Capped by a landmark performance in front of an appreciative home audience, Forge FC woke up on the Civic Holiday Monday in the lofty position they had not occupied since the second week of the season.
All alone in first place.
Saturday’s thorough 5-0 dismantling of sixth-place Valour FC was the largest home victory margin in the seven-year history of the franchise and held up throughout the weekend to move the Hammers one point beyond Atlético Ottawa, who were held to a scoreless draw by visiting York United on Sunday.
The rout kept Forge undefeated this season, extending their CPL record to a mind-boggling 17th consecutive match without a loss (10 wins, 7 draws) and 20th overall, including two wins and a draw in Canadian Championship play.
“It’s always good for the psyche and the mentality of the players,” Forge head coach Bobby Smyrniotis said Monday. “But now you know you have a different responsibility; it’s not about chasing; it’s about staying on top. You are being chased, and that’s different. As a club, we’ve been used to both scenarios and have a way of dealing with it mentally.
“It’s somewhat similar to last year; standing first in the first couple of weeks and then not again until week 17. And we’re in week 18 this year.”
Forge did what they had to do against Valour, jumping out to a quick start, playing on the front foot, scoring three times in the first half, getting a sublime control-and-feed display from captain Kyle Bekker in a holding midfielder role, and a week after two first-year Forge players scored on the road, receiving goals from veteran pros Tristan Borges, Mo Babouli, Nana Ampomah, David Choinière and Noah Jensen. Most of them came via decisive decisions in and around the box, which has been a point of emphasis for the Forge in recent training sessions.
For Borges and Jensen, it was the first goal of their seasons, which had been affected by injuries. That made it 15 different players who’ve found the back of the net this year, and in the language of soccer, that speaks directly to roster depth.
The Hammers face some higher-level competition over the eight days which begin with the third game of this year’s 905 Derby against surging York in Toronto Saturday afternoon, followed by the biggest game of the year so far — next Wednesday with MLS powerhouse Vancouver Whitecaps visiting Hamilton Stadium — in the opening leg of the Canadian Championship semi-final and then a battle, presumably for first place, the following Sunday at home against Ottawa.
The momentous match against the Whitecaps — who’ve just signed Thomas Müller, one of the world’s most impactful players in the 21st Century — comes three months to the day after the Forge’s 1-1 home draw with Atlético as the two pace-setters continued to pull away from the rest of the league.
Since the start of June, Forge has five wins and two draws in CPL play — including a 1-1 draw in Ottawa three weeks ago — and a win and a draw to eliminate CF Montréal from the Canadian Championship. They’ve outscored league opponents 14-5 in that stretch. After some trouble converting good scoring chances in the spring, as the weather warmed, so has their collective scoring touch.
“Early in the season, I talked about that maybe we weren’t efficient enough, but the thing was, we were doing all the right things,” Smyrniotis says. “And as long as you’re doing the right things, you get the ball into the right areas of the pitch and you create the chances, you’re going to score. You’ve got the quality in this group that the ball is going to go in the net. We were never in a situation where we weren’t doing that, which would have been the point where you’d have concern.
“We’ve been happy with the group: As with every coach, you believe you should’ve had a few more points on the board, but here’s where we are: we’re in a good spot. The most important thing is that the guys keep playing with the energy that they’ve shown in the last couple of games. Saturday night, they enjoyed their football and that’s the thing I’ve tried to relay to them more and more: we’ve put in all this hard work during the week, so enjoy yourselves, express yourselves more, on the pitch.”
Ampomah has certainly taken that advice. He scored his fifth goal and added his second assist of the campaign, and he was directly involved in all five Hammer goals. If soccer were scored the same as hockey, he’d have had four assists: the one he was credited with on a perfect feed to Jensen, one on a second-last pass, and two off of shots that were deflected.
Those two were among his four shot attempts, and he had 11 touches in the box, created three chances and completed six dribbles. If he can stay on top of his game like that, he’ll draw extra attention from the Whitecaps’ primary defenders, and before that, the York rearguard, which should open other gaps.
York has the CPL’s second-leading scorer in Julian Altobelli, who has nine goals, and the Toronto side will be looking to snap a three-way tie for third place in the standings and narrow the 11-point gap between themselves and the top two. Forge and York have played to 2-2 draws at each other’s stadium so far this year and since the draw here in late June, the Nine Stripes have lost 4-3 to Ottawa in the second leg of their Canadian Championship quarter-final, then have defeated Valour, Vancouver FC and Cavalry, right in Calgary, and earned the draw in Ottawa.
“I think the most important thing about this game is that you just keep pace with Ottawa and at a distance from the pack,” Smyrniotis said. “You want to try to keep it that way as long as you can.
“They’re a tough opponent. They’re very defensively resilient and have shown that. We want to keep up what we’re doing so far. We’ve got a busy stretch of games and we’re playing some excellent football: very good defensively; very good in what we’re doing on the attack; and most importantly, we’re playing some very good football as a team.
“We want to keep going, with confidence.”
It’s that confidence which has the Forge staff and players highly respectful of the Whitecaps but not in awe nor in any way fearful of the three-time defending national champions, who made it all the way to the Concacaf Champions Cup final, where they lost 5-0 before over 33,000 fans in Mexico on June 1. They were just the third Canadian team to reach the Cup final, after the Montréal Impact in 2015 and Toronto FC in 2018.
They’re currently in second place in the MLS West, one point behind San Diego, but they’ve got a game in hand and recently went into San Diego and escaped with a tie. Like Forge, they’ve got a tight week coming up, playing at 10th-place San Jose on Saturday, then flying to Hamilton for Wednesday’s semi-final opener, then hosting 11th-place Houston four nights later.
The Caps have lost dominant Serbian centre-back Ranko Veselinović for the season to a torn ACL. And just a couple of weeks ago, the Caps sold young Ecuadorian star midfielder Pedro Vite to Mexico’s Pumas UNAM in what was reported as the second-largest transfer fee Vancouver had ever received, behind only the 2015 deal that delivered Canadian legend Alphonso Davies to Bayern Munich.
But they used some of that money to sign Müller to strengthen their drive to win a first MLS Cup, and also to win a fourth Canadian Championship. While he’s 35, he was still scoring and setting up goals for Bayern Munich last season, and his game — based on uncanny timing, formation recognition and high-level experience — doesn’t age as quickly as that of many speed-based forwards. And he doesn’t have to be the sole leader for Vancouver, nor play a full 90, because of the roster depth. He should prove to be, even on artificial turf rather than the grass he’s played on his whole senior career, a dangerous complementary attacker to primary centre-forward Brian White.
“It’s a quality squad,” Smyrniotis said of the Caps. “They’ve brought in a new coach who’s given them a distinct identity, and they’ve shown it through their Champions Cup run and with what they’ve done in league play, apart from maybe a few weeks when some results didn’t go quite their way.
“They work well as a unit both on and off the ball, and it will be an excellent match.”