A professional soccer team wants home to be where the heart is, not where the hurt is.
So here come Forge FC, again hammering that point home with a spirited—a genteel way of putting such a physical, intense match between two elite teams who’ve met a whopping 39 times in a mere seven-and-a-quarter years of existence—1-0 victory Sunday afternoon at Hamilton Stadium.
It was an entertaining display conducted before a large crowd of well over 6,000 fans fuelled by the energy of the two bitter rivals in front of them and the Vitamin D of the spring sun above them. There were physical confrontations galore, and enough potential chances to belie the total of merely one goal: Antoine Batisse’s soaring header off a set piece in the 70th minute.
Plucking three points from a 90-minute team which is bound to be still in contention when the season winds down was beneficial, as all wins are. But we’re going to add a rider to that argument: had The Hammers surrendered three points rather than capturing them, the downside might have been bigger than the upside of the win, which was that Hamilton is now back in first place.
With 20 games to go, this was the final time Forge got to host Cavalry in the regular season. Both of the Calgary side’s home matches against Hamilton, August 15 and September 19, are yet to be played. Home field is definitely an advantage in soccer and if you’re a disbeliever just check the table: the CPL’s top four teams have all yet to lose on their local pitches. Repeat: home has to be the heart, not the hurt.
Now the Forge, and Cavalry too for that matter, are also both really good on the road and almost always have been. But this home win continued Forge’s amazing streak of not yielding a home goal against. Zero, nada, naught. Which has given them 10 of 12 possible home points from four consecutive cleans, five if you include the first game of Champions Cup against UANL Tigres and six if you count the Canadian Championship opening round 4-0 rout of HFX Wanderers.
It erased some of the sting of the Hammers’ only loss of the season, 2-1, a week earlier in Ottawa, reaffirmed the world-class reflexes (an impossible reaction hand-stop off Daan Klomp) and attack-generation of goalkeeper Dimitry Bertaud whose sixth clean sheet is nearly halfway to former Forge Jassem Koleilat’s CPL record of 13; continued Forge’s set-piece successes (Tristan Borges to Dan Nimick’s head, to Batisse’s elevated head, to bulging twine); and confirmed that convincing Batisse to come here from western France was the kind of international diplomacy the Canadian government could learn from.
It was Hamilton’s first win over Calgary since April of last year and also meant that Forge has now played and beaten six of the other seven CPL teams this season. And they meet the seventh, Inter Toronto, this Sunday at York Lions Stadium in the first installment of the annual 905 Derby.
Inter Toronto is coming off its first defeat of the season—every team in the league now has at least one loss—a water-logged 3-1 defeat at FC Supra du Québec which helped create bumper-to-bumper traffic from Inter Toronto in third place to HFX Wanderers in sixth, just three points behind.
Forge (19 points) and Cavalry (17) have separated themselves from the other 75 per cent of the league, at least for the moment.
Tomasz Skublak and Julian Altobelli pace Inter Toronto with four goals apiece and keeper Diego Urtiago has been forced to make a league-leading 25 saves for the offensive-minded Toronto side which features 17-year-old Shola Jimoh, former Forge Béni Badibanga, and 2022 CPL Player of the Year Ollie Bassett.