After Wednesday’s worthy effort against the heavily favoured Vancouver Whitecaps, the Forge don’t even have the luxury of patting themselves on the back, because they need to put that back on the wheel again on Sunday afternoon.
So, after a gripping 2-2 draw with the MLS West Division contenders in the opening leg of the Canadian Championship semifinals, the Forge had to quickly switch focus from one team to another one, from one competition to a different one.
Only 12 hours after the final whistle of the Caps’ game, the Hammers were back at Hamilton Stadium preparing for Sunday’s (4 p.m.) battle for first place in the Canadian Premier League against visiting Atlético Ottawa, who sit second, a mere point back of the Forge. Some players were put through paces on the pitch, while others were in the strength and conditioning room.
In both locales, there was no chance to digest that they remarkably remain undefeated this year, 22 games in, and have positioned themselves to be able to reach the national championship final if they can win the return match in Vancouver in mid-September. They don’t deal in those kinds of futures; even a month is too far down the road.
“That’s out of the way, we just move on to the next one,” head coach Bobby Smyrniotis said Thursday morning. “The one thing you do say to the guys is that they had a good performance in a tough match, both teams showing respect for each other.
“But when you have the quick turnaround, you have to make sure that the guys who played last night have the recovery work and the guys who didn’t are sharp and ready to go for the weekend.”
That is the price of success, as Forge has known since its debut season, and which Ottawa, a very strong side, is now experiencing - because in soccer, with its multiple competitions, winning means being busier, with more significant games and more travel crammed into the same space. There’s no time for resting on your laurels because those laurels are only good until you have to earn the next ones. And that’s usually real soon. For Ottawa and Hamilton: this Sunday. Each will be playing their third important match in barely a week.
While Forge were wrestling the Whitecaps to a 2-2 draw, Ottawa was also in a national semifinal against a Vancouver team. Despite numerous scoring chances, they were upset 3-1 by fellow CPLers CF Vancouver, the league's cellar-dwellers, who had only one CPL victory coming into the game. After the loss, just their second across all competitions this season, Atlético had to fly right back across the country for a short entrh ramp into the third meeting with Forge.
The two teams have distanced themselves from the rest of the pack, and Ottawa has led for most of the season, seemingly scoring goals at will (a tendency which should give them confidence when they host CF Vancouver in the second leg of their semifinal). But Forge’s league record 19 games without a league loss has inched them past Ottawa, and they have closed the goals-scored gap to just two with recent scoring explosions. And Hamilton has allowed fewer against than any team.
Each 2025 game between the two 2022 CPL championship finalists has concluded in a draw; 2-2 in Hamilton in mid-May’s School Day Match with Kevin dos Santos and Sam Salter scoring for the visitors and Nana Ampomah and Amadou Koné for Forge. In Ottawa at the end of May—three days after Forge had eliminated CF Montréal in the national quarter-final—Ballou Tabla scored in stoppage time to earn Atlético a 1-1 draw with Kyle Bekker scoring early for Forge.
“I think they’re a team always prepared to play each match,” Smyrniotis says of Ottawa. “They’re the same team from the start of the season to now: they keep their same shape, they do similar things when they play. We need to find the right energy for this match, that’s the important thing for us, and be on the front foot.
“We have different ways we’ve played against them; one way we played against them here and one way we played against them in Ottawa—there was a reason for that because it was right after the Montréal game—but both are effective.
“We’re pretty healthy, we’ve got the guys we want to play and a good rotation in the squad as well.”
Ottawa likes to play a possession game with a lot of unchallenged passes back and forth, not advancing until they can spot a portal for a quick strike. David Rodriguez and Manny Aparicio try to get the ball to Salter or Tabla, or take the shot themselves. In the Nation’s Capital, Atlético were credited with 600 passes as a team, nearly double what Forge used.
They’ve got three players among the CPL’s top six scorers—Salter’s dozen is three clear of anyone else, and David Rodriguez and Tabla have notched seven and six, respectively—and three of the top six assist leaders: leader Rodriguez, midfielder Juan Castro, and Salter. The only CPL player within 140 completions of defender Noah Abatneh’s 1268 accurate passes is his teammate and fellow defender Loïc Cloutier, with Manny Aparicio sitting fourth overall. Hamilton’s Dan Nimick ranks third.
Forge spreads its attack around more—they’ve had a democratic total of 15 players score goals this season—but Brian Wright is tied for third in CPL goals with seven, and seems to be playing with more certainty around the net. Since he arrived this season from York United, he’s put himself. “I think at times earlier this year, you could see the chances that I was missing, and I think it was more so me putting too much pressure on myself,” he said Wednesday night. “But I was focusing on doing the right things to help the team, and I started scoring goals.”
Forge should have some momentum from extracting a draw from the Whitecaps after falling quickly behind when the Caps scored twice to overtake Ampomah’s opening marker. But Ampomah’s bald steal of Vancouver’s Bjørn Utvik’s awful misplay and feed to Wright got that one back in a hurry.
That upped the streak to 22 games without a loss since the campaign began way back in April.
“I don’t know if it’s momentum from that…it’s the fact that we keep going,” Smyrniotis said. “We take pride that (streak) didn’t stop. But as I said in the press conference, you didn’t see anyone happy after that game…and that’s the sign of who we are. They knew it was going to be a tough match for both teams, and we gave ourselves a shot moving forward. When you leave that game and it’s more positive than negative, it gives you a better outlook of what’s coming in front.”
And what’s coming is Atlético, who will be motivated by the chance to take over first on the road, but also by what happened Wednesday night in Vancouver. While there could be some form of psychological letdown, a humbled team is generally a dangerous one if they put the loss in the right place and use it for corrective fuel.
“Sunday’s a different beast,” Smyrniotis predicts. “They’ll be ready.”