Seventh Heaven.
That’s where Forge FC wants to find itself after the CPL’s Summit Showdown Sunday afternoon. If they can beat second-place-by-a-whisper Ottawa Atlético in the Championship Semi-final Sunday (2 p.m.) at Hamilton Stadium, the CPL Shield winners would advance directly to their seventh straight appearance in the league final on Sunday, Nov. 9. They would also get to host that final and try to win their fifth league title to become the first club to capture the double: the CPL Shield and Final.
This is the Canadian Premier League’s seventh season and Forge has reached the final pairing in all of the previous six. Their only losses were to Pacific at home in 2021 and in Calgary to Cavalry last year. Those are, coincidentally, the only two other seasons Forge has finished atop the league table.
“There’s a lot of advantages to winning this game,” Forge Sporting Director and Head Coach Bobby Smyrniotis says. “There’s home field for the final. It gives you two weeks from one game to the other.
“So you approach it like it’s a do-or-die type of game. That’s the way with any sort of playoff game in any sport. Whatever the series is — three out of five, four out of seven — it’s the most important game you have in front of you.”
Forge clinched the CPL Shield, and the automatic berth into next winter’s Concacaf Champions Cup, with a dominant 3-0 home victory over York United last weekend to complete an undefeated regular season at Hamilton Stadium. Earlier, Ottawa had become just the second team to not lose a CPL game at home, so Forge earning the right to play the Semifinal at home was important.
While Sunday’s winner advances, the loser will still host a home playoff game, next weekend, in the “Contender Semifinal” against the winner of York and Cavalry, to be played in Calgary, also this Sunday. York went into hostile territory and beat HFX Wanderers in Halifax on penalty kicks Wednesday night in one of the all-time great CPL playoff games.
Smyrniotis said it’s helpful coming off such a decisive title-clinching game against their closest regional rival.
“Yeah I think when you look at last year we had locked up the Shield I think three weeks before the season ended and our games after that weren’t great as the season ended,” he said. “So maybe that had an effect on us.
“The morale in the group is great after a fantastic season; you get your second Shield in a row and that’s not an easy feat. That gives a lot of confidence to the group and that’s always an important thing going into playoff games. You want to feel good, you want to feel like your processes are working on the pitch. They have been working the past few weeks very well and that’s always a help.”
In the four regular-season games against the Atléti, the Hammers tied three: 2-2 in front of a CPL record crowd of nearly 18,000 in May’s School Day Match; 1-1 July 12 in Ottawa; and 1-1 in September in Ottawa. They won 2-0 August 17 in Hamilton, which would have given Hamilton the tie-breaker should the two teams who’d gone neck-and-neck almost all season finished in a dead-heat for first place. No tie-breaker required.
Forge has had a brilliant season so far and emphasize that it’s not over, with at least two of its biggest games remaining. But gleaming amidst all of their other heady accomplishments there are a couple of numerical nuggets.
While they recorded 13 clean sheets — Keeper Jassem Koleilat smashing the league record with that Baker’s Dozen — Forge were shut out just once, a scoreless draw way back on May 3 in Halifax.
And since the league went to 28 games in 2021, no team had lost fewer than five games, but Forge suffered only two defeats this year in regular-season play. They came after a 20-game CPL record undefeated streak of 20 games and overall 24-game undefeated string, losing 4-1 at Cavalry Aug. 30 and 2-1 two weeks later away to Valour.
“There are a few things in there,” Smyrniotis said of the absurdly low loss total. “We started in January which we know is tough; there’s always a lull in the season and we were able to beat that, but maybe it did hit us a bit in September. But then you also look at how you’ve done it: with sandwiching in the toughest schedule of any team in the Canadian Championship: Round 1 is against Halifax not an easy match; Round 2, you’re playing twice against Montréal with one of those games butting up to a game against Ottawa, who we were always fighting for the top position; then you’ve got two games against Vancouver Whitecaps which again butt up to a game against Ottawa.
“So it was a tough schedule and there were a lot of variables in there and I think that makes it even more special. It’s always hard to say but this may be the best group we’ve had here and we’ve had some excellent groups.
“It’s a new cycle for us so we had some changes and obviously it’s worked out well: most points in a season for the league; only two losses, a goal differential of 29, the most goals we’ve scored, 24 games unbeaten so there’s a lot of positives.
“But here’s the thing with this club, you just have to keep on going.”
One of the reasons that makes Sunday’s head-to-head matchup of the league’s top two teams so compelling is that with all that each side has put together, including just two losses for the Hammers, they narrowly edged out the Atléti by just two points, halfway between a draw and a win over nearly seven months of CPL action.
So these are definitely the two teams who should be here, one win away from the league final.
“One hundred per cent,” Smyrniotis agreed. “Each team had an opportunity to do things. One way, you could say we narrowly beat them; another way you could say we took over first place in Week 17 and never gave it up. Same thing last year. We took over first place in Week 18 and never looked back. That’s the strength of another accomplishment: keeping that consistency. Although another club is chasing you, they’re always chasing. That’s something we did very well this year.
“Playoffs are totally different, I’ve found the past six years. Now we go on to single matches where anything can happen. This is football, teams can change how they’re going to play. Whether it’s us, whether it’s them, it’s all about the final result. That’s the only thing people will always remember other than the 2023 final with (Tristan) Borges’s Olympico.”
Ottawa comes in with the runaway Golden Boot winner, Sam Salter, who fell one short of his bid to be the first CPLer to score 20 in a season. David Rodriguez and Ali Musse finished first and second in assists and Noah Abatneh, the still-dangerous Manny Aparicio and Loic Cloutier were 1-2-3 in total passes. Veteran winger Ballou Tabla is always a dangerous go-to threat and Canadian Richard Ennin, who scored in the 89th minute to beat Wanderers in a tough setting Saturday, is now finding his CPL legs after spending the past eight seasons in several European Leagues.
“They’ve got four more goals than us and when you look at it, it’s their three guys across the top,” Smyrniotis said. “That’s the main part of their production: they’re really good but you also know where it’s coming from. That’s the way we have to look at things as coaches: how we neutralize that and that will be very much a key to what we do. It’s not a matter of how we are off the ball but how we are on the ball; if we’re dominant on the ball you start putting those guys into more defensive roles. That’s the most important thing: how good we are on the ball before we decide not to be good on the ball and do things a bit differently.
“We’ve played some excellent football against Ottawa and probably have been unlucky in two of the games not to come out with a win. We know the formula that works: we’ve seen our guys in the last couple of weeks against Cavalry, against York, just bring it up another notch on the pitch and so we expect that on Sunday.”
He won’t tell us, though, what to expect in his starting lineup on Sunday. Of course linchpins like the stout backline and captain Kyle Bekker, who has two goals this season against Ottawa, are automatics and likely so is striker Brian Wright, coming off a career high 12 CPL goals, including two definitive ones against York last weekend. For just the fourth time this year, but second game in a row, Wright was flanked in that game by 20-year-old Hoce Massunda and seventh-year Forge star David Choinière who is back at the top of his game. But there are also Borges, Mo Babouli, Viktor Klonaridis, and more. A lot of talented depth, which can keep the pressure on Ottawa, perhaps tire them out. But the high-octane Atléti are also persistent in their attack and can still be dangerous late.
“I’m a guy who doesn’t decide until the last moment,” Smyrniotis smiled enigmatically. “When all the guys are ready it’s a little bit of a feeling, it’s a little bit of how you want to start a game, a little how you think you can impact the game.
“It’s not that if you start one way it’s going to be weaker than starting another way or that you can’t make changes. I think we can keep our tempo high with whatever players we go with, it’s just a matter of the little nuances of how we want to defend, where we want to attack from and who is the best to start that way and who is the best to finish.”
Don’t miss out — get your tickets for Sunday’s showdown here.