Don’t blink, or you might miss Forge FC’s off-season.
Depending upon next month’s Concacaf Champions’ Cup draw, the Canadian Premier League Shield winners will return to training in either the first week of January or, at the latest, two weeks after that.
This after a season which officially began last February, with a competitive two-leg Champions Cup loss to legendary Mexican side Chivas of Guadalajara, and proceeded relentlessly through a record number of home wins, the spectacular emergence and even more spectacular (financial-wise) departure of striker Kwasi Poku, eliminating Montréal FC in the Canadian championship, and defeating Toronto FC in the first leg of the next round, clinching the Shield as regular season champions with a couple of games left to play, dominating league player award nominations with Tristan Borges (Player of the Year), Poku (U-21 player of the year) and Bobby Smyrniotis (coach of the year) taking home the hardware; and reaching their sixth final in the CPL’s sixth year.
Not winning their fifth title, after starting the game flatly and losing 2-1 to scorching-hot Cavalry FC in the final, was the one blip, and should provide some motivation, Smyrniotis and some of his players said Thursday as the team prepared to depart for the post-season break that will again be a short one. Winter soccer at Tim Hortons Field is just around the corner.
“I think it was a season full of positives,” said captain Kyle Bekker who was one of three Forge players who were finalists for the league’s top player honors. “I think we took steps forward as a group, buying into the goals of winning the regular-season championship and all that comes with that; consistency, dedication to being what is asked of us.
“We’ve seen massive highs in the results against Montréal and the first leg here against Toronto which is going to live long in a lot of Forge fans’ memories and ultimately seeing positives like the sale of Kwasi Poku and the success he had in a short period and being able to push him on in his career. I think they’re massive developments which are going to overlook losing the final against Calgary.
“Six finals in six years; I think there was tons to be proud of. We had a lot more depth in the past, a ton of creative weapons, and showed a lot of different ways to get a result so that was pretty cool to be part of.”
Smyrniotis said he was most proud of the fact that despite off-season departures of core talent such as, among others, Triston Henry, Manjrekar James, Rezart Rama and Woobens Pacius, “most of those gaps were filled from within; players who were stepping up into roles who maybe hadn’t played as prominent a piece on the team. You’re looking at guys like Chris Kalongo until he was injured and Jassem (Koleilat) stepped up and now we’ve got a great goalkeeping tandem. Malcolm Duncan, who watched as Rama played all season last year, Garven Metusala taking that next step, Noah Jensen, Kwasi Poku.
“And we got super bounce-back years from two guys who were injured last year, Tristan Borges and David Choinière.”
Promoting from within is part of the constant evolution of professional sports teams and Forge has done that well. Smyrniotis pointed out today that his club operates on a three-year cycle, and is about to enter the third such cycle of his club’s history but you could argue that cycle has already begun with the organic elevation of the roles of players like Jensen, Metusala, Duncan, the goalkeepers and Béni Badibanga.
And, of course there are still high-level veteran core players like Alex Achinioti-Jönsson, Bekker and rest of the leadership group.
“We’ll try to set up a team for the next three years,” Smyrniotis said. “Over the next 10 days we’ll take a deep dive into what we’ve done well and what we need to improve. There will be changes in the team. Not major ones but we have an ability to bring in impact players to our very strong core and a number of players who will be back.
“There are two things to look at. There’s ‘What more do we want to see and what do we want to see in the tactical evolution of the team?’ Does that need specific players coming in, does that need us to change things with certain players? I think it’s important for a team that’s been successful for six years that we refocus and always look at things and not just be happy with what we’ve done this season and in the past.
“The next couple of weeks, it’s about which players we’d like to retain, focus in on two or three targets who are outside of our environment and take a measured approached on all the next steps we take.”
Smyrniotis said that, like last year, he and his staff won’t be rushing to build a team specifically for Champions Cup, although advancing much deeper than the first round is still a major goal. He’ll keep some spots open for later in the campaign, as happened this season when the likes of Victor Klonaridis were added late.
Smyrniotis said his only regret this season was that “six players, not all starting players, but all important ones” were injured or hampered for the latter part of the year, including post-season losses to Cavalry. Klonaridis, Elimane Cissé and Metusala were among those and Borges was playing through a debilitating ankle problem and Nana Ampomah got hurt early in the final.
During the season Forge lost their two primary strikers, Jordan Hamilton and Terran Campbell, to significant stretches of injury down-time, saw Poku turn into a stunning striker but then sold him for a league-record transfer fee, and once they’d clinched the Shield, went into a long goal-scoring drought which was absolutely atypical of a team that led the league in scoring.
After the 1-0 goal which beat Valour and secured the Shield, over the next month—464 minutes of on-field play—Hamilton scored just one goal, although it was huge; Malik Owolabi-Belewu’s header which eliminated Atlético Ottawa and sent Forge into their sixth league final, the most of any major North American pro sports team in the 21st Century.
“Scoring goals is one of the things talked about in the media,” Bekker said. “It’s one of the things that’s always easier said than done. If it was easy, you’d see games 10-9. I think towards the end of the season we saw just a little bit of form. I think it would be a lot more concerning if we weren’t creating chances over those games when we weren’t necessarily scoring as many goals as we’d been scoring in different parts of seasons. They just weren’t going in.
“As Canadians we’ve all heard the phrase ‘gripping the stick a little too tight’ and I think there were moments when we were all guilty of that. I don’t think it’s something we’re going to lose any more sleep over.”
Smyrniotis acknowledged that since one of the things that drives this team forward is international competition and Forge had guaranteed themselves a spot in Champions Cup by winning the league title, “maybe that’s a little part of losing that edge toward the end of the season. Maybe there was a big exhale moment.”
But all through the final month he also emphasized that the team was creating opportunities, just not finishing them.
Champions Cup is what will be on the players’ collective minds now, and it is a very brief off-season, after a very long on-season. The draw for Champions Cup will be held in December, and broadcast live from Miami. Forge will likely come up against one of the leading Mexican sides again, or a top MLS club.
Smyrniotis said that from a purely competitive standpoint—he concedes there will always be a budget imbalance–MLS opponents might be more preferable because that league, like the CPL, will not have started formal league play yet. Mexican teams, however, will by then have played six or seven games in the second half (Clausura) of their schedule.
“But we also love the juice in Mexico and the challenge they provide: the atmosphere, it’s very uplifting for the players and we’ve lived that twice with Azul and Chivas. So we’ll take anyone who comes.”
Bekker, who is one of several Hammers whose contracts will soon run out, says of the Champions Cup looming on the post-holiday horizon: “Those are the games you want to play in, you want to test yourself against the best competition. If it means you have to have a little bit longer season and a little bit less off-season, so be it.”
Jensen, often referred to as the midfield successor whenever Bekker’s magnificent career—still at a league-best level—finally winds down, says the loss to Cavalry FC, which hit its peak at exactly the right time this year, “taught us a lot of lessons; you can’t play like that in big games.
“Going into the off-season, for the players and the staff, it’s a good point to step back and see how we can improve going forward.”
HAMMERS AND NAILS: Forge players whose contracts are expiring include Kyle Bekker, Dominic Samuel, Garven Metusala, Jordan Hamilton, Tristan Borges, Alessandro Hojabrpour and Victor Klonaridis. The club holds options on Christopher Kalongo and Orlendis Benítez