No soccer-playing country is having a better summer than Canada at the Copa America – upsetting Americans is the cherry on top

The soccer crew at Fox Sports spent their weekend having a nice, little holiday freakout.

There’s only so much fun to be had railing on your own national team. So in order to keep things spicy, they went looking for someone else to blame for U.S. failures.

“They should demand that things should change that benefit America,” said analyst and former player Alexi Lalas. “We all want to help the minnows. But not at the expense of the cream.”

Who should be demanding what of whom? Who are these minnows? How exactly are things being done at “the expense” of America? And why are they “the cream?”

No clue. This is Fox. It didn’t make all that money by being rational.

But because only one North American team is still on its feet and swinging at the Copa America, it wasn’t hard to guess who they were angry at.

On that basis alone, no soccer-playing country on Earth is having a better summer than Canada. Winning a couple of 50-50 games at exactly the right time is worth something. But driving America batty at a tournament it paid for is priceless.

Canada advanced to the semi-final against Argentina this week when it beat Venezuela 4-3 on penalty kicks after a 1-1 draw in the quarter-finals on Friday night.

Because the Copa is held irregularly, it hardly ever coincides with the European soccer championships, which are also ongoing. But that is happening now, providing a side-by-side comparison of the world’s best international soccer teams.

(Bear in mind that no team from outside Europe or South America has ever won a men’s World Cup. Soccer is a global business, but UEFA and CONMEBOL control the board.)

Is it fair to judge who’s best based on a few days worth of work? Absolutely. That’s the only way to do it. Otherwise, you’re into fantasy-league philosophizing about whose overlapping wing play is superior. Results should and will out.

Soccer is especially well suited to this kind of snapshot judgment because the teams everybody thinks will win usually do. Once in a while, a Denmark (Euro ‘92) or a Colombia (Copa ‘01) slips through, but overdogs generally carry the day.

Based on where we are at the semi-final stage in the world’s second- and third-most-important soccer tournaments, who are the best teams in the world right now?

France, England, Netherlands, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and you know who.

If Samoa and Vatican City were in that list somewhere, you could make the argument that this year’s real-world tests of quality are operating outside the acceptable variance. But they aren’t. That’s a list of seven historic heavyweights – teams that have won nine World Cups among them – plus Canada.

Which means Canada is now one of the best soccer countries in the world.

You can sit around all day talking about how Italy or Mexico should be better, but Canada is actually being better. Only one of those things counts.

You don’t need to be an aesthete of the game to see that the soccer being played at the Euro and the Copa isn’t the sort they sing about in the favelas. France has got to a semi without scoring a single goal from open play. England has been one minute and then one penalty away from losing to Slovakia and Switzerland.

If you had to distill the current fashion in international men’s soccer based on what we’re seeing at this year’s shows, it would be “rise and grind.”

The teams that are succeeding come up the field in a peloton, take a tentative stab at goal, usually miss the net altogether, and then retreat back down the pitch the same way they advanced.

Some teams still play with the sort of looseness we associate with great, Brazilesque soccer. Collectively, they are known as the losers. Would-be winners – and this includes the Brazil of right now – are plodders.

Days ago, England was preparing to bring back public hanging so that it could properly fire its national team manager, Gareth Southgate. Mr. Southgate practises what might be called barricade ball. Take 10 huge international superstars and combine them into a featureless, immovable stump in front of the goalkeeper.

It is gruesome to watch, but it works. Having not changed a single thing about what he’s doing, Mr. Southgate has gone from epochal scapegoat to iconoclastic genius in the space of a week.

Canada cannot compete with England or anybody else on that semi-final list on a player-for-player basis. But can the Canadians collapse back onto their own net like a 20-legged armadillo at the first hint of danger? Yes, they can. Anybody can.

This way of playing is either completely unambitious or incredibly disciplined. You can tell the difference based on whether it worked.

The United States is angry because it played like Canada and lost, while Canada played like England and won. Boo hoo.

You’d say that Canada has no chance in Tuesday’s semi against Argentina, except that the current World Cup champions have started playing this way, too.

The only difference between Argentina’s penalty-shootout win over Ecuador in the quarters and Canada’s penalty-shootout win over Venezuela was the colour of the jerseys.

Tactical fads are everything in soccer. A couple of years ago, you could not win without fielding a false 9. A couple of years before that, it was all about a goalkeeper who could play the ball out. Before that, the key was the deep-lying midfield string puller.

Typically, Canada can’t compete in these trend wars. It has one world-class player (Alphonso Davies) and a few other guys who work really hard.

But as long as the best in the world want to play a risk-avoidant, star-negating style whose goal is getting to penalties, Canada can stand and trade blows with the greatest of them.

It is often said of teams of the moment, but it has rarely been truer than it is of Canada right now – this may be its time, and it may never be again.