War of the weak sisters

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/09/2009 (5850 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LET’S see if we can hype this bad boy properly here: Two teams with a combined 6-16 record… two teams so offensively challenged they’d be hard-pressed to put a dent in a stick of butter… two teams struggling to tread water, one about to be tossed a life pre­server, the other an anvil…

It’s not exactly a marketer’s dream now, is it, selling tonight’s ugh-fest be­tween the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Toronto Argonauts?

Funny thing about football, however: Sometimes it’s exactly these kind of contests that provide the most compel­ling drama. Desperation, after all, can occasionally bring out both the nasty and the good in a squad trying to hang onto its fleeting playoff hopes.

"I was just thinking about it and it’s, ‘Wow. One of these teams is going to be 3-9 and be buried so deep it’s almost a write-off for the year.’ It just better not be us," said Bomber defensive tackle Doug Brown. "It’s a high-stakes game.

And I don’t want to be stuck in the city at 3-9 and I’m sure they don’t want to be going home to Toronto (at 3-9). Actually, I think fewer people would care if they lost.

"Do we have more to lose? Let’s put it this way: it’s a lot easier to get lost in Toronto and to be anonymous. It’s some­thing you wear. If you’re a Winnipeg Blue Bomber and you have a bad season you wear that on your sleeve all year.

And for the guys who live here in the off-season it’s a stain that doesn’t erase until something else can counteract it on the other end.

"I’ve been through some miserable seasons, but we still have that one word ahead of us right now: opportunity."

True enough. Amazingly, as bad as the Bombers have been in their 3­8 start they remain just four points out of the playoff hunt — the B.C. Lions at 5-6 would cross over for the last spot — with seven games still to play and five of them at home. And consider this: As much as this bunch is trotting out a receiving corps that has so many new faces half the group still has airline travel tags on their gear, quarterback Michael Bishop insisted the week of practice was more spirited and ener­gized than any since his arrival.

"We changed some things. What we’re doing now is a better fit to the guys that are playing," Bishop said. "This is the best week of practice we’ve had. We made some changes and, for the first time, everybody’s on board. Once you get everybody on board and if we come out and play well then everything keeps going up from there. We’ve got guys coming in at 8 o’clock at night that never would have done that. That’s because they’re ready to go.

"We have nowhere to go but up. The way we feel right now, one game here could turn it around for us and be a spark for us. A win here and everybody’s back on board with us and we don’t have as many people dogging us as there are." But a loss would drop the locals to 3­9 and the wailing for head coach Mike Kelly’s head on a platter would undoubt­edly become louder and louder. Earlier in the week the boss referred to this as a ‘must-win’, although he backed off a bit on that in his pre-game press conference Friday.

"Whoever loses this game, that light at the end of the tunnel is starting to look like a little pin rather than any kind of beacon," said Kelly. "But there’s still light there because you wouldn’t be eliminated yet in our wacky world that we live in in the Canadian Football League.

"We still think we have a shot to make some legitimate noise down the stretch.

I don’t think that’s foolish. I don’t think it’s foolhardy. I believe in this football team. I’ve never wavered from that and I’m not going to waver from that and I’ll be that way until November."

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca