By Dan Plouffe
The Ottawa South United Force and Ottawa TFC under-17 girls’ soccer teams met in the first-ever all-Ottawa Ontario Player Development League Charity Shield final on Oct. 26 in Vaughan, and produced perhaps the most memorable finish in the 10-year history of the OPDL.
After a 1-1 regulation game, the match was decided with a penalty-kicks shootout that went 16 players and eight rounds deep.
The shooters shone at first, but it was the goalkeepers who ruled the day come the end. Ottawa TFC converted its first four penalties and had a chance to win it, but OSU goalkeeper Charlotte Murray-Martin blocked that attempt fairly easily and elevated her performance from there.
She made another two sparkling diving stops with the game on the line before Grace O’Grady finally snuck a shot in for the Force against Lauren Yeomans, who was standing tall in the Ottawa TFC goal.
Murray-Martin then got a hand up to knock the deciding shot over the goal – her fourth consecutive save following four goals conceded – to deliver the title to OSU.
“It feels amazing. I’m so excited,” Murray-Martin said on the Ontario Soccer webcast moments after teammates had bounced her over their heads in full cheer formation.
“I think we definitely got lucky,” she added. “But I’m so proud of these girls. Everyone fought their hardest until the last whistle. On the penalties, we just had a positive attitude and we just kept going. I’m so happy.”
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OSU coach David Fox told the Ottawa Sports Pages that he’d “never seen anything like that” in a penalty-kicks session.
“Each time I sat down, thinking, ‘Oh, here we go,’ and then she steps up and saves us again. It was definitely a big moment, a special moment for Charlotte,” Fox highlighted. “She’s been excellent all year, and I think the goalkeepers in our teams don’t always get the credit that they deserve for how good they are, because we have such dominant teams at times.”
OSU won a total of four titles across eight Charity Shield age group finals for boys and girls on playoff championship weekend, with three triumphs coming in shootouts.
Penalty kicks are “always going to be a bit of a lottery,” Fox noted, adding that it mostly comes down to who can be the most cool and composed. But he’s very pleased to hold the winning ticket this time, having lost his last four Charity Shield shootout finals with various OSU teams, including last year’s U17 girls’ squad.
“We’ve turned around the bad luck we were having and evened it out a little this year, which is most pleasing to me,” Fox smiled. “There’s an element of luck in this. You know, you can practice kicks, as I’m sure everyone does, but you can’t recreate the pressure that the kids are under in that moment.”
With many team members completing their youth soccer careers, the end of the season always has a bit of a bittersweet feeling regardless of the result at the U17 level, but Fox was thrilled that his players got to experience the epic win as their final memory all together.
“It’s just been such a special age group,” he underlined, noting that the team made it to the Charity Shield final every year since U14 and that a number of top players moved on to the Canadian women’s program’s National Development Centre in Toronto.
“What I’m most happy about is the fact that we’ve managed to be in a final at the end of all of this and still be competing with those top teams,” added Fox, whose troops won a 2-1 semi-final over Waterloo on the road to reach the final.
“The fact that in the last couple of years, we’re actually still able to produce teams on the field and produce performances that win in the big finals, is a full testament to the club and also obviously to the players that have come in and stepped up in the program so that we can keep playing at that level.
“Full credit goes to all the players over the years for everything that they’ve achieved.”
Ottawa TFC takes down undefeated league champs to reach finals
Ottawa TFC was a surprise finalist in some ways. The east-end club’s prospects of making it into a top-four playoff position looked dim when they were just 2-3-1 in premier division play, having lost several close games while battling injuries.
But Ottawa TFC coach Pavel Cancura said that may have helped them in the end, because “we were facing must-win scenarios for weeks leading up to the playoffs,” he explained.
Ottawa TFC produced three consecutive victories to sneak into the playoffs and earn a trip to Markham to face the unbeaten league champions in a semi-final on Oct. 19.
“Markham, they’re a good team. We’re well matched,” Cancura recalled. “This has all the makings of a normal semi-final. Nerves. It’s testy. It’s going to be tight.”
The match was deadlocked at 0-0 until just before halftime when a goal was scored by U15 age player Tahlia Aird-Graves, who was the Ottawa TFC U16 girls’ top scorer and #3 league-wide.
Then Mia Cleroux played “lights out” to score and setup Ottawa TFC’s next two goals in the second half en route to a massive 7-1 upset victory on the road.
“I’ve never been a part of something like that,” Cancura signalled. “It was crazy.”
After that high, Cancura was initially worried that his team might not be able to refocus on preparing for the championship game against OSU, but wasn’t the case.
“We were quite prepared,” he indicated. “I think everyone felt confident that we would be at our best.”
Tied 0-0 at halftime in the final, Ottawa TFC broke through with the first goal of the Charity Shield final in the 52nd minute when Rachel Gopalakrishnan delivered a nifty shot from a distance.
Ottawa TFC then had a series of corner kick after corner kick after corner kick (en route to a 12-3 advantage in corners come the end of the match), but couldn’t buy an insurance goal despite numerous scramble opportunities. Time of possession stats were not available, but those would have been heavily titled in Ottawa TFC’s favour as well.
Nevertheless, OSU became dangerous with several quick counterattacks, and in the 71st minute, Mia Ugarte got the equalizer from the top of the box off a pinpoint pass from Cindy Yang.
The game wound up in a shootout and Ottawa TFC was left to lament missed penalty kicks when they had the chance to win it, but Cancura noted that another goal during regulation would have done the trick too.
“Frankly, I thought the girls did quite well,” Cancura outlined. “We knew the opponent well. Everything we prepared for is what they did, everything we wanted to do to counter them, we did, and it worked.
“At the end of the day, we didn’t get our final touch. Just even the sheer volume of set pieces, the corner kicks that we had, the amount of time spent in and around their box, the number of goal-line scrambles, the goal that’s called back – I don’t know, when I talked to the girls, especially the seniors that are graduating, a lot of them repeated words like, ‘It probably hurts more because we feel like we probably should have won.’
“That was a sentiment that I heard from a number of them. I don’t necessarily totally agree with that because I don’t want to take anything away from OSU. They were incredibly resilient. You look at some of those goal-line clearances and scrambles, and the sort of almost battering that they absorbed, and were still able to produce a goal and were still able to stand tall in the shootout – that’s definitely a credit to them.
“But it was, for sure, emotionally disheartening. That’s the best way I can put it. Because you do everything, you build up to the game, and then you play like that, which I’d say was pretty solid, and yeah, the only thing missing is the result.”
First all-Ottawa OPDL final, but leaders expect it won’t be the last
Prior to their rise in the past decade, Ottawa teams struggled mightily against Toronto competition at the provincial level, but in recent years, an all-Ottawa Ontario final began to look like more of an eventuality than a fantasy.
“I think for those of us who are close to it, I don’t think we’re that surprised anymore,” indicated Cancura, noting that a big local strength is nurturing homegrown talent, who work with quality coaches from a young age and grow up experiencing a winning club culture.
Both finalists said that facing a fellow Ottawa team didn’t impact their approach – after all, it’s an opponent they’re meeting for the championship.
“But it’s a great thing to have another Ottawa team in one of the finals and obviously there’s always going to be a bit of a rivalry with that,” noted Fox, OSU’s high-performance technical lead. “Both teams at the ’07 age group have been very successful over the years, and in that age group, it’s certainly been a bit of a rivalry for sure.
“To finish OPDL with that final is pretty special.”
Cancura noted that strong teams can start to emerge from a young age, and that a bit of an unusual bond has developed between the local adversaries.
“You end up facing each other so much that by the time you get to U17, you feel like you know every player on the other team’s roster by name, because you’ve faced them 50 times over the course of your youth career,” he explained.
That somewhat odd relationship – as fierce but supportive rivals – was noticed most prominently in the moments after the shootout when both squads gathered near the same spot, with OSU celebrating their big win and OTFC supporting each other in defeat.
“The emotion kind of died very quickly,” Cancura recounted. “From the time I walked from the bench to where our girls were, it was kind of quiet, and some of their girls were consoling ours.
“It was weird. I actually had to make a concerted effort to pull our girls away from it, because I felt like, just let them celebrate a second and it’s OK, we can be a little disappointed.
“But the two teams were almost mingled all together, which probably says something about the rivalry too, right? At the player level, there’s not a hatred there or anything like that by any means. They respect each other.
“There’s definitely the pride. Of course, both teams want to win and both teams are kind of almost afraid of losing that match.
“I would say, when you combine all those things – the players will fight as hard as they possibly can to try to win, but in the end, they are able to show the respect for one another – wouldn’t that be exactly what you’d call a healthy rivalry?”
All-Ottawa final held at usual championship site in Toronto
The OSU vs Ottawa TFC matchup was a historic moment for soccer in the nation’s capital, although the contest was held 450 km away at Ontario Soccer’s Zanchin Automotive Soccer Centre in Vaughan, where Charity Shield finals took place for all age groups.
“We would have liked to host of course, and logically it makes sense (with two Ottawa teams), but we also had so many other OSU teams away that it would have been tough to manage from a coaching perspective,” said Fox, who suspects Ontario Soccer is not yet ready to entertain the idea of a provincial final being held elsewhere.
Cancura agreed that it made sense logistically to have the final in Toronto, with finalists only determined days before the big event, and particularly since both Ottawa squads qualified with upset road victories.
But it would have been a great spectacle for local soccer if it had been held in town, he added, as the clubs’ oldest youth teams faced off in a match that was absolutely thrilling from a fan perspective.
“If that final had been here at Millennium, it would have been full,” said Ottawa TFC’s club general manager, noting that he’d love to look at options for the future to play a final between two Ottawa teams at a university in town, which would still be a neutral site.
“Not only does it save us the obvious driving for everybody, but it also would be good for the league and the city and the sport,” he added. “It could come up again sooner than we may think (to have another all-Ottawa final). We had three teams in the semis, so we certainly hope to be there again.”