Forge FC has fared well in battle all season against all kinds of weapons, but they couldn’t overcome a smoke bomb.
The Hammers’ home game Thursday night against Pacific FC, scheduled to be their fifth game in 17 days, had to be postponed when the forest fire smoke that engulfed the province pushed the air quality risk well above the minimum level required to play a game.
The CPL pushed the game back an hour, hoping for an improvement that never came, and it could not be rescheduled for the next day, when the air was expected to be as bad as, or worse than, before. So Pacific, which had already been in Hamilton for two days, had to fly home.
“In one way this was a very tough period with five games in 17 games, so this gives us a bit of a breather,” said Forge head coach Bobby Smyrniotis. “But now this game will get put in much later in the season so it’s going to create a log jam somewhere in there.”
“You take it as it is. The reality is it was not safe to play; it’s as simple as that.”
After a three-week hiatus for the World Cup break, the Forge returned to the field on Canada Day and escaped with a furious comeback 3-2 win over improving Vancouver FC, then went into Laval and beat Supra 2-1, followed by a 1-1 road draw against semi-pro Saint-Laurent and then needed a late goal to win the return leg of the TELUS Canadian Championships and advance to the national semifinals, which won’t be played for several weeks.
Now, they’re in the midst of a 10-day gap between matches. They don’t return to the game pitch until they head to York Lions Stadium for a 905 Derby showdown with Inter Toronto on Sunday. It’s a bit reminiscent of their second season in the Island Games bubble when they qualified for international play and had huge gaps in their schedule, interspersed with compressed periods of competition.
Smyrniotis says he and his staff can use this week to zero in on some parts of Forge’s game. It’s no secret the club hasn’t consistently played up to their normal standards recently and has shown some very uncharacteristic defensive lapses.
“When you play every three days you don’t get a chance to work on anything,” he explained. “It’s basically: rest-recover-activate-play; rest-recover-activate-play. Now you’ve got some time where you can focus on a few things: you can devote two or three training sessions just on making things smooth on the pitch.”
“You always have to work on getting better. The toughest thing is, tactically, to implement those things when you don’t have time and are rolling from one game to another and trying to give the guys a simple tactical piece of advice here and there. In this situation, we can work a little more thoroughly.”
It speaks to the height of the bar Forge has set that we’re poking holes in a team that has played a dozen league games, won 10, drawn one and lost only one. They still lead the CPL, five points up on Cavalry heading into this weekend, although the Alberta side has a game in hand. Those two have separated themselves from the rest of the pack, but there are still 16 games left to play, lots of time for the standings to reshuffle.
“It’s tough,” Smyrniotis said. “We can always make a mistake as coaches by looking at the last game or two, but it means you’re not looking at the global picture and I’m a global guy. You know there are different factors. You come off a period off, then you go to four games in 12 days, the first one being in plus-50-degree weather. Unless you’ve lived that, you don’t know how much it takes from you… You need a week to recover, but we played three days later, again in heat.”
“But here’s the flip side: in those four games it’s three wins and a tie. You want the guys to be better, but you also want to be positive. What we always preach is that sometimes you might not be at your top, but your quality has to come through. That’s what’s happened in a couple of these games, but we’ve been very good in a couple of games as well.”
Sometimes that quality has come through in the nick of time as Forge is never out of a game until after the final whistle goes. Is it possible that, given that history, the Forge could begin relying too much on that collective character trait?
“I don’t think so,” Smyrniotis counters. “We’ve got an experienced group here who have lived a bit of everything, the ups, the downs and know how hard it is to stay up, so they really know how to bounce back.”
“We have an excellent group that wants to talk about it and be open about it, and once you’re open about it, it’s easy to adjust.”