By Elliotte Freidman,
CBC Sports
It was Jesse Lumsden’s birthday, but the Tiger-Cats got the gifts.
Lumsden’s all-world performance Friday night (12 carries, 211 yards, an obscene 17.6 average) is what the organization needed, badly. Hamilton looked awful at the start of this season, the running back’s 11-carry, 158-yard mauling of the outstanding B.C. defence overshadowed by yet another defeat.
This time, he scored the opening and clinching touchdowns, the hometown boy energizing a sellout crowd by running through, around and past a pretty good Winnipeg defence. The punch-drunk Tiger-Cat fan base has something to believe in. This guy is no fluke.
The most impressive thing about Lumsden is how he’s worked to correct the (very few) flaws in his game. In one of my earlier columns, I wrote how other teams noticed he wasn’t comfortable running to the left, and that he was holding the ball in his right arm (not the correct left one) when going to that side. On the second of his two TD runs, he went left. And, he was holding the ball in the proper arm.
Obviously, he was aware of the critique. Clearly, he fixed it. That says a lot.
Friday morning, hours before the Winnipeg-Hamilton game, the CFL on CBC crew met with Danny Maciocia to discuss Calgary-Edmonton. Maciocia said one of the problems the Eskimos had last year was too many selfish players “only wanting to get their films together so they could get back to the NFL.”
I thought about that while watching Lumsden that night. Jesse and father Neil were disappointed with the way his time in Washington ended. (With Clinton Portis injured, the Redskins traded for veteran T.J. Duckett, basically killing Jesse’s chances.)
Maciocia’s Edmonton 2006 issues will not be repeated for Charlie Taaffe in Hamilton 2007. Lumsden’s focus is in the right spot.
Elliotte Friedman is the host of the CFL on CBC.
(The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of the Canadian Football League)
