Mitchell Blair
On a day where points were tough to get and both defenses played extremely well, both the B.C Lions and the Saskatchewan Roughriders found a chance late in the football game to score points. Unfortunately for the home side, the Lions got the last points and the winning points.
Paul McCallum kicked a 42 yard field goal on the game’s last play to lift the Lions to a 24-22 victory over the Riders in front of just under 40 thousand fans to hand the Riders their third straight loss and really tighten up the Western Conference standings.
It looked like the Riders were going to pull this one out at the end as Darian Durant led his team down the field late in the 4th quarter on what was the offence’s best drive of the day capping it off with an eight yard touchdown pass to Weston Dressler with just 38 seconds left, but the defense could not stop rookie quarterback Thomas Demarco who promptly took the Lions down to the Saskatchewan 35 setting up McCallum’s heroics and leaving the Riders once again to look in the mirror and wonder what had gone wrong.
“This is horrible,” a sullen Chris Getzlaf said moments after the final gun sounded. “Our offence continues to be flat and it’s very frustrating. Teams are getting a lot of pressure on us, we are facing a lot of second and long situations and when that happens you are not going to get a lot of first downs. It’s a struggle across the board and we all have to pick up our game.”
The disappointment Getzlaf is feeling was evident throughout a somber dressing room. Durant, who threw for 352 yards in a losing cause, was also at a loss for words as to how the football team had let this one get away especially when it came to the topic of urgency and the seeming lack of it.
“If I felt like the urgency wasn’t there I could answer that question, but I can’t answer it.” a disappointed Durant said. “I feel like we have the urgency, but we just aren’t executing. This is very frustrating. I don’t like losing and we’ve done it three straight times. I know there are a lot of questions being asked and there are a lot of things we could have done better. I will take a lot of responsibility for this. It’s all about missed opportunities at the end of the day and we just had too many of those. We just have to regroup and keep playing football. There’s a lot of time left in this season.”
Head Coach Corey Chamblin was also feeling the disappointment of having two points stolen from them. He wasn’t going to start pointing fingers at any one area saying all parts of this football team have to sharpen up.
“We still have to play football at the end of the day,” Chamblin said. “We have to be able to handle every situation when it’s presented to us. We have to make the field goals, we have to make the first downs and stop them from getting first downs, and we have to stop taking some penalties. We did a lot of good things out there today, but we all have to take a gut-check and look at ourselves and make sure that individually what we do is going to produce a win.”
Defensive lineman Keith Shologan knows the team let this one slip through their fingers.
“We were 32 seconds away from taking this one. We knew what we had to do, but they took what they needed and they executed well in the face of pressure.” Shologan said. “This is a very frustrating loss.”
With the team entering the final third of the season, Shologan is confident his teammates can rebound from this three game losing skid and get back to playing the football they were playing at the start of the season.
“This thing isn’t over,” Shologan insists. “I know we’ve lost three in a row and we haven’t played well, but this is the CFL and you know you can’t say anything is over at this point of the season. We just have to look back at what we were doing in those first few games and look at everything and then try to brush this skid off and catch fire again.”
The team now finds themselves tied with the Lions for 2nd in the West at 8-4 just one game behind first place Calgary. They hit the road for two straight starting Sunday in Montreal as they play their last game of the season against an Eastern Division opponent.
GAME NOTES:
- Both teams seemed content to throw the football instead of running it as there were only 26 running plays in the game with BC having 14 of them
- Chris Milo has missed three field goals this year. All three have bounced off the upright including two on Sunday.
- Geroy Simon is tied with Ben Cahoon for most catches in a career. Simon’s next catch will be his 1,018th which will make him the most prolific pass-catcher in CFL history
- Linebacker Weldon Brown was a late scratch after a knee infection flared up late on Saturday. His removal from the roster meant the debut of linebacker Ejiro Kuale who had just been signed on Wednesday.
