Photo by Ottawa Fury FC

By RYAN TOLMICH

If one were to look at the NASL’s Spring Season table, it’s hard to imagine that either Ottawa Fury FC or FC Edmonton would be any sort of contenders early in the Fall Season.

Yet here they are.

After finishing ninth and 10th, respectively, in the Spring Standings, Fury FC and FC Edmonton now sit atop the table ahead of this weekend’s Canadian derby (Sunday, 4 p.m., ESPN3). Meanwhile the Spring Season champions, the New York Cosmos, currently sit as the season’s bottom-dwellers, signaling a bit of a shift in power as the Fall Season hits its stride.

Both Fury FC head coach Marc Dos Santos and Eddies head coach Colin Miller cited the three-week break between seasons as essential in helping their teams grow, an opportunity not afforded to many teams throughout the world.

With a “second preseason,” as Miller called it, between the Spring Season and the Fall Season, NASL teams are given a chance to readjust after 10 games, while also earning a bit of a mulligan for lackluster Spring campaigns.

Currently, the NASL Spring Season and Fall Season winners are given automatic berths in the playoffs, while the two highest finishers in the combined standings join those teams in the league’s postseason.

Both Dos Santos and Miller say that they choose not to focus on separate seasons, admitting that, in all honesty, they would prefer a combined season with the four highest finishers making the postseason.

With that mentality, both coaches believe that their teams are mentally built for the long haul, as the two teams view the NASL campaign as one big picture rather than two separate halves.

“I’d love to start well in the Spring Season because every point is a prisoner, of course,” Miller told SBI, “but the fact that some clubs may put all of their eggs in the basket into that Spring sprint and they don’t win, psychologically that may be a time where they sort of have to reinvent themselves. Myself, our approach at this club, it’s just lets take it one game at a time. There’s no Spring Season or Fall Season to us. We went on a fantastic run in the Fall Season last year, so we’re hoping that that will continue.”

“We always looked at it as a full season,” Dos Santos told SBI. “We’re not in it like, ‘OK, let’s put the Spring Season aside and now focus only on the Fall.’ The objective in the Spring Season was to get as many points as we can. We were able to get 11, and now, in the Fall, we want to get the maximum points that we can because our main objective is at the end. When we calculate everything in the combined standings, we want to be in the top four spots.”

Sitting in the league’s top spot as things stand, Fury FC have earned 13 points from the Fall Season’s first five games, two more than the team earned in the entire Spring campaign. With a three-week break between a lackluster Spring Season and a, to this point, resurgent second half, Dos Santos attributes his team’s recent rise to a boost in confidence and, more importantly, fitness.

Having made numerous additions, including Rafael Alves, Colin Falvey, Paulo Jr. and Andrew Wiedeman, to the team ahead of the 2015 season, Dos Santos said that the three-week break between seasons was crucial in allowing his team to enter the Fall Season full-strength while also giving the team a chance to perfect tactics even further.

“One of the things we did is that we were pretty much sure about our model of play,” Dos Santos said. “We wanted to play as a team, and we knew what we wanted to do at different moments of the game, but a lot of players that were new, they had to get used to that model and the way that we wanted to play. Those three weeks, the break, we were able to just work on that and make sure that we invested a lot of good time on that and that’s what we did.

“Afterwards, it was about being focused in training, taking training like we were in a game and slowly growing as a team. Everybody understands their role at the club and all of that helped us. We’re doing very well at the moment, but we’ve only just started the season and there’s still a long way to go.”

In contrast, FC Edmonton’s rise has been a cause of one thing and one thing only: defending.

Citing himself as a coach that demands organization, Eddies coach Miller utilized the break between seasons to repair his team’s calamitous nature when forced into defense.

Citing his team’s “Bad News Bears defending,” Miller says that the three-week break between seasons allowed his team to refocus on what it takes to stay organized and compact, something that has paid dividends en route to the team’s current second place standing.

“I think it was a bit of everything to be honest with you,” Miller said. “Over my time at FC Edmonton, we’ve traditionally been a very, very difficult team to play against, hard to score on. It just seemed to be any sort of mistake our guys were making, whether it be goalkeepers or whatever, we just went through a period where I thought, ‘goodness me, we’re going to have to score five here.'”

With both teams now sorted heading into the Fall Season, Sunday’s clash between the two takes on more importance, as the two teams vie for legitimacy and, more importantly, a playoff berth.

In a rivalry game made all the more important by the spot in the standings, both FC Edmonton and Fury FC have a chance to make a legitimate run to the postseason after tough Spring starts, something that will add even more fuel to the fire to a game that Dos Santos called the NASL’s best rivalry.

“Their tails will be up for sure,” Miller said. “There’s a very real rivalry between the two clubs, and it’s a Canadian derby, so there’s a lot to play for here. If we win, we can be two points behind them. That’s our prime objective.”

“We are teams that are trying to be the number one team in Canada and the NASL,” Dos Santos added. ” There is that rivalry that is natural right away. It doesn’t matter if it’s first or against second or the two last place, every time Ottawa plays Edmonton, I’m expecting a very intense game.”