After being thrown from their mount as they approached the finish line, Forge FC has to climb right back onto the horse. No choice, with so many games crammed into a short space, but to saddle up again and squeeze the reins a little tighter.
The Hammers lost a golden opportunity to exert strong pressure on first-place Cavalry FC on Saturday when they surrendered two goals in a long stoppage time to allow visiting HFX Wanderers to rally for a 3-3 draw.
Cavalry had lost earlier in the day, and when Ismaël Oketokoun made it 3-1 in the 90th minute, second-place Hamilton appeared to be comfortably drawing to within three points of their arch-rivals, with a game in hand.
But Halifax scored twice, once in the 94th minute (Liam Mackenzie), and again in the 103rd minute (Tavio Ciccarelli), igniting wild celebrations on their bench as the sixth-place Wanderers stayed in the race for the final playoff spot. Both goals were highly preventable, but Forge didn’t prevent them.
Cavalry have lost two games in a row, and Hamilton has three straight draws, but even though the Hammers have an extra game, the schedule has grown short and favours the Cavs over the last stretch.
Calgary plays in Halifax on Thanksgiving Day, then finishes at home against Pacific and Vancouver FC. Forge has an extra two games in that same time, both of them in the next eight days. They host last-place Pacific in a Wednesday night game (7 p.m.) rescheduled by the wildfire smoke in mid-July, followed by Inter Toronto’s visit on Thanksgiving Monday. Then they’re away to contend with Ottawa Oct. 17, before heading to Montréal to face CF Montréal four days later in the one-game final of the Canadian Championship for the Voyageurs Cup. It’s one of the biggest games—perhaps the biggest game—in franchise history.
“Calgary has won one game in the last four as well,” Forge head coach Bobby Smyrniotis said of his team’s third consecutive draw, and fifth in their last six games, “So we’re both not taking care of our business.
“But we’ve been playing some excellent football. You look at the last game (against Halifax), it was one of our best 90 minutes of the season, yet at the end we dropped points. So, we have to focus and get the maximum out of these games coming up, and play our best at home.
“We’ve got this game ahead of us against a Pacific team that’s done very well recently, up until Sunday’s game when they lost to Supra. You always have to be careful because you’re playing a team with no pressure, nothing to lose. We’ve talked about this; these are must-win games for us.”
Against a desperate Halifax side, Forge took an early lead when Lucas Cavallini scored his first goal for his new club and showed his immense value-added on several other plays. Forge were victimized by a couple of debatable calls and non-calls in the Halifax box that thwarted them from adding to their early lead. Dan Nimick headed in Noah Jensen’s free kick in the 80th minute, then the Wanderers scored in the 81st minute after not recording an official shot on goal during the first 80. When Forge restored their two-goal lead as regulation time was running out, three points looked like they were written in indelible ink. But that’s why pencils were invented.
“It was one of those things where a lot of things had to happen for that draw to occur, and if you’re in the game long enough, you’ll see everything,” Smyrniotis said.
“It was a game we were totally in control of—we could have been up five-nil—and it could just be that you score the third one and think everything is good. It was uncharacteristic small mistakes that led to a big problem. You learn from it, and you move on. If it was the last game of the season, it would be a different sucker punch, but you’re still alive and have to keep on learning from mistakes.
“Being ahead late, and teams pushing us, is a situation which, over the years, we’ve dealt with many times, and for some reason this time we didn’t. I can’t pinpoint it as a simple thing. Their last goal, it’s a simple clearance that we don’t clear, and then they’re on the ball. 99.9 times out of a hundred, that ball is cleared by our defenders. This 0.1 percent of the time... it wasn’t.”
Smyrniotis said it’s clear that Cavallini has benefitted from two full weeks of training with his new club and that’s encouraging, especially with Kyle Bekker’s playing career now done. Cavallini will need to be an impactful figure over the compacted match calendar in the next few days.
“Obviously with the World Cup break, there’s going to be a congestion of games,” Smyrniotis said. “You’re playing deep into the Voyageurs Cup, and when you throw those games in there, this is a natural by-product of it.
“But we’ve had this before and have usually handled it very well.”