The old (midfield) gang is back together and it couldn’t come at a better time for Forge F.C.

Ali Hojabrpour has returned to the Hammers and will be in the lineup for tomorrow night’s Champions Cup home leg against powerful Mexican side C.F. Monterrey.

Hojabrpour had been given permission to seek other opportunities and earned a trial with MLS side Orlando City, but returned over the weekend to the club with which he won two league titles in the past three years. He’s known as a big-game player, reads and adjusts the dials of the on-field thermostat from his controlling midfield position and rejoins captain Kyle Bekker and CPL reigning player of the year Tristan Borges in a dangerous midfield.

Those three were the entire midfield of the CPL’s Best 11 –read ‘all-star team’–named at the end of the 2024 season when Hojabrpour was also a finalist for player of the year. He was the league’s U-21 Canadian player of the year in 2021 when he scored the winning goal against, of course, Forge to give Pacific FC its only league title. The following season he scored the winning goal for Forge in their championship win over Atlético Ottawa.

Hojabrpour said he enjoyed his experience with Orlando City and played half of a “friendly” with them, but ultimately didn’t sign a contract and returned to his original team over the weekend, a huge relief for Forge fans.

“Forge was always an option for me,” Hojabrpour said before today’s final training session before Wednesday’s massively important match against Los Rayados. “They showed me a lot of support at the end of last season and allowed me to see what my options were out there. Forge is a great club and I don’t consider it a backup plan, it’s just another option. When it came to the chance to come back here and work with some of the new players and, of course, the existing players it was a great option for me.

“I spent 10 days with Orlando in their pre-season. It went well.  They didn’t see enough from me to sign me but it was a good experience and I took a lot from it. It’s nice to see what the next level is like.”

Hammers’ head coach Bobby Smyrniotis said that Hojabrpour could play in a “lot of leagues out there with his eyes closed” but was happy to have him back in the lineup, and considers the 24-year-old to be one of the most important players on a very talented side.

“We had guys like Borges, who rightfully was the MVP of the league but you go inside the team and can you see the value of Ali,” Smyrtniotis said. “He’s the top; just setting the tempo. Like I’ve said in the past, he’s a computer. He knows how to read things, he knows when things need to go quicker when things need to slow down with the team and really how to give us a good balance between what we’re doing defensively and what we’re doing in the attack…in transitional moments especially.

“We’ve been in constant contact since the off-season started, and the point came when we thought it was the best thing that we stay together and continue all the successes we’ve had. And we continue to be a mechanism to develop into even bigger things because he’s one player, among many on this team, who will be playing somewhere else in the future.”

But he’s playing here and although he’s only had a couple of days of training with the club, he’s in good shape and, of course, is familiar with so many players and with Smyrniotis’s systems. And there is no bigger platform to demonstrate that than the Champions Cup.

“I love the big stage,” he said. “These big games take some personality and I like to be one of those guys that take on the pressure, like big games have. Big games like this are the ones which get the blood pumping, there’s something on the line and we have two of those coming up that we’re focussed on.”

Hojabrpour laughs that he’s not sure he could play in higher leagues ‘with my eyes closed’ but the 24-year-old B.C. native says he appreciates the vote of support and how he’s grown as a player since coming to Hamilton three years ago this month.,

“I came in as a kid and I’m a man now and I think with the confidence Bobby has in me and I have in myself, who can’t play at the next level?  There are a lot of players here who can play at the next level, it’s a matter of opportunity.

“It’s a lot of fun playing with those guys; Bekks and Borges mostly, we were playing together a lot last year. When you have quality like that and the output that they have, it’s impossible to not see how fun it is to come back and play with them.”

While CF Monterrey are prohibitive favourites in this two-leg series (Game 2 is a week tonight in Monterrey), Hojabrpour and the other veterans aren’t viewing the next few days through that prism.

“I think we always fancy our chances,” Hojabrpour says. “I think Forge has gotten to the place where we’re a big club and we’re not just happy anymore to just be part of these games, we want to get results.

“Being at home in this atmosphere, this weather, gives us an advantage. We’re just looking to win: at the end of the day, we fancy ourselves as a football club that can play at these levels. I don’t think the money or the size of the club, in terms of Monterrey, has any fear for us. We’re ready to play football and get a result.”

*Although Forge FC had been training outdoors at Hamilton Stadium to acclimatize themselves to the winter conditions for Wednesday’s Champions Cup first-round home leg against CF Monterrey,  they made a last-minute decision Monday to move practice to Stoney Creek’s Players Paradise in Stoney Creek.

“Sunday, parts of it were ice-covered,”  head coach Bobby Smyrniotis said of the artificial turf pitch. “It was hard to find another place to train on the weekend. We wanted to test it out today because we wanted to be out in the elements but we just thought that to get the best out of what we wanted in the session we moved down the street to the excellent facility at Players Paradise.”

The club worked out in pretty good conditions this morning at Hamilton Stadium.

Monterrey, which had been expected to fly to Canada on Sunday, after playing a league match at home Saturday night, changed their plans and remained at home for practice yesterday NS earlier today and will not fly into Canada until tonight.

*CF Monterrey, struggling to prevent goals in the two previous games, found the defensive formula they were looking for under backline-oriented head coach Martín Demichelis over the weekend, edging visiting Necaxa 1-0 in an important match that moved them to 10th place in LIGA MX, tied with Necaxa.

It was Los Rayados’ first victory over the opening five games  (three draws, one loss) of the Clausura (second half) and it was their final league match before flying to Hamilton.

Monterrey scored in the 45th minute through an athletic diving header from midfielder Felix Ambriz, who converted on a perfect feed from star forward Sergio Canales from inside the box. There were 44,471 spectators at the game which saw Demichelis slightly adjust his formation to a 4-2-3-1 from the 4-1-4-1 structure he’d used the previous three games, two of which each resulted in three goals against.

*During today’s pre-match media conference, Bobby Smyrniotis addressed the status of backfielder Malik Olowabi-Belewu who will be returning to the club, but not in time for Wednesday’s match against Monterrey.

Olowabi-Belewu, the British-born centre-back who was raised in London, Ontario was supposed to have been transferred to Chesterfield FC, in the fourth level of the English football system. He wanted to be closer to his original home in the U.K.

“We had come to an agreement as of yesterday,” Smyrniotis said. “And it fell apart last night, on their (Chesterfield’s) end. It was hard on Malik. But it’s not the first time this has happened in football.”

A little more than halfway into their current season, Chesterfield currently ranks 10th in EFL League Two, a long way (11 points) from promotion but also well clear of relegation in the 24-team loop. Chesterfield is home Thursday to second-place Doncaster.

Under new ownership, Chesterfield won the National League last season earning promotion to League 2 for the first time in six years.

*This will be the third time in four years that Forge FC will entertain one of the top five sides (Cruz Azul in 2022, Chivas in ’23) of LIGA MX in the Champions Cup opening round and some players new to the team that year have either seen their first Forge action in those games, been on the bench or at least witnessed the competition in person for the first time as a Forge.

Veteran CPL striker Brian Wright is in that situation Wednesday night and at the other end of the scale, so is 20-year-old midfielder Keito Lipovschek, who is from Guelph but has been part of the Fleetwood Town FC Academy for the past three years. Fleetwood seniors play in the fourth level of English professional soccer.  Recruited out of a camp run by the academy in Ancaster a few years ago Libovschek was with Fleetwood’s sister club in the United Arab Emirates but wasn’t getting enough playing time.

He was noticed by new Forge assistant coach Arno Buitenweg, a friend of Smyrniotis’s for the past 15 years.  Buitenweg had been working in the Middle East for several seasons, including a stint helping Qatar’s National team.

“We brought him into pre-season,” Smyrniotis said. “And he showed well. He’s quite a good player.

“We always look for these scenarios of young Canadian players who may be off developing somewhere else and this is one who came onto our radar. He checked a lot of things we were looking for: one was his position.  He’s a versatile midfielder who can play either a No. 8 or No. 6 and gives us a lot of flexibility; Two was just quality. He’s excellent with the right foot and the left. Now it’s just about him coming up to speed on the rigours of playing for Forge.”

Smyrniotis likes what experiencing Forge in practice and big games, and seeing opposition the quality of Monterrey can do for a young player’s sense of purpose.

“First things first, you come into an environment and you realize it’s a high environment,” he says. “And your first taste in that environment is going to be at the top of the game…in the Champions Cup. And I think that’s an allure for players, obviously. I think it’s good for the new players that we’re in this competition this year, and it starts off in this way because it shows where this team belongs and that they need to keep on going. I think that’s important in setting the goals and the tempo of what we need going forward.

“This is the standard, this is the minimum that every year we need to be playing here and now we need to just really focus in the next two days and try to give ourselves a chance of playing more than two games in this competition.”

*In just over three years, including this week, three of the top club teams from Mexico have played an opening leg of the Champions Cup in Hamilton during the depths of winter. And they’re always welcome visits for those in the city with Mexican or Latin American heritage.

“It’s absolutely a big thing,” says Victoria Longa the front-of-house manager for Latin Food and Products in the Hamilton Farmers Market, which includes a grocery store, a full-fledged restaurant, a product importing business,  a catering business and a bakery. 

“On game day I saw a lot of fans in the market with their (Mexican team) jerseys on, especially when Cruz Azul came in. 

I went to the game…and a lot of our regular customers were there; I recognized at least 30, probably more.

“Definitely the Latin population has gone up with immigration, so it’s obviously nice to have these teams come in. There is a big Mexican population in Hamilton so there are quite a few locals who go to the game. They’re a lot of fun and it’s lovely to see when they all get together. It looks like a party.”