World Cup qualifier: Will Canada use extreme cold as a weapon against the US?

Forewarned is forearmed and clearly, at some stage in late November, Gregg Berhalter and US Soccer sat down, ran the tape, looked through the Edmonton squalls and saw in the frozen Mexican faces all the warning they needed.

In truth they could have saved themselves 90 minutes and read the French advice. Just 19 words of it. “To survive the Canadian winter, one needs a body of brass, eyes of glass, and blood made of brandy.”

Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce’s offering was published in the early 1700s but as Canada and the US men meet for their most consequential encounter for a generation, the message still sounds clear through winter’s air. Not least because the exploration that sparked such trauma in the third Baron Lahontan is within a stone’s throw of Sunday’s venue.

Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton, a stadium sponsored by the country’s beloved coffee chain in a city about 70km south of Toronto, has no great footballing history. This potentially pivotal 2022 World Cup qualifier will in fact be the first time Canada’s senior men have pitched up at the stadium for a competitive international. But John Herdman’s young team are all about creating new stories, new history.

When they did just that in November, turning Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium into the Iceteca and vanquishing Mexico in a qualifier for the first time since 1976, Canada’s coach pointed to the piles of pitch-side snow and the mercury bottoming out at -9C (16F) with a wind chill of -14C (7F).

“Every country uses the terrain to their advantage,” the Englishman said after his finest night yet had seen Canada surge to the top of the Concacaf standings. “We see this as an advantage. There was a genuine opportunity here to bring out the Canadian in our players. They’ve