Another season without playoffs for Valour

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This article was published 03/10/2023 (1085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Valour FC’s players and staff were in high spirits at Tuesday’s training session, but the sour taste of another missed post-season still lingered.

The club’s playoff hopes were dashed last month, long before Friday’s regular-season finale against the Halifax Wanderers at IG Field. The match goes at 6:30 p.m.

Winnipeg’s pro soccer club has yet to make the post-season since joining the Canadian Premier League in 2019. The squad has six victories to go with eight draws and 13 defeats.

“Unexpected and frustrating, to be honest,” midfielder Kian Williams said of his first season with the club. “Throughout the season, a lot can take its toll and heads can go down over little moments, but I guess for next season it’s about bringing in guys that are almost bulletproof and can get through those adversities and get results, get goals, get assists.

“Get guys who maybe have more experience and have been in these situations before and deal with them better.”

Head coach Phillip Dos Santos was singing a similar tune around the same time last year, which led him to add 13 new players in the offseason. Dos Santos thought his team was deeper, more experienced and talented than it ever had been.

It wasn’t enough, though. Valour took a major step back in 2023 and is likely to finish last in the CPL table.

“What I learned is character is so important,” Dos Santos said. “Leadership is so important, and it’s one thing to be able to do it in a shorter spell, (but) I think it’s important to get the guys to understand that it’s going to be about resilience. It’s going to be about finding and keeping the motivation throughout (the season).

“I’ll say it bluntly, I feel that some of the guys that were high hopes for us couldn’t sustain the rhythm and maintain their levels of motivation when things got a little bit difficult. Adversity got the best of them, and, for me, it has everything to do with character, mindset, but also leadership.”

While more changes are sure to come, don’t expect any at the head of the coaching staff. Dos Santos, 14-11-17 in his tenure, said he’s had conversations with club president Wade Miller about continuing to lead Valour in 2024.

“I’m not a quitter,” Dos Santos said. “And if there’s a desire from the club to bring me back, there’s something I started to build here and I still have the desire to be here. I still have the energy to be here. I still feel that I could bring a lot to the club. There’s a lot of invisible work that was done in the last two years, things that are not seen but that are very important for the growth of an organization.

“So, for me, I think that it’s something that I still feel I need to be here for the guys and I know that this group is going to bounce back.”

Valour struggled in many areas this season, but perhaps none more so than scoring goals. The club has found the back of the net just 25 times this season, the fewest in the league and worst since its inaugural campaign in 2019 (22).

Equally notable to Dos Santos, the club was forced to field many of its youngest players due to injury. Valour’s four 21-and-unders — Matteo de Brienne, Jared Bazán, Juan Pablo Sanchez and Eskander Mzoughi — have combined for 4,139 minutes this season.

“We played the majority of the season without pieces that came in to be potentially your leaders on the team,” Dos Santos said. “So, yeah, it gives the opportunity for other guys to come out but you need that on the field consistently. You look at the best teams in the league, they’ve had that consistency when it comes to leadership on the field.”

“Everyone grows through going through (tough moments), myself included. But I also think that sometimes you need the injection of those types of characters and that’s going to be a very big focus of ours in the offseason. I think there’s a very good foundation…”

Indeed, not all was dark in Valour’s season. Canadian keeper Rayane Yesli, in his first full season as the team’s unquestioned starter, is second in the league in saves (80) and clean sheets (seven). Williams, one of the club’s newcomers, is tied for the team lead in goals (four), and Dante Campbell and de Brienne are the top two interception leaders in the league with 40 and 39, respectively.

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De Brienne, who jumped from left-back, where he excelled as a rookie, to the midfield, has authored another solid campaign with three goals to his name and cemented himself as one of those foundational pieces for the club.

“It’s been an exciting roller-coaster but, unfortunately, the ride is coming to an end,” de Brienne said. “It’s been one of those seasons where right off the get go, we knew everything that we had to play for, we knew the quality that we had — and we still do now — but at times we had our highs, we had our lows, but the way we kept ourselves accountable for everything I think it really helped us grow as individuals.

“But now that the season is coming to an end, I think it’s a matter of making sure we can regroup and come again next season with the right mentality to get this city into a playoff spot and hopefully win a championship.”

jfreysam@freepress.mb.ca

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Joshua Frey-Sam
Reporter

Josh Frey-Sam reports on sports and business at the Free Press. Josh got his start at the paper in 2022, just weeks after graduating from the Creative Communications program at Red River College. He reports primarily on amateur teams and athletes in sports. Read more about Josh.

Every piece of reporting Josh produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.