As Forge FC and their pushed-through-the-wringer fans get a slight breather after one of the most significant few days in club history, here are a few bullet points looking back on a power-changing Canadian Championship title and ahead to the Canadian Premier League playoffs.
- Forge entered Sunday’s Decision Day tied for first place as the CPL regular season schedule concluded with all eight teams playing at the same time. Because Cavalry FC held the tiebreaker, Hamilton needed a better result in their away match at Pacific FC than Calgary had in a home match with Vancouver FC, who likely needed a win to make the playoffs.
Neither venue provided the Hammers what they wanted, however, as a 72nd-minute goal by Ronan Kratt allowed last-place Pacific to pull into a 1-1 draw against the exhausted visitors, and Cavalry made its 1-0 lead stand against Vancouver to win its third CPL Shield, and first since 2023, two points clear of Forge.
- In the reduced CPL playoffs, Forge now visits third-place Atlético Ottawa on the banks of the Rideau Canal next Sunday at 2 p.m. in the opening leg of a two-game total-goals semi-final, then has Atlético at Hamilton Stadium Saturday, Nov. 7 at 1 p.m. Meanwhile, Cavalry plays in Laval against Supra du Québec then hosts Supra, which survived a tense race for fourth place, the following weekend.
“I feel very good about our season,” head coach Bobby Smyrniotis said. “I think there’s a lot of positives we can take away from it. I think it’s the most points we’ve accumulated in a season (58, tied with last year). And it’s a season where we had to overcome some very important losses to our team in Kyle Bekker and a lot of different other things happening in our team.
“And it’s also a season when we’ve done so great in scoring goals by committee. You look at our top goal scorer, and it’s 5 (Ismael Oketokoun), and the league leader had 15 (Supra’s Loïc Kwemi). That means it’s been a very big team effort. We’ve done a great job; it was a great season. We’ve already got one trophy in the bag, a very important one, and we continue on.”
To Smyrniotis’s point about scoring diversity, Forge had 19 different players notch goals during the CPL season, and the only other team with more than 10 players with at least one goal was Cavalry, who got goals from 13 different players.
- Forge never makes excuses, but it was a big ask Sunday in Victoria, after the club had won Wednesday’s landmark Canadian Championship final in Montréal by playing 90 minutes plus injury add-on (13 more minutes) in regulation, then another two 15-minute halves of overtime, and riding an emotional bucking bronco through the 4-2 penalty-kick shootout to the biggest win in club history.
They came back to Hamilton Thursday, trained here Friday, then immediately flew all the way across the country and three time zones for Sunday’s finale. They went up 1-0 on Brian Wright’s great set-up to Tristan Borges’ textbook seeing-eye screamer, but were on fumes late in the game.
“You could see the tired legs out there,” said Smyrniotis, who made an uncharacteristically large and early (around the hour) substitution against Pacific. “And the field was soft, which compounded it, taking more physically out of the guys.
“The standard formula, when you’re playing an MLS team or playing a team in Champions Cup, you’re usually expending 30 percent more physical output because of the pace of the game. So, you add it all up, and with the extra time Wednesday night, it was like playing two full CPL games of energy output in one night.
“But the good thing is the next game isn’t until Sunday, so we’ve got some time to relax and reload.”
Cavalry was full value for their title, which also puts them into Champions Cup and Forge finishing second came down to too many draws, despite losing just once in league play since mid-August. More specifically, the two games in Calgary essentially decided the two-point difference atop the standings. After an early win and draw at home against Cavalry, Hamilton was beaten 2-1 Aug.15 at Spruce Meadows when a red card reduced them to 10 players, then drew 1-1 there six weeks ago.
“We’re up 1-0 in both those games and are comfortable, and in one game we get the red card and give up two goals, and the other was a goal in injury time,” Smyrniotis said.
- Forge has won three of four games against Atlético, including the most recent two: a strong 3-0 win at home Sept. 12, and a critical 2-1 win in Ottawa nine days ago to keep their drive for the CPL Shield alive.
“Ottawa is a really good team, with a good identity of themselves,” Smyrniotis says. “Their coach (Brazilian Gustavo Leal) has them understanding their identity.
“Us playing them just a couple of weeks back is a good thing because there’s a familiarity. It’s not someone you played two months ago, and now you’re getting them back. We had a very good outing there a couple of weeks ago, so we take those little nuances, and we move forward into the series. It’s two big games.
“I think we’ve been excellent in this last month, so as long as we can keep this trajectory, we’re in a good spot.”
- In a first-quarter TV break during the Ticats’ final game of the season Saturday, they honoured Forge’s national title win and brought several injured players, who didn’t accompany the Hammers to Victoria—led by now-retired Kyle Bekker—onto the field to celebrate the Voyageurs Cup. They were given a standing ovation.
- When Forge won the national title with that 4-2 advantage in penalty kicks in Montréal, all four Hamilton goals were scored by Canadians, while none of CF Montréal’s were scored by or even taken by Canadians. And while the MLS side fielded only three Canadian starters, the bare minimum for the national tournament, and had three more on the bench, the CPL team started seven Canadians, with seven more on the bench.
Tristan Borges, Ben Paton, Dan Nimick and Manjrekar James scored in the shootout for Forge.
“I didn’t realize that,” Paton said of the Canadian shootout content. “But it’s good, and it’s great for the CPL to win, absolutely great for the league.”
Bobby Smyrniotis said of the import vs domestic player distribution and impact of the final result, “Sometimes it’s a coincidence, but I think it just talks to the narrative of what this league means for Canadian players.”
- So many great players in soccer history have missed critical penalties in shootouts by firing over the net and, with that background, many shooters at even the highest level choose to go low and hard with their shots.
But Forge’s two destiny-shaping opening penalty kicks in Montréal were both converted on high shots; first Tristan Borges, then Ben Paton, who went to keeper Sebastian Breza’s left side, high.
“In penalties in training I just lean into it, and I always prefer to go that side,” Paton said. “I have confidence in big games. I was always going to go to that side. And high, especially since their tender is quite big as well. I’m confident in my abilities and knew if I struck it well it would go in.”
Breza, incidentally, scored the goal in that memorable shootout for Montréal, which gave them the 2021 semifinal win over Forge in the national tournament when the penalty-kick decider advanced all the way to the 11th round. He had stopped Hamilton keeper Triston Henry’s shot immediately prior to converting his own against Henry.