Familiar faces on both sides of the ball for coach Kah at CPL’s Island Games
There’s the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and then there’s the One Degree of Pa-Modou Kah.
The 40-year-old Pacific FC coach can seemingly be linked to just about any player in the Canadian Premier League by a single step, thanks to a career that started 23 years ago in Oslo.
He knows Valour’s Brett Levis from the Whitecaps, and Andrew Baptiste from his time with the Portland Timbers. Valour’s David Edgar played with him in Vancouver, as did Cavalry FC keeper Marco Carducci. Kah even butted heads with Pacific owner Rob Friend when the latter was a striker in Norway, Holland and in Major League Soccer.
“It’s a little, funny world,” said Kah. “That’s the beauty thing of football.”
That small, beautiful world, one disrupted by the onset of the novel coronavirus, has coalesced in Charlottetown, P.E.I., this week as the CPL returns to play with the Island Games, a tournament that will replace the 2020 regular season for the two-year-old league.
Hamilton’s Forge FC, the defending champion, kicked off the tournament Thursday against Cavalry FC. Kah and the Tridents don’t play until Saturday, when they face the HFX Wanderers of Halifax (noon, CBC, OneSoccer).
Pacific has long boasted a bevy of former Whitecaps or players developed in their system, and added Winnipeg’s Marco Bustos to that list in January.
Bustos also played with Kah, along with about three-quarters of his new team’s roster, while also playing against new striker Alejandro Diaz from his national team days to when he was in Mexico with Zacatepec in Ascenso MX — the team the Mexican national went to mere weeks after Bustos left.
“We’ve all played together, we’re all familiar with each other. … It is a bit of a small world,” said Bustos, who had eight goals and three assists for his hometown club of Valour last season.
He opted to switch teams in the off-season, and was one of the most sought-after CPL free agents, but his familiarity of the roster and Kah was a big part in moving back to the province where he spent eight years with the Whitecaps.
“That was part of making the transition easy as well. Coming to a team where you’re very familiar with the coach and coaching staff. … You’re not just coming into a group where nobody knows you, you don’t have to gain that trust. I came in already knowing that I had the trust of the coach, the coaching staff and the owner, so that was a big plus.
“Now, we’re here, we’re waiting to play football. We have all been waiting for so long. And it was kind of painful seeing all these leagues come back playing, and you’re hearing nothing about your league. We were eager to get out there and play, perform and actually remember what a game day is like again.”
Pacific plays seven round robin matches against the rest of the league at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Alumni Field during the next three weeks before the top four advance to a second-round group stage of six games, with the top two sides playing for the North Star Shield and the right to be called champion, along with a 2021 CONCACAF Champions League berth. It’s the first action for any of the CPL teams since last season concluded with Forge and Calvary in the championship game.
“Every team is in the same boat, with not playing an actual competitive game before coming here,” Bustos said.
“But it’s made us focus on ourselves, and that’s a big part of the game … sometimes you forget to focus on yourself and focus too much on the other team.
Pacific returned half of its 20man roster from last year, including a talented young core that’s now a year older and wiser after a fifth-place finish. Terran Campbell had 11 goals, second-most in the league, in his rookie season in 2019, while Noah Verhoeven and Kadin Chung also played key roles.
Bustos and Diaz, the first Mexican in the CPL, are the two heralded signings, and should inject a boost into an offence that produced a middle-of-the-pack 35 goals last year.
Kah, who was an assistant at the USL level and in MLS with former
WFC2 boss Alan Koch in Cincinnati, is in his first season as head coach after taking over from interim manager James Merriman.
Merriman, who — surprise! — Kah knows from his Whitecaps days, will be associate head coach and the club’s technical director. Both envisioned an aggressive, attacking team with the technical skill to maintain possession and play tight defensively.
“We see football a similar way in philosophy and vision. Definitely the team will have my DNA, and his as well, into it,” Kah said. “We want to play attacking football, but you also want to close shop as well. I’m still a defender and I value clean sheets, so we have to find the right balance of attacking and defending as well as being ruthless.”