John Herdman stands in front of a yellow conference room wall, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, off to the side of a projector screen. It displays a quote from Sun Tzu in one corner and a dramatic description of a wildfire along the bottom. He leans into the latter.
“It gains a terrifying momentum. That’s what it gains – a terrifying momentum. This red shirt, this team,” the Canada manager tells his players. “It consumes everything in its path: Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Aruba, Suriname … and then you’ll be ready. What a fucking journey.”
If the identities of the four teams in that path somewhat detract from the speech, they really shouldn’t. This is the world that Canada’s men’s national team were operating in just a year and a half ago. Next week Herdman, an Englishman who has become a hero in Canada, will send his team out to face Belgium in the country’s first men’s World Cup match for nearly four decades.
The speech is one of the first stirring moments from WeCAN, a behind-the-scenes series charting Canada’s rollicking run through Concacaf qualifying en route to Qatar. There are plenty more. But in truth, this is all merely part of the journey.
Just one Canadian player was born before Mexico 86, the last time the country played on the game’s grandest stage – indomitable skipper Atiba Hutchinson who turns 40 in February. Much is rightly made of the rawness and inexperience of the team he captains. But Herdman, the 47-year-old former teacher from Durham, does not lack for experience. Qatar, remarkably, will be the fourth senior World Cup of a management career that started in earnest 16 years ago.
Herdman talks about history as something to be torn up or rewritten, to be challenged or made and remade. When asked last week what it meant to him to be the first manager ever to take a team to a men’s and women’s World Cup, he spoke of how pivotal it is to be “practicing what I preach”.
The preaching is, and appears to have always been, the key part of Herdman’s practice. Spend time with any of those who he’s brought with him on his journey from skills camps in northern England and doubters at the Sunderland Academy to grassroots roles in New Zealand that turned to national team jobs there and in Canada, and the talk always comes back to the talk. Herdman is a master of motivation.
“John is built for these kind of tournaments,” says Melissa Tancredi, the former Canadian stalwart who played under Herdman at the 2015 Women’s World Cup. “He’s been through it all. He’s been through one at home [in Canada] when we all felt that pressure so I don’t think that there’s any inexperience with John.
“This man has something that most managers don’t and that’s his ability to actually connect with players and get the absolute best out of them. He’s a mastermind. I’ve never had, or heard of, a coach who is able to connect with players like he does. He’s an absolute beauty in terms of a motivator. He has that ability to calm the situation or bring it to where he needs to bring it, he’s a calibrator. You don’t really learn that, it’s something you’re innately given.”
While Herdman has undoubtedly grown as a tactician during his years in the international game, Tancredi’s argument that the psychological and cultural skills were a feature from the jump is backed up by those who were there at the start.
Wendi Henderson was long since retired from the New Zealand national team and was feeling her way back into club football, initially for fun, in 2006 when someone approached her on the sidelines in Wellington.
“It was John Herdman. He said he’d just been appointed as Football Ferns manager and asked: ‘Where are you at?’” Henderson says. “I started laughing. ‘Where am I at? I’m 35 and retired three years ago!’”
