What? They play the same team twice within five days, but there’s something different on the line in each of them?
That’s what looms on the immediate horizon for Forge FC as they visit Halifax on Saturday to play HFX Wanderers in a Canadian Premier League match. Then on Wednesday, May 7, the Wanderers return the ‘favour’, traveling to Hamilton for a 7 p.m. appointment against Forge. Only this time, it doesn’t count in the CPL standings: it’s a win-or-you’re-done match in the first round of the TELUS Canadian Championship.
Soccer players, and their most ardent followers, are used to this kind of mental multitasking, but to the casual sports fan, it can be difficult to grasp that it’s a long-standing soccer tradition for teams to be pursuing more than one title at the same time.
To cite the most extreme example, in 2020 Bayern Munich of Germany – with Canadian superstar Alphonso Davies in a headlining role---won six major pieces of “hardware,” which is soccer parlance for ‘trophy’ or ‘title’.
One was the German elite league title, and another was their version of the national championship tournament, which includes every men’s professional club in the country, from the highest level to the very lowest.
Those two are equivalent to what both Hamilton and Halifax are chasing in the next few days.
The Canadian Championship is Canada’s highest-ranked domestic men’s professional championship and the top 14 professional teams in the country are eligible to vie for it, including all eight CPL teams, the three Canadian MLS teams (Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal) and senior (League1) champions from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C.
There is a lot at stake in this tournament, which begins with a single-knockout preliminary round this month, moves to home-and-home knockout quarterfinals later this month and in July, then two-leg semifinals in August/September and the finals in October.
The Canadian winner advances directly to October’s Concacaf Champions Cup against the survivors of other national championships from North and Central America and the Caribbean. And the winner of that represents Concacaf in the FIFA World Club Championship which Bayern won as part of its six-trophy haul in 2020.
Vancouver Whitecaps have won the last three Canadian championships and have earned their way into the Concacaf Champions Cup semifinals this year, and have defeated Messi an Inter Miami in the first leg of that home-and-home.
Forge, meanwhile, have qualified three times in their six-year history for the Concacaf Champions Cup, losing to legendary Mexican sides each time. In 2022, they rode a string of stirring qualifying matches to become the first CPL team ever to qualify for the Cup. The Hammers then made it back in 2023 by winning the CPL championship, which comes with a direct berth into Concacaf. Earlier this year, they played in Concacaf again, after winning another automatic berth as CPL regular-season winners.
That route back to the Champions Cup—by taking one of the two berths allotted to the CPL—is still wide open for Hamilton, but another avenue to the prestigious event is through the Canadian championship. With 41 countries in the region, there is only one berth available from the Canadian championships…and that goes to the domestic tournament winners.
Forge made it to the Canadian championship semifinals last year and lost on away goals to Toronto FC after beating York United in the opening round and pulling off the massive upset of MLS side CF Montréal in the quarter-finals.
They were also finalists in the postponed 2020 Canadian final, which was played in 2022, when TFC won on the sixth penalty kick. In 2021, they were beaten on the 11th penalty kicks in the semifinals by CF Montréal.
In this year’s Canadian championships, the Hammers are on the toughest side of the bracket. First, they must get past the Wanderers, who stand second in the CPL with three wins and a draw, two points up on Forge, who have two wins and two draws. Halifax has improved this year and has shown an improved ability to put the ball into the opponents’ net.
And the winner of that sudden-death game advances to another tough round: against the winner of Toronto-v-Montréal in the quarterfinal.
Forge Head Coach Bobby Smyrniotis always preaches that his team must focus only upon the task directly ahead, so that means it’s all about the CPL regular season until after Saturday’s game in Halifax. He’s exhorting his club not to fall prey to the brief but punitive 15-20 minutes of diminished work ethic, which has cost them four points in the standings over the past two league games, both draws.
After Saturday, the club will zero in on the Canadian Championships, again against the Wanderers. And it doesn’t get any easier after that. Six days later, they’ll host Atlético Ottawa at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, May 13, in the popular School Day Match, a regular-season game. Ottawa is tied with Halifax atop the league table with 10 points, has been scoring goals at a prodigious rate, and still has motivation from losing the CPL title game to Forge in 2022 in Ottawa.
Three games in 11 games against the other two teams in the CPL’s top three: two matches in league play, one in Canadian Championship play.
Players know how to keep them straight and separate. Now you do too.
