This late in the season, top teams—or those who aspire to being top teams—have to have short memories.
So, when Forge FC goes into Ottawa for Sunday’s crucial Canadian Premier League showdown against Atlético, both teams must think about only the 90 minutes at hand, not the 90 minutes earlier this week which derailed their hopes for a Canadian Championship.
Forge was outgunned 4-0 in Vancouver on Tuesday night, sending the MLS’s high-soaring Whitecaps, on a 6-2 aggregate, into the single-game national final Oct. 1, against another BC side, Vancouver FC, which is enjoying the greatest moment in franchise history, eliminating Ottawa on a 4-3 aggregate despite Thursday’s 2-1 loss to Atlético.
It was a classic example of why national Cup tournaments are so attractive: Ottawa has been engaged in a wire-to-wire neck-and-neck battle with Forge for first place in the CPL, while the Eagles languish 35 points behind them in last place in the league table and have been mathematically eliminated from post-season consideration.
In the hunt for the CPL Shield, emblematic of a first-place finish in the regular season and accompanied by an automatic berth in next year’s Concacaf Champions Cup, Forge leads Ottawa by a mere two points, 49 to 47. If they win, they’d be down to magic numbers, five points up with four league games to play and the season’s series in their favour. It’s the last time the two sides will meet this year, and Forge has a win—2-0 in Hamilton Aug. 17—and a pair of draws, 2-2 in Hamilton before a league-record crowd in May and 1-1 in Ottawa in mid-July, three days after the Hammers eliminated CF Montréal from the Canadian Championship tournament.
If Atlético wins, they’ll move a point ahead of Forge, who beat them right in Ottawa for the 2022 playoff title, and Ottawa would have a leg up on Hamilton over the final month of play.
A third draw between the two sides who’ve dominated the standings this season would complicate all the math and extend the top-of-table tension.
“It feels like a final,” says Forge captain Kyle Bekker, who scored the opening goal in each of the Hammers’ last two games against Atléti. “I think it is a final in terms of where we are in the standings. We know this game can dictate how the rest of the season is going to go.”
He adds that the thorough loss in Vancouver is already in the rearview mirror, although it was a bitter pill to swallow at the time. The Hammers – like most top domestic club sides around the world who’ve had lots of international competition—are accustomed to rallying from setbacks in quick order.
“It has to be behind us,” Bekker said of the loss to the Whitecaps. “There are a lot of lessons we can learn from it. The beauty about sports is that as long as you learn when you fail, you don’t really fail.
“We gave up three set pieces over two legs; two corners and we gave a penalty off a corner. We spoke about it going into the second game that when you play these games—the Concacaf Games, the Canadian Championship games, knock-out style games—it comes down to fine margins. And set pieces are a big part of that. I think we’ve given up four set-piece goals this year and three of them came against Vancouver over two legs. So it’s something we need to just course-correct and that comes down to who wants it more.
“We know we have a group here that is capable of doing that, who have that attitude, so it’s just about re-setting, finding the joy again, and going again.”
Veteran Ottawa midfielder Manny Aparicio, who deftly set up David Rodriguez’s hope-stirring goal Thursday night against Vancouver FC and was Bekker’s teammate at Toronto FC more than a decade ago, had a similar take on rebounding for Sunday.
“Our heads are down right now a little bit,” he said directly after Thursday’s loss in which Ottawa completely owned the second half but couldn’t nail the series equalizer.
“But we take tonight to sulk about it, if we want, then we show up tomorrow ready to go for Forge on Sunday.”
Aparicio is one of the cogs in an Atlético offensive machine that heads many CPL categories. They’ve scored the most goals (46) and allowed the second-fewest (24) behind Forge’s league-stingiest 19. Each team has a plus-22 goal differential, exactly double the next best (Cavalry) in the league. Aparicio has made the most passes in the league at 1468 and the rest of the top four are also in this game, Hamilton’s Dan Nimick has 1425, while Ottawa’s Loïc Cloutier and Noan Abatneh are also around the 1400 mark,
Atlético’s heavy offence is the result of scoring talent but also of relentless attacking. They simply turn up the volume; leading the league in shots and in total scoring attempts with 264, a whopping 50 more than any other team.
Rodriguez heads the CPL with seven pure assists, while Hamilton youngster Hoce Massunda is second with five, and Rodriguez also stands third in goal scoring with seven. That Golden Boot almost certainly will go to Ottawa forward Sam Salter who has 17 goals, six more than No. 2 Tiago Coimbra of HFX Wanderers.
“Salter has had a fantastic season,” Bekker said. “He’s definitely somebody you have to be aware of. He’s a threat, and he’s in good form.
“We know what Ottawa is all about; they haven’t really changed too much over the course of the season, so for us it’s about finding the energy again. We have to replicate how we came out the last time they were here and we beat them.”
Since that 2-0 victory behind goals by Bekker and striker Brian Wright and the shutout from Jassem Koleilat, who leads the league with 11 clean sheets, Forge has scuffled a bit. Their CPL record unbeaten streak stretched one more game after that to a phenomenal 20, but was followed by a 4-1 loss in Calgary, a solid 1-0 victory over Halifax, an upset 2-1 defeat at Valour and Tuesday’s 4-0 blanking against the Whitecaps.
“Sports is funny,” Bekker said of the recent slippage. “Regardless of how good you are, how well you do, how consistently you play for a larger part of the season, the moment things don’t go well it’s easy to start searching for things. But there are ebbs and flows over the course of every single season. It’s just a matter of how you handle those and how quickly you can recalibrate.”