2025 CPL Regular Season — Match #53
Pacific FC vs. Halifax Wanderers FC
July 12 at 3 p.m. PT/7 p.m. AT
Starlight Stadium in Langford, British Columbia
Live: OneSoccer // Tickets available here
Pacific FC and the Halifax Wanderers will round out the first half of their Canadian Premier League campaigns on Saturday, as they get set to do battle at Starlight Stadium.
After having had a bit of a break, with Pacific having last played on June 27th and the Wanderers on July 1st, both will enter this game recharged and ready to tackle a crucial stretch of league games.
Once you hit the halfway mark of a campaign, the urgency tends to ramp up as the standings start to come into focus, as this is usually a good time for teams to take stock of where they’re at.
For Pacific, they’ll certainly look to this next stretch as a pivotal moment in their season, as they find themselves in a tough position near the halfway point.
No matter what happens in this game, they’ll hit that 14-game mark still outside of a playoff spot, as they enter this weekend sitting six points behind fifth-place York United. For a team looking to reach the postseason for a sixth straight campaign, that leaves them with plenty to do over the second half of the year, and that’s not lost on them.
With four of their next six games all coming at home, they’ll want to rack up some wins, especially when seeing that their lone two victories in CPL play came at Starlight Stadium, a number they’d love to at least double across that upcoming stretch.
“We have to start on the front foot,” Pacific FC head coach, James Merriman, said this week. “We're at home. We know that trips are not easy when we go out to the East Coast, so when teams come across the country to play us, especially in an afternoon game at Starlight in front of our fans, we need to be on the front foot and put the pressure on.”
As for the Wanderers, they’re looking to build momentum after picking up crucial back-to-back home wins, which have pushed them to third in the table. Given that they only sit four points behind first-place Atlético Ottawa, they could make up some crucial ground in the title race when seeing that Ottawa hosts second-place Forge (who are three points ahead of the Wanderers) in a top-of-the-table clash earlier on Saturday.
With a trip to Ottawa looming next week, the Wanderers would love to at least keep pace in the title race heading into that game, and the best way to do that is to pick up a victory in this Coastal Clash.
That’ll be easier said than done, as they lost both of their matches at Starlight Stadium in 2024, having last beaten Pacific on the road in June of 2022, but this would be a pretty good time for them to change that form.
“We know that they have a lot of key players,” Wanderers’ head coach, Patrice Gheisar, said of Pacific. “They're very organized, they’re a possession-based team that has a lot of good ideas, and the travel is challenging for us, but they travelled to us last year and were able to get results.”
“There's no excuses, there's only our commitment to produce results. It’s a smaller field, but we will still have our energy, which has been our secret sauce, and we will not allow them to get any rhythm and try to disrupt them as much as possible.”
In terms of player availability, Pacific will only be without Daniel de Pauli, as they’re otherwise healthy, long-term injuries to Ronan Kratt and Juan Quintana aside, while the Wanderers have everyone on their roster available for selection, including Julian Dunn.
Photo Credit: Trevor MacMillan/HFX Wanderers FC
3 THINGS TO WATCH
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Can Pacific still harness momentum from Salish Sea Derby? It feels like a lifetime ago, but Pacific’s last game happened to be one of the best in CPL history, as they contested a thrilling 4-4 draw against rivals Vancouver FC. For a team that had scored just eight goals in CPL action heading into that match, it was a much-needed offensive outburst, as they matched 50% of their total output in 90 minutes of action. Now, however, with such a lengthy break since that game, the challenge will be for Pacific to build off what they showed in that game. In particular, they’ll want to continue to be dangerous on set-pieces, having scored twice from those situations in that match, and they will be relying on Yann Toualy to build on the fact that he also opened his professional account on the day. They won’t need to score four goals every game, but putting up two with more regularity would be a good start, given that was only the third game in which they’ve scored multiple goals, as they’ve won the two previous matches where they had that sort of offensive output.
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Tiago Coimbra rounding into form for Wanderers: In their last match out, the Wanderers claimed a big 3-1 victory, doing so thanks to a brace from Tiago Coimbra, who scored the first and third goals to help seal an important comeback for his team. With that, his first brace of the season, that gives him six goals in 2025, with five of them coming in his last seven matches. Now starting to get up to full fitness after some injury trouble, he’s started four straight matches heading into this match, after starting just one of his first eight appearances this season. It hasn’t mattered if he’s started or come off the bench, given that his six goals have come in just over 500 minutes, but the Wanderers have benefitted from his goals, sitting with a record of 4W-1D-0L when he scores. If this latest stretch is a sign that he’s going to be able to accumulate more minutes in the second half of the season, watch out, as he now remains just three goals behind leader Sam Salter in the golden boot race despite his limited time on the pitch - if he can keep racking up starts and goals, he could very well make a push for that trophy. Certainly, the Wanderers wouldn’t mind that, as it’ll help their quest for the CPL Shield, so it’s a win-win for them.
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Ndom and Meilleur-Giguère face off in battle of top CBs: This game will be special for both Pacific fans and one key Wanderers player, as centre back Thomas Meilleur-Giguère will make his return to Vancouver Island after five seasons with the club, in which he lifted the North Star Cup and became one of the league’s top defenders. Now a key member of these high-flying Wanderers, he’s played a key role in their turnaround, as they’ve conceded just 13 goals in 13 games after conceding a league-high 43 goals in 28 games last year. After helping Pacific concede just 32 goals in 28 games last season, he’s done well to build off that, showing why it’ll be bittersweet for fans to welcome him back to Starlight Stadium. At the same time, Pacific can be pleased with Meilleur-Giguère’s replacement, Aly Ndom, who has essentially been a new signing after missing a large chunk of last year with an Achilles injury. Since his return at the start of this season, he’s been a rock for Pacific, playing a big role in their defence, play on the ball and even their attack. In particular, the last point has been most impressive, as he already has four goals in CPL play and five markers in all competitions, which leads his side. While Pacific would be happy to see another name step up and help him score goals, they won’t mind if he keeps finding the net, especially given the work he’s put in elsewhere on the field, which has made the goals feel like a bonus.
PROJECTED STARTING XIs
Pacific FC: Anchor; Chung, Machado, Ndom, Lajeunesse; Keshavarz, Young, Daniels; Bustos, Heard, Toualy
Halifax Wanderers: Yesli; Pearlman, Meilleur-Giguère, Sow, Timóteo; Callegari, Johnston; Telfer, Probo, Rea; Coimbra
ALL-TIME SERIES
Pacific wins: 10 || Halifax Wanderers wins: 6 || Draws: 8
Last meeting:
April 19, 2025 — Halifax Wanderers 3-1 Pacific FC
KEY QUOTES
“We've been pretty upfront about it, and we've been speaking about it - we're not happy with the first half of the season. We know that we need to be better as a group and as a team. We've had many new faces come into the group, and we've had a couple of significant injuries that hurt us, but we need to put all that behind us right now. We need to focus on what's in front of us. In the second half of the season, we have to treat every match like a playoff game for us to get back above that line. That’s the focus for us, that’s the goal, to get into that fifth place spot, and that's where we need to focus, week in and week out, until the end of the season.” – Pacific FC head coach James Merriman
“I think we're happy, but not satisfied. I think there's a lot more to do to get to where we want to be. There are a lot of good things that we've done, but still areas we have to grow. But every time there has been a setback, we've learned from it, and a setback could even come in a win, but from a goal that we gave up, so we continue to learn and we continue to adjust. (..) I think we are going to get better, and I've said this all of my three years here, we want to be at our best at the end of August. Of course, we want to be very good now, but we want to be at our best going into the playoffs,” – Halifax Wanderers head coach Patrice Gheisar.