A fall day full of footballs

The rain and fog has rolled into Howe Sound. Autumn on Bowen Island is really divided into two halves. The first begins August 1 when the harvest gets going, the crickets start chirping and the slightest chill comes into the air. The days begin to grow shorter, but there is still lots of warm heart and summer calm. The second half begins around the end of September, when the rains arrive and the southeasterly flows of the low pressure systems in the Pacific bring cloud and rain and powerful fall storms. This weekend the rain has started in earnest, and I awoke to a grey and foggy morning, which set a perfect mood for a few hours of watching sport.

I do love watching rugby. I don’t follow it closely, but I’ll usually make time in the winter to watch the men’s Six Nations matches. The women’s World Cup concluded today with a dominating England performance over Canada, a 33-13 result in front of more than 81,000 at Twickenham. Until this morning, I didn’t watch the tournament at all, to my slight regret; one can’t follow every sport, and I was away a lot this month. Canada is a top international team despite a patchy infrastructure for the game, and the final clearly wasn’t representative of Canada’s play through the tournament. National pride aside, rugby is the only sport that can regularly get me out of my seat as a neutral. There is nothing more tense that a persistent drive towards the try line with a team going through phase after phase of play, with a rhythmic cadence of relentless attack and a defence putting everything into stopping them. It’s thrilling stuff.

Closer to home, AFC Toronto has won the inaugural Northern Super League title. Calgary beat Montreal 0-2 in a bit of a shocker in Laval, and that win secured the title for Toronto. Coming into today, the final playoff spot was still up for grabs, with Vancouver needing only a draw to secure it after Calgary won. They got it with a Holly Ward equalizer 78 minutes into the match against Halifax. Toronto. has run away with the league title on the strength of several players who were developed in British Columbia by the Whitecaps academy programs, including three players who played with our TSS Rovers inaugural women’s team in 2018: Emma Regan, Ashley Cathro and Kaelen Hansen. It is an ongoing puzzle as to why the Vancouver Rise weren’t willing or able to lock up those players.

Meanwhile in North London I set my eyes on the Tottenham match with some dread. Wolves have been terrible, but had a decent cup result against Leeds this week. That team has always done well at Tottenham, and I recall a game in 2012 which I attended with my dad, in which Luka Modric saved a point with a beautiful goal from outside the box. I think that one dismantled our chances for the title and we weren’t the same despite being top at Christmas. Wolves’ shirts are the colour of banana skins. Today was typical in the pattern. Spurs dominated the chances in the first half but scoring nothing from it, and Sam Johnston in goal can take a bunch of credit for that. A ragged Wolves goal at 54′ led to substitutions of Bentancur and Spence for Johnson and Porro a few minutes later. Paling, who has had a terrific week, left it to nearly the last kick of the game to score a beautifully sculpted equalizer to salvage a point from the match. 1-1 draw.