What kind of team is the Blue?

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This article was published 10/07/2015 (4103 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT is probably not a coincidence the last time a Winnipeg Blue Bombers team had an identity — 2011’s Swaggerville phenomenon — was also the last time this city had a winning football team.

Say what you want about the whole Swaggerville thing — yeah, it was goofy, and yeah, Jovon Johnson probably still has a trunkful of unsold T-shirts the Bombers defence produced on its own that memorable summer as an ill-conceived income supplementing exercise.

For all its flaws, Swaggerville was also a brand and an identity that an otherwise ordinary 10-8 team was able to rally around and parlay into an appearance in the Grey Cup game.

The whole was greater than the sum of some very ordinary parts on that 2011 team, and the Swaggerville defence had more than a little to do with that.

It’s said all great football teams have an identity — think ‘Purple People Eaters’ or ‘Steel Curtain’ or ‘Orange Crush’ or ‘New York Sack Exchange’ or ‘Gang Green’ or, well, you get the idea.

The point is that it’s been at least three seasons since you could attach an identity to a Bombers team other than “bad.”

Think it doesn’t matter, that it’s all just a bunch of words and mumbo jumbo? Tell that to Bombers defensive tackle Bryant Turner, who was a member of the Swaggerville defence and he says sometimes you really are what you say you are.

“We need an identity,” Turner said Thursday. “I feel like when other teams are on the field, we want them to see an aggressive attack team. We want guys to fear us, basically…

“And it starts up front, I think, with the O-line and D-line. I feel like we need to be physical and fast and mentally ready basically to hit each other in the mouth. And hopefully we can come out (tonight) and start off early with that and go from there.”

The Bombers host the Montreal Alouettes tonight at Investors Group Field. Their fans are hoping the Bombers will be the gritty and aggressive gang that hung a Week 1 win on the board in Regina and not the gutless bunch that capitulated at home to Hamilton last week when QB Drew Willy went down.

So what is the identity this Bombers team could take on? Well, they would be well served if — as many football teams have done before them — they simply took on the identity of their head coach, Mike O’Shea, a 16-year CFL middle linebacker who was long on heart but also had a notable nasty streak.

O’Shea says it will be up to his team — not him — what this unit becomes.

“We don’t actually use that word (identity),” O’Shea said Thursday, “but we talk about what we want to be and the team we want to be.

“And obviously that takes some time to get to that.”

“But the hope is you reach that identity by the time the mid-season mark rolls around and you’re winning games and pushing for the playoffs.”

Part of establishing an identity is establishing character and there’s no truer test of that than the way a team responds to adversity. They failed that test — hopelessly — when Willy went down last week and among the most vocal with his disappointment in how his team responded to the loss of their leader was slotback Clarence Denmark, who said immediately after the loss to Hamilton the entire team needed to pause and take a long hard look at who they are and who they want to be.

On Thursday, Denmark said the loss to Hamilton still rubbed him the wrong way.

“I don’t feel like they were a better team than us,” said Denmark. “I just feel like we beat ourselves. And that’s always a hard way to lose. When you go out and just get beat and manhandled by a team, you have to respect them and you have to watch the film and find a way to get better.

“But when you lose like we did, leaving all those plays out on the field that we could have scored on and a lot of plays the defence could have made, that’s hard to take.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek