The record was broken the same way that it all started. With a clean sheet from Forge FC goalkeeper Jassem Koleilat.
The Hammers began the second half of their remarkable CPL season with a 2-0 home victory Friday night over Pacific FC, who stayed in the game until Nana Ampomah drew a penalty in the 78th minute which Dan Nimick quickly converted into a 1-0 lead. Then Ampomah himself converted a rebound three minutes later.
And Koleilat shut the door.
That win extended Forge’s unbeaten streak to 15 straight games, breaking the CPL record which the inaugural Hamilton team established from mid-July of 2019 to early October, before going on to win the first of their four league championships.
The streak is actually now up to 18 undefeated games and counting, including Canadian Championship wins over HFX Wanderers and CF Montréal and also an away draw in Montréal.
And on the horizon is another massive CanChamp match, Wednesday Aug. 13 against Vancouver Whitecaps, the best Canadian team in MLS. They are just one point out of first place in the U.S.-based league’s West Conference with a game in hand. The Hammers and the Caps will play the second half of that home-and-away in Vancouver in September.
Forge, with eight wins and seven draws, remains one point out of first place behind Atlético Ottawa and will try to maintain pace with the league-leaders, while creating distance from the six teams behind the top two, when they visit fourth-place HFX Wanderers Friday night on the east coast.
The Hammers opened the season with a 1-0 victory at home over reigning league champion Cavalry FC, with Koleilat making a couple of great saves to preserve the win and start a streak that no one could really see coming as Forge was changing over parts of its roster to open its third three-year cycle.
“It’s obviously nice to get a clean sheet,” Koleilat said Monday. “The guys in front of me I thank for that. I look back at some games and I do believe I played a part of that, just like everyone else on the team has. Keeping a clean sheet at home, especially for that record, it does have a special feeling. I think it’s something I’ll always hold close to my heart: to do it in front of our home fans who are so great.
“Obviously it’s a great achievement. We were the last team to do it and right now we’re just trying to stack it up even more. Like coach Bobby said, it’s one thing to break a record but it’s another to just keep breaking it. I think it gives us confidence and we’re just trying to keep it rolling right now. It’s a matter of momentum.”
Koleilat split time equally—almost to the minute—with Chris Kalongo last year but took over as No. 1 as playoffs approached and has remained there, especially with Kalongo injured much of the first part of the year. The native of Prague, who played fifth-tier pro in France, after growing up in Dubai where he learned soccer, is eligible to play for Czechia, Lebanon (his mother’s roots) and Canada, but hasn’t heard from any of those national programs.
At just 25, he might soon. He leads the CPL with seven shutouts in his 14 games, two ahead of three other keepers, and ranks fourth in saves. But many of his saves have been diving one-armed point-preservers as teams don’t get too many shots against the brick wall that is Forge’s league-stingiest defence, but when they do it’s often quick, hard and coming off a ball suddenly lobbed into trouble areas.
“I’d love to represent Canada,” he says. “But I never had even youth level contact from any of those nations. The way I’ve been treated here and the life I’ve been living here has been great and obviously representing Canada would be something nice to achieve. But I’m focusing step-by-step and game-by-game here.”
Koleilat had trained with Forge while he was in college at Iowa Western before being selected by LA FC in the 2023 MLS SuperDraft. When LA relegated him to their second team, he left after a year to join Forge: “I don’t think I’d say no to a team like this: it’s an attractive brand of football and you play in some big competitions: Concacaf and CanChamps. It’s nice to be part of.”
That’s the same rationale Nimick employed to choose Forge when he departed the Wanderers after two seasons in Halifax. Considering that his confident shot which broke a scoreless draw on Saturday was his 13th successful shot from the spot in 15 chances over two-and-a-half CPL seasons, it’s surprising to hear that Nimick didn’t even know he was blessed with that skill.
“Honestly it started in Halifax,” said Nimick, who grew up in Yorkshire, England but was born in Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador. “I never really took penalties before coming to Halifax, but we did a penalty shootout in pre-season and I won that and just went from there. It just seems that the teams I’ve played on have won a lot of penalty kicks and I’ve been lucky enough to stand up and put most of them away.
“My senior year in college (Western Michigan) I was the penalty-taker but I only took one penalty in college. It wasn’t until the pro game that I realized I was good at penalties.”
Bobby Smyrniotis says he’s not sure why Nimick is so proficient on penalty kicks, but is happy that he is.
“I’ll be honest, he doesn’t train a lot on it,” Smyrniotis said. “He’s not a guy that sits there in training and takes 50 of them. It’s the composure for a guy stepping up to the penalty spot. You see certain players who are not attackers or are not guys around the goal but they’ve got that calmness, that composure, and they know how to pick their spot and they go with it. Wherever that spot may be. And that’s what he has.”
And what Forge has is a record that is still ongoing. Smyrniotis said that his team hasn’t talked about it much, but now that they’ve bagged it, they want to keep adding to it. In June and July Forge have compiled five wins and three draws overall, including the 2-2 draw in Montréal which put them through to August’s Canadian Championship semifinal home match. They have outscored the opposition 18-7 in those eight games and in CPL alone, they are 5-2-0 in June and July, with a 16-5 margin in goals and three clean sheets.
“That’s something we take a lot of pride in as a club… not only going out there and winning games but setting the standard,” Smyrniotis said. “One of the things when I was given the great opportunity to lead this club in 2019, was making sure we had big moments in this organization and that we think big. It doesn’t matter who the players are; that’s the mentality of this club and that’s how this club grows for the future. We’re temporary… but this club will be here for a long time.
“As a coach and as players you’d hope to have another four to six points on the board but I think that’s every coach across the league. This is a testament to the club, this organization and the mentality around the club from everyone involved from the top to everyone who is inside that locker room.
“But you’ve got to keep on going, you’ve got another one coming up next week and if you keep on doing the right things… and we have… we’ll have success.”
Halifax, eliminated by Forge in the opening round of the Canadian Championship 3-1 back in May, sits fourth in the CPL, with 24 points, seven back of Forge.
Nimick returns to face his former teammates again and Koleilat, the keeper behind him, says, “Halifax is always a tricky match. They have a good crowd, they have good fans and the energy there is always tough. It is a good place to keep the streak going and if we get a result it will be a huge win for us and will just help us carry our momentum even further. They’re a tricky team to play… if we can get a result it will be great for our confidence.”
Nimick feels that the Hammers still have another gear and can reach a higher level with 13 games left in the regular season.
“I think if you look at our performances, there are a lot of games we feel we should have won and we ended up with ties,” he says. “That’s points we’ve left on the board that we’re looking to pick up in the second half of the season.”