‘You can hear everything’ when stadium doors locked
Forge FC is a North American rarity: a pro team that has recently played a big game in front of no fans
Many North American professional sports teams are sailing into uncharted waters, but Hamilton’s soccer squad may be the only one holding a recent nautical map.
The National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, the Canadian Elite Basketball league and American men’s and women’s soccer are all on the verge of returning to “real” play in empty stadia with broadcast-only audiences, but Forge FC has been there and done that: in Honduras last August, and most of those players are back this year.
“It felt really kind of weird,” defender Dominic Samuel recalls of Forge’s 4-1 loss to CD Olimpia behind the locked doors of a Honduran stadium designed to hold 37,000 soccer fans. “It felt more like a training session, like a scrimmage, instead of a real match. It’s real quiet, you can literally hear a pin drop.”
The away loss eliminated Forge from the second round of CONCACAF League play on a 4-2 aggregate after they’d won the first game 1-0 in Hamilton. A few days earlier, four people had been killed during a vicious riot among fans of Olimpia and their cross-city rivals in the capital of Tegucigalpa, so Olimpia’s home game against Forge was shifted to a stadium 300 kilometres northwest, and fans were banned.
Not the same root cause as a pandemic lockout, but ultimately the same scene: other than Honduran security forces packing machine guns, that is.
“It’s a bit of an eerie feeling playing in such a big, empty stadium for such a big game,” Forge goalkeeper Triston Henry says. “It felt like a training session but, at the same time, you understood the big implications of the game.
“The noise of a crowd can keep you focused and energized, whether it’s the home supporters or even the rival crowd cheering so hard against you. So it’s about mental focus and toughness in a game like that. You hear all the communication between players on the field that you don’t normally hear. After their goals, when you’d normally only hear the crowd getting so loud, you heard everything: the ball hitting the mesh, the roar of the opposing team on their bench … even the sighs from your own team.”
The first known locked-down major professional sports game in North America was five years ago when baseball’s Baltimore Orioles hosted the Chicago White Sox behind closed doors because of civic unrest following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American. Minor-league teams have played before no fans because of weather and even publicityseeking reasons, but it’s been very rare.
Forge FC has been working out in reduced groupings at Tim Hortons Field without using the inside facilities. An announcement of when the CPL will open a shortened live-in-abubble schedule in a hub city in P.E.I., New Brunswick, or on Vancouver Island, has been anticipated for a week. But league officials still haven’t said when that might happen.
Assuming it does, Forge players predict a more level playing field than soccer’s normal heavily home-tilting advantage. Same for other sports.
“We’ve seen that in the (British) Premier League and even in Honduras, even though that didn’t turn out the way we hoped,” Forge captain Kyle Bekker.
“With no fans, it kind of humanizes other teams: Other times you go into that very hostile environment and they can seem like giants.”
Will Forge have an advantage over other CPL teams who would be playing their first empty-stadium games? Possibly at first, Henry and others say, because it’s the devil they and head coach Bobby Smyrniotis know. Last August, Smyrniotis stressed the ironic necessity of his players remaining undistracted by the lack of distractions. He’ll likely re-emphasize the message closer to CPL play resuming.
“Even though it’s not at all like having people in the stands, it doesn’t take away the weight of the games,” Forge midfielder Alexander Achinioti-Jonsson explained. “A win is still a win and going into it you need to get your mindset right.”