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‘When pressure’s on, character reveals itself’: Ingham, Atlético Ottawa itching for top-of-the-table clash with Cavalry

Nathan Ingham has a memory from his youth soccer days that’s stuck with him forever.

He was 18, playing for Ajax at the 2011 Dallas Cup — one of the world’s most prestigious youth tournaments. He’d made it his goal to get his team to the U-19 competition’s final, which would mean playing at the stadium of MLS side FC Dallas. After losing in the semifinals at U-16 level, Ingham wanted nothing more than to get to that championship game this time.

Ingham got his wish, but it wasn’t quite the satisfying triumph he’d hoped for.

“We ended up losing to Knowsley Youth from England,” Ingham recalled. “I remember sitting down after that game devastated and thinking, ‘What a stupid goal, to want to make a final. Why wouldn’t it just be to win?'”

From then on, second place hasn’t been enough for Ingham. Today, the Atlético Ottawa goalkeeper — in the midst of his first season with the club — finds himself at the centre of one of the most impressive stories in the Canadian Premier League this season. But he has eyes only for the championship.

Ottawa currently sits in a tie for first place in the league table, one game shy of the halfway mark for the season. That, in itself, is no mean feat, considering that they finished dead last in 2021. With 16 new players and a new head coach in Carlos González coming aboard for 2022, Ottawa signalled clearly to the rest of the league that they intended to come out swinging this season. But for Ingham — who’d spent the past three years at Ottawa’s provincial rivals York United — choosing to sign in the capital was still a gamble.

However, Ingham explains that he never really wavered in his off-season decision; as soon as he spoke to Atleti CEO Fernando López, he knew their ambitions were aligned. For both parties, the goal was singular: to win a championship.

“It was a bit of a leap of faith,” Ingham admitted, “Knowing that they still had to bring in a lot of names, had to bring in a full technical staff, but knowing Atlético as an organization and the confidence with which Fernando spoke, it was an easy decision. I feel great about it now, but it’s exactly how I thought I was going to feel in July.”

Ottawa’s 7-3-3 record so far this year means they’ve already won more games than they did in either of the first two years of their existence. They’re two points away from matching last year’s full-season total. After conceding more goals than anybody in the league in 2021, they’ve allowed the second-fewest so far with 13 in 13 games — and almost half of those came in one 6-1 defeat to Valour, a match that both managers since agreed was surely an aberration.

At time of writing, Atleti is on their way home after a massively successful two-game road trip, which saw them bag clean-sheet victories in both Halifax and Hamilton in a matter of four days.

The work is far from over, of course. The season’s only half complete, and there’s a long way to go before anybody is pencilled into the playoffs. But the improvement Ottawa has made since 2021 — or even from game one of this season — is obvious.

Much of that improvement can be attributed to González, who has drawn rave reviews from players and staff for the work he’s done so far, beginning during preseason in Madrid and carrying all the way through until now. Ingham has been impressed with the coach’s passion and, in particular, ambition — enough to match his own.

“He’s football 24/7,” Ingham said of his gaffer. “He was in the Spanish system, and then he goes to Kuwait, and then he chooses to come to Canada. You don’t do that unless you have massive ambitions as a coach, and you’re trying to achieve something much bigger than the CPL. But in order for him to get there, he knows that we have to be very successful here. Every step of his path he’s been successful, and now he’s come in and I think he knows and we know if we want to reach our ultimate goals in football we’re going to have to win the league, win a championship, probably play Champions League football. His style, his philosophy that he’s brought in has been a lot to digest; it’s why our games earlier in the season might’ve been a bit scrappy, it’s why teams are starting to understand who we are now that we’re getting into things, and it’s gonna get more and more clear as we go forward.”

Ingham added: “What I’ve liked most about him is he demands a ton from us, which can be taxing, but he’s the hardest working of the group. He asks a lot from the assistant coaches, he asks a lot from the players, but he’s not asking anything he doesn’t do and then some, and he’s got the full respect of the locker room because of that.”

Atlético Ottawa vs Pacific FC May 7, 2022 PHOTO: Tim Austen/Freestyle Photography/CPL
PHOTO: Tim Austen/Freestyle Photography/CPL

 

Ottawa has emerged this year as one of the most well-organized teams in the CPL, with defenders like Miguel Acosta, Drew Beckie, Diego Espejo, and Maxim Tissot drawing plaudits in recent weeks for their performances. For a goalkeeper like Ingham, it’s certainly nice to play behind a group as defensively sound as that — and all the more satisfying to be able to help them out with a big save on the occasions it’s needed.

He has, of course, been able to do that — Ingham is third in the league with 33 saves, and he leads all goalkeepers with six clean sheets — but he’s just one cog in this red-and-white machine.

Ingham explained that it’s a selfless group — all 10 outfield players know their roles defensively and play them well. And of course, the results now are a manifestation of the work they did on the well-manicured Atlético Madrid pitches back in March.

Still, there’s a lot of work left to be done. On this week’s CanPL Newsroom show, López stated that Atlético Ottawa wants to become “the best soccer team in the country.” All involved with the project know that’s no small task, but the ambition of this three-year-old club speaks for itself. For Ingham, that’ll take more than just winning a CPL championship.

“We’re not just gonna be the best team in Canada, it’s gonna be a lot of work, and we can’t necessarily comprehend the full picture,” he said. “But they have plans and aspirations and they give it to us little bits at a time. With the resources they have and the footballing IQ the whole organization has, there’s no reason why we can’t for a year be the best team in Canada. Win the Canadian Championship and you’re the best team in Canada that year, that’s the only way we’re able to do it because we don’t get to play in MLS. So if you’re asking me if I think we can do that, absolutely. I think we can do it in the next few years, no problem.”

Before they get that far ahead, though, Atleti has some more immediate hurdles to jump.

This Saturday, they host Cavalry FC in a battle for first place. Ottawa have already beaten the Cavs at home once this year — their first match of 2022, in fact — but there’s a little more pomp and circumstance this time around, with the two sides locked on 24 points apiece at the top of the table.

That’s exactly the kind of high-leverage game Ingham wants to be playing, though.

“Pressure football is beautiful,” he said. “There’s no point in playing for sixth or seventh, there’s no fun in that. If no one’s tested, no one really cares. When everyone’s watching and you’re at the top of the table and the pressure’s on, that’s when the character reveals itself; that’s when you find out if you’re a contender or not.”

Saturday’s game with Cavalry will not decide anything concrete. Win or lose, Atlético Ottawa will still have half a season left to play.

Still, taking over the league lead would be one more step forward for this club on their quest to lift a trophy.