Sunday afternoon at BMO Field: first meeting between the two clubs since last November’s semifinal
The Roses travel to Toronto on Sunday with a perfect record, a clean sheet streak, and the team that ended their 2025 season waiting on the other side. The first two matches have set the tone. Now comes a real test of whether it holds.
Saturday’s home opener at Stade Boréale delivered the line of the young season: 4-0 win over the defending champions. Tanya Boychuk, in her first start of the year, scored a brace. Elyse Bennett added her third of the season to keep her at the top of the league’s scoring chart. Anna Karpenko picked up her second straight clean sheet. Two matches in, the Roses have yet to concede.
Boychuk’s brace deserves a closer look. The co-captain led all returning Roses last season with seven goals and four assists, and given a starting role on Saturday, she looked every bit the player who put up those numbers in 2025. There’s a small piece of history worth mentioning here, too: Boychuk scored the first goal in club history, and it came against AFC Toronto on April 19, 2025. Sunday is her chance to add to that file.
Around her, the build-up has been the story of the early going. Lisa Pechersky and Chloe Minas have run the attacking third for Robert Rositoiu’s group through two matches, with Minas setting up Bennett’s opener in Calgary and Percheski picking up an assist that broke open Saturday’s win against her former club.
And the back line picks up where it left off. The same group that conceded fewer goals than any team in the NSL last year has carried that form into 2026. Lucy Cappadona, Stéphanie Hill, Anne-Valérie Seto and co-captain Mégane Sauvé have logged nearly every minute together through two matches, with Hailey Whitaker and Olivia MBala stepping in off the bench.
The opponent
AFC Toronto enter Sunday at 1-0-1, off a 0-0 home draw with the Halifax Tides last weekend. The 2025 Supporters’ Shield winners opened the season with a 3-2 win at Vancouver in a rematch of the NSL Final, but the Halifax result extended an odd thread for the club: AFC Toronto have still not won a match at BMO Field. Three losses there in 2025, including the NSL Final against Vancouver, and now the draw with Halifax. They host seven of their 13 home matches at BMO this season.
Marko Milanović returns 19 players from last year’s championship-game roster, and the threats are familiar to anyone who watched the 2025 semifinal. Esther Okoronkwo, the Nigerian international who scored a hat-trick against the Roses in that series, won the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations with Nigeria last summer. Kaylee Hunter, the league’s reigning Rookie of the Year, finished 2025 with 12 goals; the Calgary native turned 18 in January. Sarah Stratigakis and Victoria Pickett anchor a Canadian-international midfield, and Finnish goalkeeper Sofia Manner joined the rotation this winter.
The 2025 series finished 3-2 in Toronto’s favour, but both Roses wins came at BMO Field, the most recent a 2-1 result on July 18.
What to watch
The match within the match is at the back. Hill, Cappadona and Seto have been excellent through two games, but Okoronkwo’s runs off the shoulder of a centre-back are a different test from anything they’ve faced so far in 2026. The communication on through balls, and Karpenko’s reading of the line behind them, will go a long way toward determining whether the clean-sheet run reaches three.
The midfield is where the chess match plays out. Pechersky and Bilbault give Rositoiu one of the most experienced central pairings in the league, and Stratigakis and Pickett match it on the other side. Whoever wins the second balls in the middle third will set the rhythm. Minas, drifting between the lines, is the one who tilts the picture if the Roses get on top.
And then there’s the new front two. Saturday was the first time Boychuk and Bennett started together. They scored five goals so far this season between them. A road match in Toronto against a Supporters’ Shield winning side is a different proposition than a home opener against Vancouver, but a starting pair clicking this early is the kind of problem most teams in the league would happily trade for.
Broadcast
SunDay, May 10, 2026 - 1:00 p.m. ET, BMO Field, Toronto
Live on CBC (English) and RDS (French) in Canada. International streaming on NSL.ca.