It’s a 16-hour flight from where he grew up but Elimane Cissé feels like he’s come back to where he belongs.

“Forge is my home,” the 29-year-old midfielder/back said today as the Hammers prepared to visit fierce rival Cavalry FC in Calgary Sunday night, the first installment of Cissé 2.0. “I was just missing it and wanted to be back. Even when I left here, I wanted to come back at some point.”

Cissé was an original, and important, member of the inaugural Forge team, signing with Hamilton in February 2019 out of Diambars, the Senegalese club which he’d joined as a youth player. He had hoped to play in Europe but when potential deals there fell through he wanted to increase his opportunities to follow a path to a more lucrative league by getting exposure in the new Canadian Premier League.

He ended up staying with Forge through 2021, winning two CPL titles and finishing as runner-up in a third. He rejoins a team that has won the last two league playoff championships.

“It feels very good to be back,” he said in French, interpreted by teammate Garven Metusala, one of eight current French-speaking Forge players. When Cissé arrived in Hamilton the only two other French-speaking players were the long-departed Bertrand Owundi, from Cameroon, and David Choinière, who is still a Hammers’ star.

“It’s changed a lot since I was here, but I think it’s changed for the better,” said Cissé, adding that while he was playing in Senegal the past two years he had received a lot of messages from his former Hamilton teammates asking him to come back, which helped cement his decision to return.

But despite having clearance into Canada for himself, his wife Seynabou and their young daughter, it has taken months for Cissé to be allowed back into the country and he has no idea what caused the delay. There was a similar time lag for Ghanian Nana Ampomah to gain admission to the country but both are here now as Forge reaches the halfway point of their 28-game CPL schedule this weekend and still remains alive in the Canadian Championship semifinal.

Cissé left Forge for Union de Touraga, which plays in the top flight of the Morrocan league.

“It was going very well there but then my old coach called and wanted me to come back to my old team,” he said. So he rejoined Diambars for two years.

While he prefers playing midfield, he was installed at right back in both Morocco and Senegal and even played some centre back. That’s the kind of elasticity that always impressed Bobby Smyrniotis.

“He brings that versatility which is important to this team, and in this league, to have guys who can go in different roles as we get into the mid-point of the season,” Forge’s Head Coach and Sporting Director says. “He can play anywhere in the midfield —  holding midfielder, attacking midfielder, a box-to-box guy – and in his final year here in 2021 he showed he can be an excellent right back. He transformed our team in ’21 by playing that role. We’re just evaluating him in training and he can slot into different positions. He’s a guy who can make an impact.”

Cissé will dress for the Cavalry game but, as Forge did with Ampomah, they will likely break him into the game gradually. He’ll be reunited on the pitch with five mainstays who were here when he started in 2019; Choinière, captain Kyle Bekker, Dom Samuel, Alex Achinioti-Jönsson and Tristan Borges.

“He’s coming into training looking good,” Smyrniotis says. “He looks even younger than when he was here the first time.

“He brings a great energy. The new guys have heard great stories about him from the guys who knew him before.”

One of those stories, of course, involves the day that Cissé married his wife Seynabou. It was Oct. 5, 2019, and he was still in Hamilton, as Forge was preparing for the inaugural two-leg CPL championship against, appropriately, Cavalry FC, but Seynabou was home in Senegal.

“It was a very special day,” Cissé recalls. “I was on the phone with her on What’s App and all the guys were there. They had a big cake.”

The cake was provided by his teammates, after hearing about the wedding through Owundi, who was Cissé’s roommate.

“Once we caught wind of it obviously we were very excited,” team captain Kyle Bekker said a couple of weeks after the wedding.  “He’s a character in the locker room. He’s a great guy. He’s always making jokes, even if there’s a little bit of a translation issue. We were very happy for him and we got him a little cake to surprise him.

“Obviously, he’d want to be there for the wedding, but it’s the soccer season. We just wanted to let him know we’re happy for him.”

Cissé explained at the time that in Senegal you don’t have to be there in person for your wedding. Both he and his wife are Muslims and he said that as part of the lead-up, the two families had talked to each other, but that it was the couple’s own decision to get married.

“I’ve known her for more than five years,” he said in 2019. “We have been in love a long time. This is not an arranged marriage. We both really wanted to get married.”

His wife and his daughter plan to join Cissé in Hamilton soon, and meanwhile, he’ll dedicate his time to getting up to speed with his new-old teammates, beginning Sunday night (5 p.m.) in Calgary. It’s the Hammers’ final visit of the regular season to Spruce Meadows—they’ve got a home match on Sept. 7 against Cavalry—and they will be looking to avenge a  June 8, 1-0 loss.

Tobias Warschewski netted the only goal in that game and now has seven on the season, equalling the total he had for FC Edmonton two years ago while on loan from York United. The German forward is a dangerous presence and is tied for the CPL lead with Brian Wright of York and Rubén del Campo of Ottawa, but just a goal up on Forge FC’s Kwasi Poku.

With two goals to defeat Pacific last week Poku has been absolutely on fire. Across all competitions, he’s put the ball into the net eight times in the last nine games, including critical strikes against MLS sides CF Montréal and Toronto FC in the last two Canadian Championship games.

Poku’s rise, combined with the return from injury of veteran Jordan Hamilton gives Forge depth at striker despite the continuing injury absence of Terran Campbell, still the CPL’s all-time career leading scorer.

Cavalry has had trouble scoring goals, which accounts for their inordinate number of draws this year. Although their three losses are one fewer than Hamilton has, in their 14 games the Calgary-based side has accumulated eight draws, twice as many as anyone else in the league. They’ve scored 14 goals, exactly half of them by Warschewski. Although they’ve got several quality players on the team the club is still missing a fistful of key players, though, including the dangerous Somalian winger Ali Musse, last season’s CPL Player of the Year, and William Akio, who’s out for the season. 

Dutch defender Daan Klomp is one of four CPL players with over 800 passes, a category led significantly by Forge FC’s Alexander Achinioti-Jönsson with nearly 900. And Calgary’s Diego Gutiérrez ranks fifth in the league with 22 tackles. Hamilton’s Malik Owolabi-Belewu ranks third with 25.

With a game in hand over every CPL team except seventh-place Valour, this is an important game for the Forge in the tightly bunched league. They don’t want to lose any more ground to first-place Ottawa, who’ve already beaten Hamilton twice, although both of those games were in the National Capitol. Those two losses make up six of the seven points by which the third-place Hammers trail Atlético. They’re one point back of York, and two up on Pacific and Vancouver.

Cavalry, which defeated Vancouver Whitecaps in the second leg of their Canadian Championship semifinal but were eliminated on away goals, are four points back of Forge in sixth place and currently sit out of the CPL playoffs. In their last eight league games, they have wins over Forge and Valour but have also had four draws, and losses to lowly Valour as well as a 2-1 loss at home to rising York.

Forge meanwhile, still needs to clean up some details on their defensive play. Momentary lapses have led to too many goals which have marred otherwise productive outings. They haven’t had a clean sheet since beating York 3-0 on June 1 and in two games against Ottawa surrendered a total of seven goals.