Before June, if you had tried to discuss soccer with me I would have politely told you to shove it, refusing to waste my time or subject my ears to chattering about a boring sport populated by feather-haired pansies. For all I cared, the soccer world could have its Fosbury Flops and tournament-deciding shootouts, but I refused to entertain the shenanigans. Ronaldo and Rooney were just names, nothing more. I was willfully, shamelessly ignorant, and perfectly content to live out my days that way.
I had played soccer as a gangly child, patrolling soccer’s equivalent of the blueline during a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Fort McMurray summers. There isn’t any glory reserved for an eight-year-old defensive specialist, and I soon became bored watching my smaller, quicker teammates dart through the offensive zone. I can still remember my mother’s postgame advice: “Stop picking your butt!” Unable to do anything else with my hands, they turned to the yeoman’s work of dislodging my incessant wedgies.
Long before I knew who he was, I patterned my game after Bryan Marchment, with the same physical tenacity and disregard for the rulebook. Cursed by a lack of mobility, I soon realized that I didn’t necessarily have to strip the ball from my opponents, I just had to swing my long right leg far and hard enough to engage in a shin-on-shin collision. My bare shin always emerged the victor. My soccer career ended around 10 years of age and I never looked back. In fact, if soccer was involved I often looked the other way.
Hooked on a Feeling
That all changed in June, shortly after the start of the 2014 World Cup. My fiancé, a dyed-in-the-wool Jamaican, has long been a supporter of the German national team, Die Mannschaft, which literally translates to “The Team.” It seems Jamaica’s national team—the Reggae Boyz… yes, really—is on par with Canada’s, so everyone on the island adopts a team that’s actually relevant on the international stage. She hitched herself to the German bandwagon decades ago, and urged me to come along for the ride.
I was hooked instantly. Having a team to root for increases your level of interest exponentially, and I wasn’t simply tolerating football (soccer is a word for impressionable children and granola-munching hippes) but found myself emotionally tied to the game, drawn in by the drama of its low-scoring, next-goal-wins nature. The nuance of the sport interested me, but the nuance of German football fascinated me. Goals weren’t scored as much as they were manufactured, coming off an assembly line with exacting precision.
Die Mannschaft didn’t feature any flash or panache, just a series of moving parts rather than a single, brilliant individual. As a lifelong hockey fan, I had to adjust my thinking. I can’t tell you how many times a German player seemed to have a clear shot on goal from a reasonable distance, but dished the ball to a hard-charging teammate for a goal. At first, each tally was accompanied by this five-step thought process that took about three seconds:
1) Shoot the ball you idiot!
2) What are you doing passing?!
3) Whoa, that other guy could score.
4) The ball is in the net!
5) That was absolute genius.
I enjoyed rooting for Germany—as an Edmonton Oilers and Oakland Raiders fan, I haven’t had many reasons to cheer for anything since 2006—but I also enjoyed the beauty of a difficult thing done well. That feeling of simultaneous shock and euphoria was oddly addictive, and Die Mannschaft kept feeding my craving en route to a thrilling championship. Afterward I reflected on the German performance with some selfish concern, wondering how long it would take to experience that feeling again. Then Leon Draisaitl came along.
The Dawning of Draisaitl
Draisaitl—drafted third overall by the Oilers in the 2014 NHL Entry Draft—embodies the same no-nonsense, team-first approach that Die Mannschaft employs. You can see the thought process at work whenever he gets the puck. He’s not looking to simply get it in deep or start a meaningless cycle; Draisaitl’s focus is moving the puck toward the net, and if he can’t do it he moves it to an opponent who can. That’s one of the first things I came to realize and appreciate about him: He’s not a passer, he’s a distributor.
Draisaitl didn’t panic during the rookie tournament, where he stood out with an intriguing mix of intangibles and unteachables. He has tremendous poise with the puck and on-ice vision, terrific stickhandling ability, and a knack for creating turnovers by keeping his stick on the ice and anticipating the play. The Oilers would be putting a lot of faith in the 18-year-old if they handed him the second-line centre spot to start the season. There’s no better way to learn to swim that being thrown into the deep end. Then again, there’s no quicker way to drown.
I’m curious to know how much Draisaitl’s selfless approach is nature versus nurture, but the German influence is evident. He wouldn’t have looked out of place alongside Mesut Ozil and Bastian Schweinsteiger, passing up quality shooting opportunities in favor of a cross-crease feeds that forced the goaltender to stretch. His linemates didn’t always cash in on Draisaitl’s creativity, and we’ll see how his play translates to the NHL game, with its condensed time and space, but up until this point the signs have all been encouraging.
In many ways, Draisaitl is the anti-Yakupov. There isn’t any dangle to his game, just cold, calculated efficiency. I’m not sure I would have fully appreciated that before June, but after watching the Germans dismantle star-based squads like Portugal, Brazil and Argentina, molding the face of football supremacy in their own image, I’m thrilled about Draisaitl. Here’s to a fantastic future, watching the big German pivot contribute to the latest assembly-line tally, glancing at the scoreboard to make certain it counted, then putting his head down to start working on the next one.
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