It’s down to one game.
Twice.
After taking care of business in the Nation’s Capital Saturday afternoon, Forge FC has embarked on one of the most significant weeks of a franchise whose history has been dotted with significant weeks. For the first time in five weeks, the Hammers can focus solely on the TELUS Canadian Men’s Championship.
Forge is in Montréal to face CF Montréal Wednesday night (7 pm, TSN, OneSoccer) in a single-game winner-take-all match for the Canadian title, which the visitors enter as the widely assumed underdogs, despite eliminating Montréal from the national tournament in each of the past two years and despite the home side enduring a pock-marked MLS season.
And at the end of the week—Saturday, when all eight teams play the final game of the Premier League season at 4 p.m. ET—Forge has a chance to win its third straight CPL Shield as regular-season champions. After their inspired 2-1 win in Ottawa Saturday and Cavalry FC’s 4-2 home victory over last-place Pacific Sunday, the Cavs and Hammers are knotted atop the league table at 57 points apiece, with identical 17-6-4 records.
But since Cavalry holds the tiebreaker, Hamilton must fare better than Calgary in that final game to earn the Shield and its automatic bye into winter’s Concacaf Champions Cup. So, if Hamilton wins or draws in their final match at Pacific, they would be champions if Calgary loses on the road to fourth-place Vancouver FC. If Calgary draws, Hamilton must win to finish first. If Calgary wins, they get first no matter how Hamilton fares.
So, it was imperative that Forge, after three consecutive draws, picked up their third straight win when Anthony Aromatario knocked in the rebound of a Rezart Rama shot in the 32nd minute, and Levonte Johnson converted Lucas Cavallini’s pass 10 minutes after intermission for a 2-0 lead and control of their own fortunes. For both shooters, it was their first CPL goal, and Forge has now had 19 different players score goals in CPL regular season play.
“You want contributions from across the squad, and that’s something we pride ourselves on,” Smyrniotis said. “It’s been a very positive season for Levonte, and it was nice for him to get the goal; it kind of unlocked it for us. Levonte got his second start. In the first one, he got injured, and since then we’ve had him off the bench. So good to see him score too.”
A penalty kick goal in stoppage time stirred a little anxiety, but Forge repelled any further damage, as they had when withstanding surges by Ottawa over the final 20 minutes of regulation.
“I thought it was a good performance all-round,” said Forge head coach Bobby Smyrniotis. “We probably should have had a third goal. As a player, sometimes you get that second goal, and you can think of the next one ahead and you kind of take your foot off the gas. But the most important thing is we got the three points, and we needed to get those three points. Cavalry has a tough one next week. If Vancouver doesn’t win, they’re out of the playoffs, and we have Pacific, so it kind of flips the script from this week. We just wanted to keep the pressure on them.”
So now it’s on to the Voyageurs Cup where CF Montréal and Forge are the two survivors of the 15 clubs which started the national elimination tournament. Hamilton beat fellow CPLers Supra du Québec and Montréal upset MLS rivals Vancouver Whitecaps in two-game semis to arrive at the sudden-death title game.
Much will always be made of the fact that although Montréal is one of the lower-spending teams in MLS, their payroll is still about six times greater than the entire team salary cap in the Canadian Premier League. But as pundits like to say, in a one-game playoff, bank slips don’t score the goals.
Still, payroll does buy some talent, and CFMTL has plenty of it, revolving around striker Prince Owusu, who has scored against the Forge in previous years and has 15 goals this season, just one outside the MLS’s top 10, despite heavy defensive marking all game. He’s added five assists too. He’s been nursing a knee injury and missed Montréal’s encouraging 1-1 draw in Seattle over the weekend.
“Owusu is a central figure to their game not only this year but the last few,” Smyrniotis said. “We know him as a player, and he’s central to how they start their attacks and how they end their attacks. So, our guys have to be wary of him, especially in our back line.
“We expect the best version of Montréal; the same way they should expect the best version of us. It’s a final, it’s an opportunity to win a very important trophy, it’s an opportunity to qualify for Champions Cup. So, you can always throw away what’s going on in the regular season and what the general mood is otherwise. They’re very distinct games.
In Seattle, Montréal got a good game out of legendary Chilean Alexis Sanchez, who set up their only goal, and from emerging young Ukrainian Hennadii Synchuk. Sanchez, who starred at Barcelona, Arsenal, Manchester United and Inter Milan and has been capped internationally 168 times, is clearly on the downslope of his career at 37 years of age, but is still creative and quick-acting, close to and in the attacking box.
With its dismal home and overall record—they are in last place in the MLS East and a mere filament from official playoff elimination—there has been strong local reaction to the team. Longtime fans have sometimes vented their suppressed anger with the players and owner Joey Saputo.
Forge understands Montréal recognizes Wednesday night as a chance to salvage something big from a disastrous season, so will not take Forge lightly and will field its top, available players. A Champions Cup berth would be like a winter Phoenix rising from this regular season’s cold ashes.
So, the adage of getting the early lead in a sudden-death game is even more applicable this week: it could quickly dispel any hopeful atmosphere.
“I think that’s one of the most important things here,” Smyrniotis says. “When a team hasn’t been doing very well, what you want to try to do is take advantage of it and put the pressure on them. If you can get a goal early, that starts playing on the mentality of any player on any team, so that’s important and I’m sure that’s something they’re talking about and managing; that's the same way we do.
“Playing in Montreal, that’s one thing we can do: make sure we take the energy out of them early and try to swing that into our favour.
“I think for us it’s been very positive, as we’ve been scoring, especially in the first 20-25 minutes of the game. I feel our starts lately—especially Saturday when we started fantastic—we’ve got to take advantage of. We saw that in the game against Inter Toronto (a 5-0 win) with two goals in the first 10 minutes. We need a break to the game so we can, if we can, put them a little bit on the back foot.”
Forge has lost just once—1-0 at Supra—in its 13 games since a 2-1 loss in Calgary Aug. 15 when they were down to 10 men for the final hour. Over those two months, they’ve had 6 wins, 4 draws and a loss in league play and a draw and a win against Supra in the Voyageurs Cup semifinal. In their last four league games, they’ve outscored opponents by a cumulative 13-4.
The Hammers will have goalkeeper Dimitry Bertaud back on the field after his international break summons to the Democratic Republic of Congo national team, but will be without, of course, their recently retired captain Kyle Bekker.
Forge has been deliberately providing more minutes for Johnson and recent signees like Lucas Cavallini and Manjrekar James,
“All those guys needed game time,” Smyrniotis said. “We see their improvement game after game; not only in getting better football out of them but in their game endurance, going longer into the games. Obviously, we managed Cavallini the last couple of games to make sure he’s not going the distance and to prepare for this game. His work rate has been excellent.”