It is nearly that time of year again. You begin to feel it in the air, as the interminably wretched Ontario winter slowly recedes North.

The tingle that you feel running through you is the same sensation you feel before any big life event. You innately sense that all is sunny and positive in this world, a moment when you can rewire the imagination to believe that anything might be possible.

Like thousands of other Ottawa Fury supporters, in just a few weeks’ time yours truly will be getting off a winter-battered local bus in south-central Ottawa to slowly make the short march up to the city’s footballing cathedral of dreams, Lansdowne Park.

On the way up, droves of other equally enthused Ottawa Fury devotees will be passed on by, all readied for a new season, downing beers before kick-off in the local boozers of Bank Street, ever optimistic that there beckons a new, eminently brighter footballing horizon.

Until, that is, we are ten weeks into the new season and everything has gone pear-shaped. Again.

No matter, rather than stopping at home nursed in the comfort of a DAZN subscription to a classier, more stylish world game, we venture out into a thawing Canada, glowing with a warming, tempered optimism that this season has to be better than the last. Surely?

Thus armed, we put the brackets of the closed season behind us, and get set to cheer on our local side, in this case the Ottawa Fury, now entering its third successive USL season, CONCACAF be damned.

The immediate road ahead

Our collective gluttony for psychological punishment and suffering aside, comprising some 34 games, the Fury’s 2019 season kicks off in South Carolina against Charleston Battery on 9 March. The Battery, who finished a very respectable 4th in the USL Eastern Conference last season, will be no push-over.

Viewed as a whole, the USL Eastern Conference promises some very stiff competition this year and includes more than just a few teams of an unknown quantity. Four expansion sides join the Eastern Conference in the shape of Birmingham Legion, Hartford Athletic, Loudoun United and Memphis 901. Meanwhile Saint Louis and Swope Park Rangers have hopped over from the West, both of whom, it might be added, made the play-offs last year.

In their first six games alone, Ottawa Fury will encounter two of these unfamiliar beasts, namely Birmingham Legion away on 16 March and Loudoun United at home on 13 April. Apart from a home game against 2018-season-strugglers Atlanta United 2 on 28 April, the opening tranche of games will take in some formidable opposition. Early-doors opponents include Charleston Battery at the season’s kick-off, MLS soon-to-bees Nashville SC at home on 6 April, and USL two-time Champions, Louisville City, away from home on 20 April. In a nutshell, the Fury have anything but a leisurely start to their 2019 campaign.

Missing in action – several proven strikers

Moving swiftly on from last season’s on-field disappointment, there has been a welcome combination of new signings and returnees to the squad during the closed season. Yet there remains a strange wrinkle in all of this: the lack of signings of any proven strikers. From certain vantage points supporters will be wondering why has activity in the transfer market been so slow?

CONCACAF’s unseemly strongarm tactics at the close of 2018 certainly did not help the cause. Even so, with just a few days to go before the opening game against Charleston Battery one cannot help but feel slightly troubled.

To date, the only designated striker the Ottawa Fury have on the books is Christiano François (although other players can unquestionably assume the position, as witnessed during the various pre-season games). Furthermore, the club signed a player – from the Pittsburgh Riverhounds in December 2018 – who does not boast a 15-goals-a-season track-record, no doubt envisaging that his talents would be complemented by other yet-to-materialize signings.

The jolt here is that unless the De Guzman/Popovic duumvirate have a big, surprise signing or two up their sleeves in the week ahead, supporters may be left pondering where the goals will come from this season?

Writ spectacularly large was the Ottawa Fury’s collective inability to put goals in the back of the net in 2018, as was well documented. In total, the Fury scored just 31 goals all season in the league, and both Tony Taylor and Steeven Dos Santos ended the campaign as the club’s joint top scorers with just five goals apiece.

Without at least a couple of proven signings up front to fatten and sharpen up a bare-bones offensive operation, the USL deck must seem stacked against the Ottawa Fury, who may find itself embarking upon the new USL campaign under-powered and under-fire.

Despite the limitations of last season’s squad, certain players regularly left tailwinds across Lansdowne Park, several of whom thankfully remain at the club this season. Carl Haworth and Thomas Meilleur-Giguère spring immediately to mind, while several other tried-and-trusted faces remain in situ. Onua Obasi, Nana Attakora and Jamar Dixon are cases in point.

To put a brighter face on the situation (in the hope that a deal on a striker or two is in the pipeline), during the closed season Julian De Guzman succeeded in bringing in some solid, reasonably established signings, particularly in the midfield. These included German Wal Fall and Brit Charlie Ward (from Saint Louis and San Antonio respectively) as well as 31-year-old Brazilian journeyman, Thiago De Freitas. No doubt there will be more new faces to come.

It’s a knock-out (of sorts)

In addition to the regular 34-game USL season, there is the happy prospect of a significantly expanded Canadian Championship cup tournament to which to look forward. Yet what is it with this apparently insatiable appetite of Canadian football bureaucrats to tinker with what should have been a relatively straight-forward knock-out format?

Like many of you no doubt, I would have been more than happy to see the Fury kick-off in round one of the competition and see tested in practice from the very outset CONCACAF’s USL-CPL ‘league of equivalency’ theory.

Yet as we also witnessed this past week, with the long-awaited announcement of the CPL schedule, the league’s powers-that-be also revealed themselves to be no less inclined to fiddle with a well-established, standard league format.

Even so, the Fury faithful have much to look forward in the form of a potential encounter with a CPL or L1O side in July, and then, results permitting, the more distant possibility of another show-down with Toronto FC in August. More to the point, the tournament will also be an interesting barometer for gaining a sense of where the different CPL sides lie in the wider Canadian footballing context performance-wise.

The bigger picture

For Head Coach Nikola Popovic this is the season he needs to boldly engrave his name on the club lintel, more so after a fairly mediocre first season in the job team performance-wise. The 2018 campaign, while far from terrible in any sense of the word, was just somewhat pedestrian and, from a footballing entertainment perspective, is probably destined to be slowly but surely forgotten.

As the 2018 season progressed there were not unsurprisingly more than just a critics keen to train their guns closer to home, as initial enthusiasm for Nikola Popovic’s talents dissipated (this hack was not one of them). After all, there lies a critical boundary where the benefit of doubt runs out.

To set the contours of a successful season, a few early season wins would help no end and would steel a fast march on a half-decent campaign, instantaneously putting into idle any doubts that certain supporters and media critics might harbour about the club’s backroom set-up.

To speak to the heart of the matter, while a scattershot of possibilities exist, let us hope that the glow of many a glorious sunset is part-and-parcel of the Lansdowne Park footballing curriculum during the USL 2019 season.

Like last year, NSXI will keep you updated on the ups and downs of the Ottawa Fury’s campaign. So, see you in half-a-dozen games’ time for What Goes on? Ottawa Fury at Six – thanks very much for reading as always.

Like what you read? Become a Patron.

Matthew Pringle Happily ensconced in the nation’s capital, Matti Pringle regularly cheers on the Ottawa Fury at Lansdowne Park with his wife and son, while quietly watching his much-loved Newcastle United from afar.

Share with a Friend Facebook

Twitter

Reddit

LinkedIn

WhatsApp

Telegram

Email



Like this: Like Loading...