It is a description every centre back in every league on the planet would love to have attached to his or her game: ‘big, and plays with bite.’

And now with today’s announcement Valour FC has added Rocco Romeo on loan from Toronto FC, the top club in the Canadian Premier League might have found the piece to replace Andrew Jean-Baptiste and join their collection of talented defenders.

“It’s one we were working on with TFC for a while,” Valour GM and head coach Rob Gale told valourfootball.club. “They’ve got an abundance of talentedyoung central defenders and these conversations have been going on since October.

“He’s got a bit of an edge to his defending. He’s got some bite to his tackle. He likes to close down and really likes defending. He’s got great stature and is the tallest player on our team at close to 6-5.

“He’s good on the ball, likes to play out of the back but most importantly it’s his defensive quality and aggression we really like. He’s definitely got all the tools.”

Valour had hoped to add Romeo – a product of Toronto who has international experience for Canada at the U-17 and U-20 levels – in a package deal with Julian Dunn, who played so brilliantly last year for the club at the Island Games, at the start of this season.

But Dunn was injured this spring and when TFC hired and then fired Chris Armas after just 11 matches this season and then replaced him with Javier Perez on an interim basis, well, that organization had other pressing priorities.

That, plus the fact Romeo was on loan to Danish club HB Koge through June made it impossible to get an agreement done until now.

“Like we discussed with Julian last year, we reached out and talked to them about bringing a centre-back to us this year to make sure we had the depth we needed,” said Gale. “We had discussed the pair and then Julian was injured in preseason and Rocco was on loan in Denmark, so we knew we had to wait for him to return in June and then the new coach wanted to see him in Florida, then there was the coaching change in TFC…

“So, all of that just kept putting back his potential arrival day and once we were into the bubble you couldn’t add players. We’re delighted now to have finally gotten our man and it’s obviously timely with Andrew’s injury.”

Valour begins a four-match road trip this Saturday against FC Edmonton, followed by visits to Pacific FC, Cavalry FC and back to Edmonton. The squad hopes the return from injury of Jose Galan and Brett Levis, the arrival of Arnold Bouka Moutou and the addition of Romeo will make their already-stingy defending that much more sturdy.

“The original plan was to bring Rocco in and pair him alongside the group that we’ve got with Drew (Jean-Baptiste), Amir (Soto) and Rodrigo (Reyes),” said Gale “With that we would have had four Concacaf defenders who have international playing experience. That was a big part of what we wanted to do – to give us the strength, depth and versatility from the back forward. We also have young Tony Mikhael to play alongside all these guys and learn from them.

“We thought we’d have five with good versatility, so now it will be four.”