On Wednesday, the Ottawa Fury announced the retirement of Longueuil, Quebec native Philippe Davies. Davies cited personal and professional reasons as his reasons to retire at the age of 24.
Davies began his career as a teenager in the Ligue de soccer élite du Québec before moving to France to play a year for Dijon FCO’s U-18 side. He returned to North America to join the Vancouver Whitecaps Residency program. During his four-year stint in Vancouver he would make 34 first team appearances for the Whitecaps’ senior squad (in USL) before moving on to the Richmond Kickers of the USL. Finally, as head coach Marc Dos Santos was assembling his first Ottawa Fury roster in NASL, he called upon Davies to play a key role.
Davies ended up playing quite a few roles on and off the field. On the field, he made 28 appearances for the club (the Fury have played a total of 49 competitive matches), netting only one goal but acting as a creative force in many others. Off the field, Davies was one of only a few players who could speak French (Ottawa is separated from the province of Quebec by the Outaouais River, and media outlets from the city of Gatineau cover the team extensively). That role will now fall solely on goalkeeper Romuald Peiser and Dos Santos.
I had an opportunity to speak with head coach Marc Dos Santos yesterday to reflect on Davies’ career. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.
Théo Gauthier (TG): Philippe Davies retired yesterday at age 24. He cited professional and personal reasons. I wondered if you could address the professional reasons?
Marc Dos Santos (MDS): The professional reasons have nothing to do with the club or our latest decisions regarding Phil. In NASL unfortunately you have players, let’s call them Category A, B and C, and there’s different salaries and Phil was a certain category that wasn’t making what I’d say is a lot of money. He got an offer to have a very good salary in the South Shore. That’s the professional reason.
When you think about Phil, he’s 24 soon to be 25, he was in MLS and he came down to NASL and he was never able to become one of the top players in NASL. He was a very good player for a squad. He is definitely an NASL player, no doubt in my head. He realized he wouldn’t become a player that would make a lot money in the NASL. Maybe he just took an intelligent decision that could be looked at as an early one, but maybe an intelligent one in the long-term.
At the same time, the health of his father at the moment is not top, and that coincides with his decision that if you put all of that together, Phil just felt it was just the right moment to be close his family and dad, and embrace another phase of his career that is more financially stable.
TG: Do you know much about the club to which he’s going?
MDS: Oh yeah! Quebec is divided into regions, the biggest ones are the region of Quebec City, Lac St-Louis and the South Shore. The South Shore is where he grew up as a player, where he played as a young player, and now it’s where he will start his coaching career.
TG: Independent of Phil’s decision to retire, is it important to you and to the club to have players from Quebec on the team or is that not a consideration.
MDS: Yeah, it’s very very important to us. This decision of Phil’s hurt us a lot. It wasn’t something that we wanted. Phil wasn’t playing regularly, but when the team is doing well it’s very difficult to move pieces around. Phil is a very good player, probably one the best crosser in the team, one of the best set piece and deliveries in the team along with Richie Ryan. Phil was a player who could play in a lot positions, and a player who spoke French and was important to the team and it’s a very big blow.
Yeah, it’s important to have players from Quebec, but it needs to be the right one, it needs to be players at the level to play here. We’ve had players from Quebec that unfortunately we didn’t feel they had the level to play here, but Phil is a guy that had the level to play here and was important for us. We can’t have just any type of player from Quebec, he needs to have the quality.
TG: Phil was an original Fury player; now that we’re entering a phase where we’ve had a year and a half of play and one of the Originals leaves, is there a sentimental tugging on the heartstrings?
MDS: It’s very hard. It was very hard to accept. We were very sad about it when he came to my office and spoke to me about it, it wasn’t easy for me and wasn’t for him. It was a very difficult decision for him, he was very sad. He said that he liked working with the staff, he liked the other players, but this is a very cold decision he had to take. He had to answer “What’s the best thing for my future, and what’s the best thing for now for my family.” Putting all of that together, I think Phil took the right decision and he has to move on.
Of course he’s a piece of the history of this club. He scored and had an assist in our first-ever win, so he’s always going to be in the history of the club and nobody can take that away from him.
TG: Final question. What is Phil’s greatest skill and/or human quality?
MDS: Oh, no question that was his delivery. He had a Beckham style of crossing the ball when he was wide, and his delivery from wide was probably the best quality he had as a player. A great, great person.
My message to the Regional Association of the South Shore: “What a good decision you took in bringing Phil in because not only was he a great player, on good clubs, he was also a National Team youth player on U-17 to U-23, clubs in MLS and the NASL, so Phil is going to bring not only great human qualities to the kids he’s going to coach there, but also great technical ability that he can coach. I think it’s a fantastic hire and they’re getting a fantastic person they’re bringing to their organization.
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