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Canada’s Ismaël Koné leaves the field on a stretcher during the second half of the team’s match against Qatar in Vancouver, on June 18.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The planning began within hours of the crack heard across the country: Supporters of Canada’s men’s national team would organize a visible, united show of support for Ismaël Koné, the midfielder whose gruesome leg injury marred an otherwise electric thrashing of Qatar at last Thursday’s World Cup match in Vancouver.
Members of the Voyageurs, the 30-year-old supporters group for men and women’s national soccer teams, exchanged messages over Slack that night. What if we printed thousands of signs bearing Koné’s number 8 and held them up at the next game, executive director Jamie MacLeod suggested. The group liked the idea.
Canada faces Switzerland at BC Place on Wednesday with first place in Group B at stake. The team’s six goals against Qatar means Canada needs only a draw against the higher-ranked Swiss to top the group and remain in Vancouver for a round-of-32 match on July 2. A loss would likely leave Canada as the group runner-up and send it to Los Angeles on June 28 for its first knockout round, meaning less recovery time and added travel.
Alan Ho, also a Voyageurs executive director, said the group feels positive about Wednesday’s game, but goes into it in still aching from the emotional whiplash of the last. Canada had the game under control with three goals by halftime when Qatar’s Assim Madibo tackled Koné, shattering his leg with a sickening crack that could be heard from the stands.
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“It was gut-wrenching. The whole stadium fell silent,” Ho said in an interview Tuesday. “You could tell from the reaction of the players – his teammates, even some of the Qatari players – to rush the medical staff on that it was serious, right when it happened. I left there really ecstatic that we won, but tinged with a lot of sadness.”
The group spent Monday and Tuesday printing roughly 3,000 stylized, red number 8s bearing the Voyageurs logo, and encouraging others to print their own. They will be distributed to fans on Wednesday morning at the same pub where they gathered six days earlier before marching en masse to BC Place; some will take stacks and hand them out outside the stadium. Once inside, they plan to hold them up during the singing of the national anthem.
The Voyageurs were also getting fans at Canada Soccer House in North Vancouver to write well-wishes for Koné on a banner bearing a Canadian flag on Tuesday. “Come back stronger and faster! God bless!,” one person wrote, another scrawled their phone number: “Call me.”
“I think he already knows he’s being supported by his teammates and also by his fans,” Ho said. “I hope he feels a sense of pride in knowing that we’re all in this together.”
Joining the Voyageurs in the fan march will be Anna Junker, her parents and three siblings, a soccer family scattered across Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and New Zealand reuniting for three World Cup games in Vancouver. Junker credited her father – a lifelong, diehard soccer fan from Germany – with instilling in them a love of the beautiful game.
Junker, who lives in Edmonton, said she was driving to Calgary for this trip last Thursday and listening to the Canada-Qatar match on the radio. Her jaw dropped when she heard of the injury.
“I obviously didn’t see it, but just hearing it described was wild,” she said. “It’s a loss for the team that Koné is not playing, obviously, but I think it’ll be a good rally for the rest of the Canadian men’s national team.”
Junker’s family will be dressed in red with matching face paint for the march, which they decided to join as soon as they learned there would be one.
“It really just gets you pumped up,” Junker said. “It’s sharing in something, but also national pride. The fact that we’re in the World Cup and we’ve been playing really well so far, to experience that with other people is just really incredible.”