long on Unsplash

As a long-time observer of the Canadian men’s national team, the mainstream-fication of Atiba Hutchinson has been a remarkable, and welcome, thing to watch over the last 18-months.

For years, he was ours. An athlete that we, as soccer fans, could point to and say ‘if you can’t understand why he’s important, I can’t help you!’. He was a player that you would tell new fans about in reverent whispers.

This was a guy that had seen things. Not just for Canada, but in a club career that had taken him all over the world. In a time when Canadian players simply didn’t get a chance at the biggest clubs, Atiba had carved out a career not just playing in the second tier of European football, but excelling there.

He was the Danish league’s player of the year once. He’s a legend at Beşiktaş, which is a huge club in a football-mad part of the world. Big time stuff.

Being on Team Atiba was an indicator that you were a savvy football connoisseur, as opposed to a Sawker Fanboy.

Ok, so there might have been a little judgemental gatekeeping going on too. If you dig deep into the psyche of your typical old-time Voyageur, there is at least a little part of them that kind of misses the days when the sport was our little niche thing. So long as people didn’t know, you could feel like you had an important role in the sport — you were that guy in every sports conversation that had to bring soccer into it.

So, when you started to hear random sports guys talking about Atiba — 39 years old at the time! — in World Cup Qualifying it was both incredibly rewarding and also a little bitter sweet. This thing — our thing — was no longer underground. Our work was done. The whole country finally understood how special this player was.

At-i-ba! At-i-ba! At-i-ba!

The rhythmic chant shook BMO Field on March 27, 2022. It wasn’t the first time that we heard it, either. No, but it was the loudest. In a day of celebration, there was no louder moment than when Atiba was subbed in.

About 30,000 people chanted his name. Some for the first time, many had been chanting for years. All were celebrating a remarkable accomplishment for a 39-year-old footballer — making his first World Cup.

It was an overnight success story, 20 years in the making. Atiba had finally arrived.

Arrived just in time to get a proper exit.

We mostly assumed that would happen in Qatar, where he would likely (and did) get his 100th cap. It would be a fitting way for a guy of Atiba’s accomplishments to go out.

Atiba had different ideas, however. In fact, he’s still out there now getting a call up for these two games that just passed. He says he’s not done yet. He even hinted that he might want to go out while standing in confetti this summer.

He’s earned that chance and most of us hope it happens — hell, even some of my American readers would probably be OK with a player like Atiba winning a competition like the Nations League (i.e. one that matters, but only if you win it. Kind of like England’s League Cup).

Yes, he truly has earned this summer. Besides, it will give long-term fans the chance to say goodbye.

Closure. Then it’s time to say goodbye.

That’s not going to be easy, but the nostalgia trip has to end after the Gold Cup. It’s the right call to go with the core of the World Cup team through this summer. Winning something is a vital step to the program’s development. The vets give them the best chance to do that.

After that, the focus needs to be on pushing the group to get better. That will come from competition within. John Herdman’s favoured guys should not be automatic call-ups (unless they have some form of ‘David’ in their name). No, they need to blood some younger players — players that have a chance to be part of the 2026 team.

There will be friendlies next fall after that. Although potentially glamourous (Germany has been mentioned as a possibility), they don’t actually mean anything. So, then is when you can get experimental.

If there’s a home game, maybe you bring Atiba out one last time — in a suit while retiring his number.

Before then, however, we still have a few more precious moments to enjoy. And hopefully one final image of the captain, our captain, holding a trophy aloft as Canada ends a 23 year long drought.

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