You have to expect this from teams which are still alive at this point in the season, but for the second weekend in a row, Forge FC will play host to a visitor which has been building its self-assuredness.
Atlético Ottawa– a pre-season favorite to challenge for the CPL title after seriously re-stoking its roster– comes into Tim Hortons Field on Saturday (4 p.m.) looking to prevent their provincial rivals from advancing to a sixth straight league final. The winner of Saturday’s semifinal heads to Calgary the following weekend for the CPL championship game. Cavalry FC upset the Hammers 1-0 last Sunday in the 1 vs 2 Page playoff game to earn the right to play the one-game final for the North Star Cup trophy in front of their home fans.
A couple of hours before that game, Atlético qualified for this weekend’s semi-final by edging visiting York United in penalty kicks after the two teams played through ninety minutes, plus overtime, at 2-2.
The last time Ottawa visited Hamilton, on Oct. 12, they defeated Forge 2-0 but that was the first game after the Hammers had clinched the CPL regular season title with a 1-0 victory over Valour in Winnipeg.
Ottawa desperately needed a victory and Hamilton was already home and cooled. However, it was the first of three straight losses for Forge, which hasn’t scored a goal since that game in Winnipeg.
Ottawa has drawn against Vancouver FC and beaten York in that semifinal since they blanked the Forge here.
“At this point of the season if you have the belief, you build on it and if you don’t you have to create it and I think Ottawa has done a good job,” says Hamilton midfielder Alessandro Hojabrpour. “They came here and took points from us a couple of weeks ago and then had a big penalty shootout in the playoff game so that’s obviously going to spark belief.
“When you have their quality of players they can turn things in an instant.”
Ottawa will be looking to turn the tables on Forge, who defeated Atlético 2-0 in the 2022 CPL final at Ottawa’s TD Place Stadium. But they did not even qualify for the playoffs last year, finishing sixth, and went on an acquisition spree during the off-season. They brought in talented all-purpose 6-foot-4 defender Amer Didić who’d been at Pacific FC and before that in Edmonton, proven veteran midfielder Manny Aparicio, who assisted on the first goal in CPL history—against Forge—when he was with York9, and Aboubacar Sissoko, who scored six goals while he was with Forge’s league champions the last two years.
They also brought winger Balou Tabla back from Turkey and signed hometown backfielder Matteo de Brienne, who’d been with the club in 2020 but didn’t play.
And they already had several talented returnees in goalkeeper Nathan Ingham, who had seven clean sheets this year, attacking midfielder Ollie Bassett who was the CPL’s 2022 Player of the Year and dangerous forward Rubén del Campo, who scored 11 goals this year to miss the Golden Boot by one goal, and also led the CPL in shots.
“They’re a resilient team,” says Forge FC head coach and sporting director Bobby Smyrniotis. “They showed that in the way they played this year and they showed that against York. Not a lot was going on but they do a good job keeping the ball out of the net and they try to take whatever chances come from it. We saw that on the weekend from them; they scored on a set piece and those make the difference in games like this.
“They’re an energetic team but they also know how to sit back, relax and find the moment of attack. We’re going to prepare for both versions of it and have a game plan for it.”
Ottawa, which got off to a fast start this season, with no losses in the opening nine games, fell into a slump in mid-summer, but since losing a decisive 3-0 match to Forge in Hamilton on Aug. 10, have lost just once—to York—in 11 games since then. Only four of those games were wins, but they put themselves into position to win, or draw, late in games.
When Hamilton beat Ottawa on Aug. 10, it set off the typical latter-season run of seven wins, a draw and just one loss for the Hammers, who rode that streak to clinching the CPL regular-season crown.
Atlético has beaten Hamilton three of the four times the two teams have met this season, but the first one, a 3-0 sleepwalker on May 25 in Ottawa, came three days after the Forge eliminated MLS CF Montréal in the Canadian championship.
The other loss (4-3) in Ottawa came on Liberman Torres’s goal well into added time. Sissoko, Didiċ and del Campo all scored in that game. Then there was Forge’s decisive 3-0 win here in August and the 2-0 Ottawa victory in a game far more desperately important to Atlético than to the already-clinched Forge.
“I think Ottawa does a good job tactically matching up against us,” says Forge midfielder Noah Jensen, who will likely play more minutes than he logged in Sunday’s loss to Cavalry FC. “Almost every time we’ve played against them, they come with something a little different.
“del Campo has been good at finding good areas in the box and, obviously, the last time here we saw how well they can do. We have to take away their set pieces and take away the secondary chances off those set pieces.
“It’s about attention to detail. Cavalry had one big chance, and really took advantage of it.”
Hojabrpour says the Hammers have to get on Ottawa early—it’s a different game when you score first—and keep the pace and rhythm going throughout the game.
“No matter what happens in the game–if we score first or we have to come from behind– we just have to be locked in for those 90 minutes. We can’t have bad body language. As they play full 90- plus minutes we have to be prepared to play 90-plus.”
Jensen said that the team isn’t looking back at the wouldas-couldas-shouldas of last weekend’s loss.
“Obviously that was a tough result,” he said. “I think all of us had an expectation that we’d win that game and go to the final. We can’t dwell on that too much; football is a game where you have to have short memories.
“I think we kind of needed this a bit of a motivator. It was unfortunate to lose at home and not get the final here. But the thing about this team we’ve always showed up in these situations.”
Béni Badibanga, who moved to striker partway through the Cavalry game to accommodate Nana Ampomah’s shift to his more natural spot outside, echoed that sentiment.
“We cannot change the past so we have this semi-final to reach the finals,” he stated simply.
The current three-game goalless streak is just the third such drought in Forge history; last year they couldn’t find the net across back-to-back-to-back June games against Pacific, Valour and Vancouver ; and in 2022 in late August, the Hammers were blanked by Atlético and by Valour (twice). But both times they responded in the following game with multiple goals, both times at Tim Hortons Field: two against Cavalry in 2022; and –prophetically, they hope—four in 2023 against, yes Atlético.
It’s the final home game of the season for the Forge, who set a single-season franchise record for home success this year, and the Hammer players emphasized how important it is for a big crowd to show up, to help provide the raucous support and ambience that’s conducive to the best kind of football the offensive-minded team has to offer. And to help remind the visitors that winning three out of four in the regular season isn’t the same as trying to win an elimination game on the road.
“You never look at the records and what’s been done in the past,” says Smyrniotis, the Greek philosopher of Hamilton football. “It’s about this game and this game only.”