on the wing in pre-season friendlies
and he was only15 when making his
first senior start for the club, a Canadian
Championship semi-final victory over
Ottawa Fury.
Carl Robinson, especially appreciative
of the youngster’s matchday instincts,
had absolute faith in Davies, no matter
the date on his birth certificate.
Robinson would throw him in at the
deep end without hesitation, handing
him his MLS debut aged15 years and
eight months, and including him in the
starting line-up for a vital CONCACAF
Champions League semi-final with
Mexican outfit Tigres UANL less
than a year later.
His numbers in his three-and-a-half
years with the Whitecaps (12 goals and
14 assists in 81 competitive first-team
games) might not have been barnburner
material. But he was precocious, he
dazzled and he thrilled. What’s more, he
turned into a one-man record-breaker,
emerging as the youngest goalscorer
in the history of the Whitecaps, the
CONCACAF Champions League and
Canadian Championship. There was
simply no stopping him.
“My grandmother could have picked
him out,” smiled Craig Dalrymple in an
interview withThe Provincein October
2018, the month he appeared in his
last game for the ’Caps. “It wasn’t a
case of us being great scouts. At first,
we thought it was too early to relocate
him from another province. His parents
weren’t ready, he wasn’t ready. So we
tracked him. When his parents were
satisfied we could take care of him from
an educational and social perspective,
he made the move. Then he hit the
ground running.”
Davies, the first full Canada
international to win a Champions
League, now finds himself cast as
Canadian football’s poster boy, someone
for Canuck kids to look up to and take
inspiration from. Ice hockey indubitably
is king in Canada and always will remain
Edmonton, 2,000 miles to the west.
With his mum and dad both working
long hours of shift work, Alphonso had
to step into the breach. Besides his
schoolwork, he often had to take care
of his younger siblings and there were
plenty of other household chores to
do. He had to grow up – and fast.
Talal Al Awaid, a former youth
team coach of his at Edmonton
Strikers, describes a young man
with extraordinary levels of maturity,
self-sacrifice and ambition. “He was a
kid who saw the struggles his parents
had to go through and who obviously
had his own struggles,” Al Awaidso. But suddenly soccer has a chance
to dramatically extend its reach in
Canada, and Phonzie has all the
ingredients to be the ideal recruiting
sergeant: the high-profile, the
achievements, the jet-heeled playing
style; his modest, cheery demeanour
and last but by no means least, a
most compelling of back stories.
Alphonso was born 20 years ago
in a refugee camp in Buduburam in
southern Ghana. His parents, father
Debeah and mother Victoria, had fled
there to escape the civil war raging in
their native Liberia and for the first five
years of his life, the sprawling United
Nations compound was his world. It
was the toughest of existences. With
acorrugatedironshackforahome
and a short supply of food and clean
water, while the stench of death hung
in the air.
All was to change for the family in- Their application to resettle in
Canada was accepted and they duly
crossed the Atlantic for a better
tomorrow, initially moving on a
temporary basis to Windsor, Ontario,
then putting down some real roots in
Davies, the first full Canada
international to win a Champions
League now finds himself cast as
Canadian football’s poster boyChampions
League...Robert
Lewandowski
and David
Alaba celebrate
beating Chelsea
with DaviesMAR 5, 2018
Scores his first
MLS goal in the
opening game of
the 2018 season
against Montreal
Impact.JUL 25, 2018
Vancouver
Whitecaps
announce that
Davies will join
Bayern Munich at
the end of the
2018 season.OCT 28, 2018
Signs off his
MLS career by
scoring twice for
the Whitecaps
in a 2-1 victory
over Portland
Timbers.JAN 27, 2019
Makes his
Bundesliga debut
after coming off
the bench in a
3-1 victory over
Stuttgart.Next generation...
Jonathan David and
Jonathan Osorio
celebrate a Canadian
goal with DaviesAlphonso Davies