Cavalry FC returns to powerful ways with Super Hero Day on tap

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When asked what super hero he would want to be, Tommy Wheeldon Jr. came up with his own character.

Very quickly, to boot.

“Thomas the Great — a teleporting Viking,” declared the Cavalry FC gaffer, without hesitation, ahead of Marvel Super Hero Day at Spruce Meadows.

“I’d grow out my beard a little more and my hair, do a little bit more upper-body exercises and carry an axe,” the GM/head coach continued. “But I could teleport from one location to another.

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“A bit like Thor, but I could just go from place to place.”

It’s an image befitting Wheeldon these days, with his crew finding its pillaging ways — again — while roaming about the land in the Canadian Premier League campaign.

Indeed with three wins, including two straight, and a draw from their past five matches, the Cavs (5-9-3) finally have found their strength heading into Saturday’s home quest against last-place HFX Wanderers FC (4-4-7) at ATCO Field (2 p.m., OneSoccer, OneSoccer.ca), returning them to the CPL powerhouse so often feared in the past.

“Go back to my public statement before the Forge game (on July 21), when I said, ‘We will go on a run here,’” Wheeldon said. “Because I could see the things in training.”

The Viking-esque leader could also see the future bringing back a few heroes to the team from the sidelines.

Especially one in the super form of Ali Musse, the 2023 CPL Players’ Player of the Year.

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In the Cavs’ previous episode that was this past Saturday, Musse returned from a months-long ankle injury, coming off the bench for goals in the 72nd and 87th minutes to lift Calgary’s professional footie side 2-1 past the hosts, first-place Atlético Ottawa.

Powerful stuff, to be sure, from the CPL Player of the Week.

“Listen, the more I reflect, the more I simplify,” Wheeldon said. “Football is easy when you just put your best players on the pitch and give them the ball. All this stuff we do between is just bluff.

“So I think what we’ve got now is when you have players like Ali Musse — who was the players’ player last year — coming into form, along with the return of other talents like Maël Henry, it shares the goal contributions that maybe was just from Tobias Warschewski and from Fraser Aird chipping in here or there. It gives us different elements, so that a new signing, like Nicolas Wähling or Lowell Wright or Malcolm Shaw can all chip away in their own way.

“But Ali Musse is a special player in this league, as he’s shown, and it was great to see him return in the manner he did.”

Without him, Cavalry spent most of the calendar with draws for results, keeping itself mid-pack on the CPL table.

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Then came this recent spate of successful scorelines to rise into fourth place — just five points behind top-spot Ottleti (8-5-4) — in a bid to defend the regular-season title won last fall.

And with Musse back to health, as well as fellow veteran cogs Eryk Kobza and Bradley Kamdem, that run threatens to last a lot longer into the summer and, perhaps, into the fall.

“It was very difficult without him,” Wheeldon admitted of missing Musse. “We tried to horseshoe in a few different ways of doing things and, I think as a manager, you have to be a tailor to the players you have.

“But let’s be honest: We didn’t have the attacking power that we have now and we were able to keep ourselves within the mix. We didn’t lose many. We didn’t win many. But we got points along the way, so that now all that people will remember is the run-in (to the end of the season).

“And we’re as good as anybody in the run-in, as our history has shown. So you give us our best players and now we’re a dangerous threat to anybody.”

“Resilient” is how Wheeldon describes his club in the first half of the schedule.

From here on out — barring any unforeseen major absence, along with the forthcoming return from injury of veterans Sergio Camargo and Charlie Trafford — that description shifts to “contending.”

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“Honestly, when I look back at this, it’s been one of the toughest seasons to manage for various reasons,” Wheeldon said. “To lose Myer Bevan just after Concacaf (before the CPL campaign), to lose Willy Akio early and to lose Ali Musse early — all to just different circumstances — the fact that these lads always believed that we will have a run at some point (showed resilience).

“I think because we had our suffering at the start of the season, there’s almost a hedonistic pleasure to go in for the tougher of the game, the harder the challenge, the greater the joy …

“Now, I think we’re the ones that are actually enjoying now being on the climb,” Wheeldon added. “So we’re right smack-dab in the middle of the table, knowing that if we can take points off the teams below us, we create insurance (in the race for a playoff position). And then we’ve got at team above us in York next week, and if we can go there and do like we did to Ottawa, now the title race is blown wide open.

“We enjoy being in these moments. It’s the pressure that we thrive upon. So the more that is mounted and expected of us, I think the more we grow.”

tsaelhof@postmedia.com

http://www.x.com/ToddSaelhofPM

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