Final Score: Vancouver FC 2-1 Halifax Wanderers
Goalscorers: Bitar 69′, Nimick (OG) 90+5′; Ferrin 42′
Game of the 2023 season: 102
CPL match: 469
Match in a minute or less
Vancouver FC claimed back-to-back wins for the first time in club history on Saturday, as they nabbed a 2-1 win over the Halifax Wanderers at Langley’s Willoughby Comunity Park, courtesy of a late winner on an own goal from Daniel Nimick.
To begin the game, Halifax would come out as the stronger team, however, and were rewarded for it with a well-taken Massimo Ferrin goal in the 42nd minute, allowing them to take the lead right before half time.
In the second half, though, it’d be all Vancouver, as they pushed for the win in front of their home fans. As a result, Gabriel Bitar did well to tie the game up in the 69th minute, before Shaan Hundal forced an own goal off Daniel Nimick in the 95th minute to ensure another dramatic finish at Willougby Community Park, where Vancouver had grabbed a 91st-minute winner in their last game out on September 9th.
Three Observations
Vancouver continues strong end to expansion campaign:
When reflecting on Vancouver’s inaugural season, they certainly can’t get faulted for what they showed at their best. There’s a reason why they’ve got an impressive seven wins, and currently sit in seventh place out of eight, having done well to climb out of the basement over the last few weeks.
Where they’ve let themselves down, however, is consistency. For example, heading into this game, they’d been yet to win back-to-back games all season long, and hadn’t won back-to-back home games, either.
Of course, to frame that as a negative would be unfair to them – this is an expansion team, after all, and that’s just part of the growing curve of a young team that is growing and gelling together.
Yet, as they’ve continued to string some strong performances over the last few weeks, they’ll have to feel frustrated that they weren’t able to use that as a chance to build some momentum with a stretch of consecutive wins.
In this game, however, they found a way to change that. Having won their last game, a 1-0 win over Valour in midweek, and their last home game at Willoughby Community Park, a 2-1 win over Atlético Ottawa, they entered this game with a chance to tick off two key boxes, being those pair of different back-to-back wins, as well as back-to-back home wins.
Now, with this late win, they can check both of those accomplishments off their list of expansion year achievements, one that’s quickly growing as the year comes to an end.
Not only that, but they can say that they’re finding some good overall form as of late, too, as they’ve now won three of their last four games and four of their last seven. For context, if they were to keep up that pace of four wins every seven games over the course of a full season, they’d be pushing for one of the top two spots in the league, as that would give them 48 points over the course of a 24 game season.
Plus, they’re doing a good job of disrupting the overall playoff race, too. For example, their win in midweek over Valour actually eliminated Valour from playoff contention, while this Halifax win ended up delaying the Wanderers’ ability to clinch a playoff spot on the day.
That might not seem like much, but those are important milestones, as it means that Vancouver is showing opponents around the league that they’re not just a team that will give away free points in matches.
Given that they’re eliminated from the playoff race, that’s impressive, as they could’ve had every reason to slow down as the end of the season approached. Especially seeing their status as an expansion team, it would’ve been easy to say that they were turning their focus to next season, and looking to build for that.
Instead, they’re looking to take care of as much business as possible and use that as fuel for next year.
“I think gives us confidence and it gives us a platform to build on,” Vancouver’s head coach, Afshin Ghotbi, explained when asked about his team’s recent form. “I wish this league was like the European leagues, and that we had more than 28 matches to play, because I think we’re seeing our team climb now, and if we would have had this team from the beginning this season, it’d have been a different season.”
“So we’re going to run out of games (to make the playoffs) this year, but this is going to create a great foundation for next year’s team.”
Therefore, they’ll now hope that this stretch can help them now build momentum for next year. Seeing that a lot of these players could be here in 2024, given how much turnover the team went through in midseason, that’s not an unrealistic proposition either.
Yet, that shows the importance of key moments from this game, such as Callum Irving’s big saves in each half, Gabriel Bitar’s goal or Renan Garcia’s performance in midfield, as not only are they helping Vancouver win games in the here and now, but are also setting the table for what’s next for them.
Based on this most recent stretch, one where they’ve won games, wreaked havoc for those around them, entertained and even scored a few late winners for good measure, that’s not a bad thing at all, giving something for the team to build off of once they do set their attention to next year.
“We’re just focused on trying to build for next year,” Vancouver midfielder, Elliot Simmons, said after the game. “It is a bit of motivation for ourselves to know the teams that knocked us out, that we can ruin their season in a way, but to do that we need to be the best version of ourselves, and give back to our fans who have been supporting us from the beginning of the season.”
Halifax misses opportunity to clinch playoff spot with sloppy second half:
It was all lined up so perfectly for them.
With York’s loss to Cavalry earlier in the day, that meant that Halifax could’ve actually clinched a playoff berth with a win in this game, needing no other help from other teams.
Halifax seemed to be aware of that, too, at least based on their start. Given that they nearly blew the doors off Vancouver in the first half, grabbing a 1-0 lead while outshooting them seven to two and generating 0.8 xG to Vancouver’s 0.09, it seemed like a matter of when, not if, that Halifax would book a playoff spot on the day.
Given that they were controlling more of the possession, and just seemed eager to want to dominate the game, it looked like it was going to be a long day for the hosts unless something dramatic occurred.
At half time, however, everything changed. Perhaps sensing the pressure of the occasion, knowing what was at stake, Halifax started to sit back a bit deeper in the second stanza.
As a result, they really began to invite Vancouver pressure, allowing them to grow back into the game. Then, they started to get sloppy, too, which caused even further problems.
To be fair, that didn’t hurt them for the first 20 minutes of the half, as they still remained relatively unthreatened despite their slopiness, but then they stepped on their own foot in the 69th minute. On a routine sequence of possession, they turned the ball over, and were immediately punished for it, as Vancouver then scored through Bitar after just one pass on a ruthless counter-attack.
From there, the momentum completely shifted, as Vancouver’s confidence started to grow. As a result, they really started to pepper Halifax’s goal, eager to grab a winner. Eventually, they’d find it, too, as Halifax just seemed to have no answer to the relentless waves of Vancouver pressure, allowing the hosts to leave with all three points.
For Halifax, that has to be frustrating, as this all felt quite avoidable, too.
“If we’re going to try to play the way we have, we have to be brave and be ready to deal with aggression, and we did that in the first half,” Halifax’s head coach, Patrice Gheisar, noted after the game. “(Vancouver) didn’t do anything that was crazy or rocket science in the second half (with their pressure), it’s just that we failed to play through it, and that’s where things got a little bit crazy. Then, we started to defend long stretches, and anytime you have to defend for long stretches, then you drop deeper and deeper, that was our trouble in the end.”
“Yeah, I think our game plan is to keep the ball,” Halifax full back, Zachary Fernandez, added. ” And when we don’t do that, we can get in trouble sometimes. So yeah, I thought we should’ve kept the ball more, put our feet on the ball, but we didn’t.”
Unfortunately, however, they weren’t ruthless enough, and that hurt them. It wasn’t just their defensive play, either – they had three big chances in the first half, and one big chance in the second half, showing that they had chances to both pull away early and grab a winner before Vancouver did.
Instead, they let those chances go to waste, and that allowed Vancouver to hang around long enough to win the game off the back of Halifax’s defensive sloppiness.
Yet, that provided a key lesson for Halifax as they get set for their last two games of the season. They do still hold their destiny, as they’ll clinch a playoff spot as long as they win one of their last two games, but they’ll need to be a lot more ruthless than they were in this game in order to do that.
That’s going to be a big test for this young team, as these sorts of big games will be decided on these sorts of moments, which Halifax learned first-hand in this game.
To their credit, they’ve done a good job of managing those moments as of late, which is why they sit where they do despite going winless over their first eight games of the season, but they’ll now need to lock in further as the games will only get tighter from here.
“Yeah, I think the main lesson for us is to just score one goal and then sit back,” Fernandez finished. “When we scored, we need to put in another goal, and then put another one, put five in if we need to, because when we’re on the edge like we were today, bad things like that can happen.”
Aggressive Vancouver second half tweak pays off late:
While Halifax will look at their second-half struggles and point to themselves as the reason why they lost this game, that’d do a disservice to Vancouver, who also did a good job of growing back into the game.
Not only that, but they shifted their approach, too, and that ended up paying off for them, big time.
Sensing that they were letting Halifax have too much time on the ball up to that point, Vancouver made a tactical switch in the 59th minute of the game, as they made a bit of a formation switch.
There, they brought in Mikaël Cantave and Min-Jae Kwak for Vasco Fry and Kadin Chung, shifting from a 4-3-3 to a 4-2-3-1 with those moves.
With Cantave slotting in at left wing, that pushed Gabriel Bitar from the wing to more of a central channel as the #10 in the attacking three, giving him more of a free role on the ball.
Then, off the ball, that allowed Vancouver to press with more of a front four, with the goal being to pin Halifax’s back three deeper in possession, cutting the supply to their midfield.
Therefore, while their first goal did come off Halifax’s mistake, it’s worth noting that the Wanderers’ turnover came from them trying to play through this adjusted Vancouver press.
Along with a shift in mentality, one that saw them begin to take more risks and play with more aggression, it was a bold tweak from Vancouver, but one that immediately paid off.
From there, they didn’t look back, doing well to keep up that pressure, and the rest was history.
“We knew that we had to get back in the game, and we had nothing to lose,” Simmons said of his team’s shift. “And I think it was an exciting brand of football for everyone watching, and it got the best out of us, so it was a good reaction in the second half.”
Yet, credit has to be given to Vancouver for that shift. Sensing a vulnerable Halifax side, they pounced, and their gamble paid off in the end.
Of course, it’s worth wondering if Vancouver could’ve employed this approach from the start, especially given that they had great success in doing so in their last home game against Halifax, another 2-1 win, but credit has to be given for adjusting the way that they did.
Especially given that they’d looked in danger of letting the game slip away from them completely, that they were able to recover and grab a late win is a good show of their character, which was certainly on full display in the second half.
“We had to switch systems in this game because we had to we started so bad,” Ghotbi admitted. “So we had to change our alignment because we were getting completely killed in midfield, so down a goal, we thought we could bring on an extra attacking player and put them more under pressure from all three channels in the pitch.”
“And you saw it with the changes, they gave us some defensive stability, as well as some attacking qualities that we were missing.”
CanPL.ca Player of the Match
Elliot Simmons, Vancouver FC
Deployed in his usual role in the heart of Vancouver’s midfield, Simmons had quite the impact on both sides of the ball in this game, allowing his side to claim the win in the end.
From his contributions in the attack, which included an assist, three chances created and one shot, to his defensive actions, which included three tackles, one interception, eight recoveries and five out of eight duel wins, the numbers more than back up that sentiment in the end, too.
What’s next?
Vancouver will head out on the road, but still stay in British Columbia, as they get set to cross over to Vancouver Island for their fourth and final Salish Sea Derby clash with Pacific FC on Saturday, September 30th at Starlight Stadium in Langford (2:00 p.m. PT). Meanwhile, the Wanderers will travel back across the country, as a home date with Forge awaits them at Wanderers Grounds earlier that same Saturday (2:00 p.m. ET/3:00 p.m. AT).
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