Blue have great past, present still substandard

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This article was published 07/07/2017 (3279 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a week that was all about honouring a great from the team’s past and the long-awaited, much needed arrival of the future at Investors Group Field, the question on the mind of Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans at Friday night’s 2017 home opener was whether the long-promised present is also finally at hand.

For years now, Bombers fans have been asked to either celebrate the club’s past — through a seemingly never-ending and almost weekly honouring of former Bombers greats — or to wait patiently for the future as the club’s current braintrust completed a ground-up rebuild that began in the ashes of the disastrous Joe Mack regime in 2013.

So the question that was top of mind on the night the long-promised rapid transit station at IGF finally opened for business was whether the similarly long-promised iteration of a legitimate Grey Cup contender would be the first to pull into the new station.

Sadly, that bus appears to be running late. Users of Winnipeg Transit — and long-suffering Bombers fans — will relate.

While the new transit station at the stadium appeared to be serving its purpose Friday night — moving fans on and off the University of Manitoba campus and relieving the crushing traffic that has become synonymous with Bombers’ game days — the team itself looked to still be running a cylinder short in a 29-10 loss to the Calgary Stampeders.

Now, make no mistake — this is the deepest Bombers team we have seen in these parts since the 2007 club that lost a Grey Cup to Kevin Glenn’s broken arm in the East Final.

The Canadian talent these days, led by hometown boy Andrew Harris at running back, is as good as we’ve seen in these parts since at least then.

The offensive line, this franchise’s Achilles for years — and the undoing of a steady parade of quarterbacks — has become one of the team’s strongest attributes since the move last season to start three imports alongside homegrowns Matthias Goossen and Sukh Chungh.

On the opposite side of the line of scrimmage, the Bombers’ front-seven — and especially the front-four — has shown flashes of dominance this season. A week after holding the Saskatchewan Roughriders to just 20 yards rushing, they pushed Calgary around for much of the first three quarters Friday night, at one point putting together a five-play goal-line stand that ultimately cracked on the sixth Calgary attempt but still had a big opening-night crowd of 30,165 on its feet roaring in approval.

Then there’s quarterback Matt Nichols, who has demonstrated that his Lazarus-like heroics last season in lifting a 1-5 team from the dead and carrying them to an 11-7 regular-season record and the first playoff berth in five years in these parts was no fluke.

Nichols is neither flashy or particularly physically gifted. But he has demonstrated himself to be mostly consistent and reliable, attributes seldom used to describe quarterbacks in these parts for a very long time now.

But if there’s a lingering rap on Nichols, it remains his propensity to throw interceptions. His touchdown-to-interception ratio as a pro has always been suspect, and that weakness was a big part of his club’s undoing on this night.

With Calgary clinging to a 12-10 lead midway through the third quarter and the outcome still very much in doubt, Nichols hit Calgary linebacker Maleki Harris in the numbers and Harris returned the interception 27 yards for a back-breaker of a Calgary touchdown.

Now, every game on the CFL schedule counts for the same in the standings, but make no mistake — this one was worth more than most.

Every year there are a couple of measuring-stick” games on the schedule that tell you who you are as a team and for the Bombers that game came early this season in the form a test at home against a defending West Division champion that has made a whipping boy of Winnipeg for an embarrassingly long time now.

The Bombers had lost 16 of their last 17 games to Calgary — and eight in a row at home heading into Friday, which is, of course, a complete joke and testimony to everything that has been so wrong for so long about the Winnipeg Football Club.

The fact the Bombers are now one loss deeper into that humiliation carries implications larger than a regular season record that dropped to 1-1.

The cold, hard reality is the path to the Grey Cup in the West Division seems to go through Cowtown every November and so nothing good happens for this Bombers team until they first prove they can beat the best.

Tick tock.

There was some irony to the fact this was all playing out in the same week the Bombers announced they will be honouring former head coach and GM Cal Murphy with a statue later this season.

Murphy, of course, presided over the last three Grey Cups in this neck of the woods, including the last one way back in 1990.

It has been a long, parching trek through the football wilderness ever since and the announcement the club will be putting up a Murphy statue in September outside Gate 3 comes at a time there is enthusiasm that this city’s long-suffering football fans may finally be rewarded for demonstrating a level of patience that makes Job look like an over-caffeinated teenager.

But what emerged Friday night — and in a less than convincing double overtime win the week previous over a lousy Saskatchewan team — is this 2017 edition of the Bombers still has a lot of work to do before it has fans forgetting Murphy’s 1984 Grey Cup juggernaut or those loveable blue collar outfits in 1988 and 1990 that defied the odds to parade to Portage and Main.

Still, it’s been a long time since this city has partied at Canada’s most famous intersection and the pent-up demand — and high expectations — were palpable Friday night in a boisterous, well-lubricated crowd on a glorious Winnipeg summer night.

It was the largest crowd at IGF since last September’s Banjo Bowl, and compelling evidence that if you build it, Bombers Nation will still come.

The question now is whether they will keep coming.

Bombers CEO Wade Miller made a bold pledge this week — promising free tickets to the club’s next game this coming Thursday against Toronto to any fans who turned up Friday night and did not find traffic congestion after the game had eased.

Hats off to Miller for putting his tickets where his mouth — and his new rapid transit station — happens to be.

But ask yourself this: just how many unsold tickets does Miller have to next Thursday’s game that he would dare make a guarantee like that?

What emerged Friday night is this team still has lots of work to do, on the field and off of it.

This team’s past is unquestionably glorious, it’s future promising.

But the present? We’re waiting, still.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek