After 116 regular season and playoff games, it still comes down to this: the two teams which have dominated the Canadian Premier League since its inception will meet for the third time in the playoff final.
While York United and, particularly, Atlético Ottawa were viewed as vastly improved after vigorous off-season recruiting, as the 2024 schedule kicked off it wouldn’t have surprised many CPL fans if Forge FC and Cavalry FC eventually found themselves in a repeat of the 2023 final, when Hamilton prevailed 2-1 at Tim Hortons Field, in one of the greatest overtime sessions in recent soccer history.
So here we are again: the Hammers against the Cavs, this time, it’s in Calgary, as was 2019’s inaugural CPL deciding game in 2019, which Forge won as part of their stunning four titles in the league’s first five years. This will be the sixth time that Forge and Cavalry play each other this year and another-worldly 32nd time they’ve met—across all competitions—in the CPL’s six years.
Almost every team in the league had at least one hot streak and an ice-cold one—including Hamilton, which lost three straight, including a 1-0 semifinal against Calgary, before righting the ship with Saturday’s 1-0 win over Atlético.
But, aside from the goalless slump after they clinched the league regular-season crown and automatic berth in the 2025 Champions Cup, the Forge unleashed its trademark commanding summer stretch as the importance of each match escalated.
And Cavalry, which had a frustrating array of draws while starting with only three wins in their first 15 games, shot into second place with a scorching July and August, finding rhythm and confidence—while finally not hitting the woodwork so many times– at exactly the right time.
Forge is the only team in a major North American pro team sport to reach their league finals in six straight years. In the previous five, they’ve won four times and lost the other 1-0 (Pacific, 2021). Cavalry did miss the playoffs once in the league’s first five years, but that was in the heavily-truncated bubble of the 2020 pandemic Island Games, when they played only eight games, total.
They’ve now reached the final three of the other five years. So there was an air of expectation hovering over all this.
“We said it at the start of the season, after we lost last year’s final in the manner we did against Forge, that the North Star Cup trophy goes through Forge,” Cavalry head coach Tommy Wheeldon mused this week. “And we said that before we played them in the first semi-final, and we still think that now. They’re incredible. We’ve made three finals in six years, which is a good measurable. But they’ve made six and won it four times. The standard they’ve set in the playoffs is impeccable and it’s up to us to write our own history.
“We’re still trying to write new history. So far, that new history was beating Forge in a playoff game at Tim Hortons Field. That’s checked. Next one is we’ve got to win the next game, a playoff final. We’ve not done that yet. That’s the challenge for us and whether that was Forge or Ottawa that was irrelevant: we had to bring the final back to us and whoever we played—it happens to be Forge—we’re playing to win this game. As they are with us.
“We digested (the semi-final win, their first post-season victory over Forge) we got on with it, we had a sing on the bus. And then we moved on to plan and get healthy for this game.”
Forge is attempting to become the first team in CPL history to win the double: the North Star Cup for the playoffs; the North Star Shield for the regular season. There are four Hammers who’ve been with the club for all six seasons; captain Kyle Bekker, defenders Dom Samuel and Alex Achionoti-Jönsson and winger David Choinière, who seems to save his best for the big-stage moments.
Cavalry has only premier goalkeeper Marco Carducci and stealthy midfielder Sergio Camargo who’ve been with the club since the beginning but have a core of players who’ve known each other well for three or four years, such as proven attacker Ali Musse and multi-talented defender Daan Klomp. And they added extra punch in the off-season—most notably Golden Boot winner Tobias Warchewski, who after a year in Germany returned this season to the CPL, where he’d starred with Edmonton and York.
There is an echo of 2019 here as the teams met eight times that year, and this time it will be six, including twice in two weeks.
“It’s interesting,” says Forge goalkeeper Jassem Koleilat who was the deciding factor in the 1-0 victory over Atlético on the weekend. “In our league you play a team four times and to play them a fifth, and now a sixth, that’s just not common in the world of football.
“For us as a team, it gives us another opportunity to showcase what we can do. Obviously, it’s not at home, which we wanted, but I think going there is also going to give us a bit of motivation to kind of get things straight. So, all we have in mind is to lift the trophy, whether it’s at ATCO Field or at home.”
With hours of film study and game after game of head-to-head matchups, Cavalry knows Forge’s tendencies as individuals and as a collective. And vice-versa. Is it helpful or detrimental to have this much intricate knowledge about your opponent?
“It think it’s a bit of both,” Koleilat says. “For instance, as a keeper, you like to know how teams play, then again you can’t be too focused on that because then if something else happens that you’re not ready for, you can be blindsided. I think it definitely helps the goaltending, but at the end of the day the goaltending position is very reactive. You can be as proactive as much as you want, but you have to be ready to react.”
With a depleted core of defenders against Ottawa because of the season-ending injury to Elimane Cissé and Daniel Para’s two-game suspension, Samuel stepped up with a superb game at middle back, playing the entire 90 minutes. He says it’s helpful for defenders to have played so often against the same team and many of the same individuals.
“Definitely good,” he said yesterday. “You know what they like to do and you can anticipate. But they know us too, they have a ton of film on us, we’ve played them countless times, so what I just said about them they’re probably saying about us.
“We’ll want to show them something different as well as to show our qualities.”
This game will be on national TV, (CBC 3 pm ET) as well as being streamed on OneSoccer, a valuable chunk of exposure for the CPL which has rarely had its games on over-the-air TV. Considering all the storylines, it should elevate interest in the league among non-soccer-specific sports fans.
“I think it’s always a nice thing,” says Forge Head coach and Sporting Director Bobby Smyrniotis, who was nominated and is a finalist for the sixth straight time as CPL Coach of the Year, an award which he has curiously never won. “We saw that in 2020 in the Island Games bubble. It’s a good thing.
“But I’m also going to be honest. It’s not the first thing that pops into our minds as we’re planning to play a game. More eyes—among our fans and the general observer of sport– on these players is a better thing. That always helps in growing the product and growing the game, so it’s another level of external excitement.”
They definitely don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but Wheeldon agrees with his coaching counterpart on that one.
“100 per cent,” Wheeldon says. “I think the TV broadcast is an opportunity that’s ahead of us. There’s the opportunity to lift a trophy, there’ s an opportunity to showcase the league. Spruce Meadows is a phenomenal venue to host a final and I think it’s sold out already, so that’s a positive on TV: seeing a packed house, a great atmosphere and two good teams going at it. So, I think if that’s what you want to be selling to new fans, and neutral fans, then that’s it.”
The Forge are 6-1-1 against Cavalry in the playoffs, and xyz across all competitions in their six-year history of dramatic, and sometimes bitter games. But through those six years, Forge has scored a total of four more goals than Cavalry has, which speaks partly to the Hammers’ history of rising to the big occasion.
Because they know each other so well, have reacted to each other, then counter-reacted and then counter-counter-reacted, have analyzed every foot plant, every offensive and defensive tendency, does Saturday’s game come down to who wants it more?
“I think there’s always been moments, and fine margins in our games,” Wheeldon says. “There’s been one-goal games mostly, I think there’s only ever been two games decided by more than one goal. So, I think it does come down to it now: you’ve got to play the conditions you’ve got to play the game in front of you, you have to show, and you have to be prepared to suffer.
“All those things run true, and having Bobby Smyrniotis and his philosophies in this league has made me a better coach because every game you’re trying to have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D and when you play each other so many times you have to be prepared that they’re going to counter with something else and you have to go at it again.
“He’s great to coach against, and has made me better, which is why we’ve both been invited to the same conversation about the men’s national team job: the competition we’ve had has continued to drive interest in this league.”
HAMMERS AND NAILS: The Barton Street Battalion’s viewing party for the CPL Final will be at Endzone Bar & Grill at 1305 Main St. E, beginning at 1 pm ET, with kick-off at 3 pm ET … the match will be broadcasted on both CBC and One Soccer… as well as Bobby Smyrniotis going against Tommy Wheeldon Jr. and York’s Benjamin Mora for Coach of the Year, the Forge have five players up for a variety of honors at tomorrow night’s CPL Awards in Calgary: Tristan Borges, Alessandro Hojabrpour and Kyle Bekker are all finalists for both the CPL’s Player of the Year Award and the Players’ Player of the year. Kwasi Poku, who was transferred to a Belgian side more than two months ago, is a finalist for the U21 Player of the Year; Alexander Achinioti-Jönsson, who was the 2022 Defender of the Year is up for the same award this year and Béni Badibanga is one of four Forge among the 10 finalists for Players’ Player of the Year, the only league award voted upon by the players.