Steve Christilaw: World Cup teaches real life lessons

I am fascinated by the World Cup and what it can teach.

In a world so culturally diverse, it’s amazing that the simple game of soccer has managed to cut through the differences that divide us day-to-day and bring us all to the world’s stage for a healthy competition.

On such a grand stage nationalism gets stripped of its hyperbole and jingoism and nations face one another on the level playing field of the soccer pitch.

But it’s more than that.

On its face, it’s a competition, and competition is about sorting winners from losers. If that’s what you get from watching the World Cup, that’s fine. But tracking scores and studying brackets doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Take, for example, the opening-round game from Ottawa between Germany and Ivory Coast. Score watchers probably skipped this one. Germany is a Women’s World Cup fixture and Ivory Coast is one of the lowest-ranked sides in the tournament field.

Both teams marched onto the field with their heads high. Each stood at attention while national anthems were played and the match got underway.

As expected, Germany quickly dominated and began scoring again and again. German forward Celia Sasic recorded the fastest hat trick in World Cup history and a teammate also had a three-goal game and Germany won, 10-0.

But you could get that much from the box score.

What you had to watch to fully understand was the way Les Elephants (Yes, that’s what Ivory Coast calls its national teams, both men’s and women’s) reacted to the drubbing.

Winning and losing is a function of playing the game. Whether or not a team is beaten is a function of its own character. In this match, Ivory Coast lost the match, but remained unbeaten.

One of the finest performances of the match came from Ivory Coast goalkeeper Dominique Thiamale, who refused to back down in the face of an overwhelming German offense. She made seven saves in the game, several of them spectacular.

It was the kind of performance that will inspire a new generation of young players to follow in her footsteps and bring Les Elephants back to the World Cup.

Perhaps Dominique Thiamale will do for her country what Brandi Chastain did for hers by scoring a game-winning penalty kick to win the 1999 World Cup in the Rose Bowl. Or be a role model the way Michelle Akers Stahl was – a woman from Shorecrest High School in North Seattle whose intense faith, in herself and her teammates, allowed her to conquer chronic fatigue syndrome to lead the U.S. to World Cup titles in 1991 and 1999.

But the United States may have come up with the most valuable lesson of them all.

It was the early minutes of the opener with Australia, and the game’s color commentators were still explaining what each team had to do to win the match.

I admit it, I rarely listen to color commentators and generally try to tune them out. But this was a little gem I had not heard before during a World Cup.

The coach of the U.S. squad, Jill Ellis, had stressed to her team the importance of getting better. Not just in practice, but in each game. She wanted the team to play better at the end of each half than they’d been at the beginning.

It’s not a new concept. But it was expressed in a new context.

A team is never a finished product; it’s always a work in progress. The United States women’s team is one of the top teams in the world and among the favorites to win this year’s World Cup, but they’re still working hard to get better every single day.

We can all learn from that lesson.