As Malik Owolabi-Belewu prepared to depart their locker room for the final time, one-by-one his Forge teammates hugged him, squeezing tight, clinging on for that extra few seconds, some of them with tears visible on their already-crushed faces.
It was early Sunday night and The Hammers’ large and very physical left-side centre-back had just played his last game in spark orange and platinum steel, already signed to play for English League 2 side Chesterfield when his CPL contract formally expires at the end of the year. A couple of hours earlier, his Forge career and Forge’s sensational 2025 season had just slammed to a halt with a 1-0 loss to a road-patient Cavalry FC in the CPL’s Contenders Semi-Final at Hamilton Stadium.
The defending champion Cavs now head to Ottawa and their third straight title game; the back-to-back CPL Shield winners head into the history books and will not be a finalist for the first time in their storied seven-year existence.
Owolabi-Belewu was still three months shy of his 19th birthday when he joined Forge in the spring of 2022, and he spent three years here and played 67 games, anchoring a backline which surged into prominence this year as the rudder of a club which did not lose in its first 20 league games, and its first 24 games across all competitions.
“I think I contributed in a good way, so for this to end my era here obviously hurts,” he said. “It sucks for that to be the last Forge game of my current career. Obviously, the last home game to end like that is the worst feeling in the world.
“It’s a bitter feeling leaving on that kind of note, but once I get over this, looking back on the four seasons it will be a lot more ups than downs, a lot happier feel.”
The sombre scene in a reflective Forge dressing room was a 3-D metaphor for what head coach Bobby Smyrniotis had said only a few minutes earlier in his post-game media interviews.
“I (usually) don’t get emotional with the guys but I did inside the room,” Smyrniotis said. “Why? Because you realize as a coach that you don’t get to work with these guys again. This team won’t be the same again next year… it never is. On the final whistle and at the end, that’s the disappointing thing for me, as a coach and as a human being: I won’t be able to walk into a training session with all of the 25 players I’ve worked with this year. They’ve been fantastic, they’ve made me a better person, they’ve made me a better coach, they’ve made me think about things differently.
“The game finishes and it’s a bit of a weird feeling. It’s a bit like last year… you had your best season and here you are again inside a locker room with a group of guys who obviously are disappointed but you have to remind them: who they were this year; the style of football they played; the records they broke; the Shield that they won, which was won easily — from week 16 or 17, Forge was first and everyone was chasing. That’s nothing against the other teams — Ottawa has had an outstanding season and they’ve been great, but that’s who we were.”
Smyrniotis credited arch-rival Cavalry with converting a 57th-minute chance to score — Tobi Warschewski, whom his head coach Tommy Wheeldon Jr. labelled “the dragon slayer”, deftly seizing on Owolabi-Belewu’s misplay deep in the box to soft-touch a striker’s goal — and then successfully settling in to defend against a sustained Forge onslaught.
Hamilton, which controlled play through the first 20 minutes and after the Warschewski goal, defended well up the middle, got the ball through the first two-thirds of the field with front-foot possessions and forced veteran keeper Marco Carducci into a win-preserving save off a Rezart Rama header in the 96th minute, could not find its touch in the final third of the field. Despite 20 crosses into the box, they had only three shots directly on target.
Forge, which finished first during the regular season with Ottawa second just two points back and Cavalry third a whopping 16 points in arrears, had posted the largest goal differential in the league and in team history, had shattered its franchise goal-scoring record for a single season with 51 in 28 games and hadn’t lost a game at home all season. But they were beaten on back-to-back weekends at Hamilton Stadium, 2-1 by Atlético in the Championship Semifinal, then the 1-0 blank in the Contenders Semifinal.
It was, in fact, the third straight playoff game they’d lost at home after last year’s 1-0 loss to second-place Calgary, which beat them again for the league title the following week in Alberta.
“The game is simple, one team scored a goal, the other didn’t,” Smyrniotis said. “We can talk about all the nuances. I thought we were quite good to be honest, they had the chance in the box and they put it away and then it’s a playoff game, right? You have one team sitting and one team pushing and the other team is going to get counter-attacks when it’s 1-0.
“We couldn’t get a clear shot with so many defenders crowding the box.”
Smyrniotis also gave a nod to the Calgary counter-attacks mounted quite rapidly by (Ali) Musse and (Goteh) Ntignee.
Cavalry head coach Tommy Wheeldon Jr., who had his team well-prepared for this one, said that last year’s first playoff title win with a pair of post-season victories over Forge may have changed the balance in a no-love-lost rivalry between two physical — Calgary complained that Warschewski had been repeatedly roughed up, Hamilton’s Nana Ampomah had a bleeding hole in his shin — that has now seen the two squads meet 37 times over all competitions in just seven seasons.
“Against a fantastic side we need to make sure everybody was willing to defend at every possible moment knowing that we will create some really good chances,” Wheeldon said. “And we did, but what pleased me today was the way we played for each other.
“We did it against Forge last year in the semifinal to win in the same result,” midfielder Shamit Shome agreed.
While veteran Forge forward David Choinière had said last week that winning the Shield did not lead to any emotional let-down with a Champions Cup berth already secured, it was the second straight November that they’d followed a regular-season title by losing playoff games. And Smyrniotis brought that up on Sunday.
"Maybe you're not as hungry, and that's not to say our guys didn't want this, but sometimes when you eat at a nice steakhouse, you're not ready for the—"
Smyrniotis added that he and his coaching staff altered their approach heading into last season, after five years of building almost exclusively toward the CPL playoffs, and letting Canadian Championship and Concacaf qualifying opportunities arise out of that. But last year, and this, they prepared one style of team for the shorter tournaments and another for the longer CPL haul.
“Maybe I’ll change things next year to balance out both,” he said.
Forge captain Kyle Bekker, who’s played in 35 of the 37 games, and all 10 playoff matches against Cavalry, said he felt the match was actually a positive for Forge because of how they plugged the middle and kept pressing until the final whistle.
“Ultimately we didn’t take advantage of our chances,” he said. “Fair play to Calgary, they were disciplined, they bent, they didn’t break. It just comes down to us being more clinical in the final third. Tobi made a fantastic play for the goal and they made it stand up.
“But our trophy cabinet is still looking pretty good and we’re still playing in Champions Cup next year so we’ll be all right.”
Forge operates in three-year phases, and this was the start of one of those segments, with some significant changes on the back end, the return of Mo Babouli, the addition of striker Brian Wright, keeper Jassem Koleilat smashing the league clean-sheet record, and the emergence of 20-year-old Hoce Massunda into a bona fide pro and regular starter on the left wing.
“I told them at the beginning of the year I didn’t know exactly what we’d be, and we were absolutely brilliant,” Smyrniotis said. “There’s bitterness, obviously, at the end. When you’re at Forge you have to compete for trophies. You have to win trophies, bottom line. We won a trophy. You have to play in Champions League; we’ve not played in a Concacaf competition in only one year and that’s the year they changed the rules.
“It hurts not to be in the final because that’s what you’re used to, that’s the standard. But it’s not going to always be that way. This is tough because two weeks ago you’re on Cloud 9 and now it feels like nothing happened, but in the global scheme of things it’s been an absolutely brilliant season.
“This will sting for a couple of days and then you move on.”
As the 23-year-old Owolabi-Belewu left the stadium, he acknowledged that his four seasons in Hamilton have acted as a springboard to the next stages of his promising career.
“100 per cent,” he said, “I feel like I’ve not only developed in terms of my technical ability, my tactical understanding, but also in being able to lead more and I feel that’s something that helped off the pitch as well. My personality has grown, I’ve become more mature. I’ve learned a lot under this coaching staff and playing with these great players. It’s tough to take right now, but I will never forget my time here.”