WINNIPEG — The Winnipeg Blue Bombers may have done the Saskatchewan Roughriders a favour Saturday.
Granted, a 48-28 CFL loss wasn’t what the Roughriders wanted to take out of Investors Group Field. But the spirited affair featured a lot of action away from the football and after the whistle — and, in the mind of Saskatchewan centre Brendon LaBatte, that may prove beneficial.
The Bombers had said before the game that they planned to harass Roughriders quarterback Kevin Glenn as much as possible in hopes of throwing him off his game. Afterwards, LaBatte said it felt like Winnipeg defenders were going out of their way to hit Glenn — and that led to some of the extracurricular activities.
“They came in with a game plan; they knew they had to try to get to him,” LaBatte said. “But that’s the way the game goes in the trenches. If anything, maybe it has been a little bit too long since we’ve had one like that where everybody’s kind of in a fistfight of their own.”
And LaBatte is more than OK with that.
“Shoot, we’ll go with our five guys (on the offensive line) and you pick out your five guys,” he said. “We can do it that way all day long.
“We came out on the short end of the stick on the scoreboard, but if we go out there and we battle the way we did (Saturday), we’re going to have success.”
The loss ended Saskatchewan’s winning streak at three games and dropped its record to 5-5-0. The Roughriders now sit fifth in the West Division, two points back of the B.C. Lions (6-5-0) — but Saskatchewan has the tiebreaking edge on the Lions if the teams finish the regular season even in the standings.
The Bombers also won the three-game season series against the Roughriders with two victories, meaning Winnipeg (8-3-0) has the tiebreaker on Saskatchewan.
Roughriders head coach-GM Chris Jones called Saturday’s result “a culmination of poor football,” but heads weren’t hanging in the locker room after the game.
“We took an L, but I don’t think it’s devastating to the guys,” LaBatte said. “We know that if we had executed, we would have been in that ball game at the end. But the reality of our situation is that they played good football and we made a few mistakes that led to points …
“That game was there for us. We were nine down coming out at the half (29-20), so it wasn’t out of reach. We just didn’t execute the same as we had been (during the winning streak). It’s not even 60 minutes of execution. I think it breaks down to a handful of plays that didn’t go our way.”
Maurice Leggett was the central figure in two of those plays, scoring touchdowns on a 97-yard punt return and on a 54-yard interception return. For good measure, Leggett also recovered an onside punt the Roughriders attempted in the fourth quarter.
Offensively, Saskatchewan wasn’t able to sustain drives in the contest. The visitors managed to accumulate 471 yards of net offence, but only 71 of those yards came on second downs.
Winnipeg, which held the ball for 11 minutes 14 seconds in the fourth quarter, ran 62 offensive plays to the Roughriders’ 49 in the game. The Bombers finished with 30 first downs and 410 yards of net offence.
“(The loss) is not a huge blow,” Saskatchewan linebacker Henoc Muamba said. “It was an important game, it was a game that we wanted to win and we felt like we could have won, but they executed, they played very well in front of their crowd and there’s nothing you can do about that.
“The only thing we can do is look forward and continue to build.”
The loss dropped the Roughriders’ road record this season to 1-4-0 — and they’re about to embark on a stretch of their schedule that features three road games in four weeks.
Saskatchewan is to visit the Hamilton Tiger-Cats on Friday, the Ottawa Redblacks on Sept. 29 and the Toronto Argonauts on Oct. 7. Sandwiched in there is a home game against the Calgary Stampeders on Sept. 24.
Prior to Saturday’s outing, the Roughriders had won their previous away game — a dominant 54-31 victory over the host Edmonton Eskimos on Aug. 25 — but Muamba didn’t think the defeat in Winnipeg meant the team’s road woes were returning.
“You’ve got to have a bigger picture,” he said. “You can’t look at each game and just be like, ‘Oh man, we suck.’ That’s definitely not how we look at each other.
“We did some good things (Saturday) — we did a lot of good things, actually, when I think about it — but at the end of the day, there are a lot of things we need to fix as well. It’s just a matter of fixing those things and moving forward.”
Cornerback Kacy Rodgers II agreed.
“It’s not Nov. 4, right?” he said. “It’s not the end of the year. We’ve got a lot of things that we can clean up, but we’ve still got a lot of football left.”
