Dave Campbell
CFL.ca
Anybody who’s a fan of the Edmonton Eskimos or knows and follows the Canadian Football League can vividly remember what happened on Labour Day of 2010. The Eskimos were absolutely thrashed by the Calgary Stampeders by a score of 52-5.
Fast forward one year and the Eskimos entered McMahon Stadium in Calgary with that loss hanging over their collective heads. Sure, the 2011 squad is not the same team from last season. Linebacker T.J. Hill admitted though that you can’t simply just forget a loss like that. This year, the Eskimos were a better football team at 5-3, but not feeling like themselves however entering the game. In fact, the Eskimos were losers of three-straight games.
The Esks were without the services of their best playmaker in Fred Stamps who missed his third straight game with an abdominal injury. Nobody was expecting the Eskimos to lose 52-5, but very few were expecting them to win either.
Well, two things happened. The Eskimos didn’t get thrashed and they won game. Actually, they dominated to the tune of 35-7.
Now, you couldn’t find a single person in this country who would have predicted a 28 point shellacking by the Eskimos. Well, maybe one person wasn’t surprised by the result, head coach Kavis Reed.
“It is a relief to get the win, but it was expected that our guys would come out and play very well tonight,” he said. “Our guys are smart, they prepare very well. We just ran into a spell of a lot of injuries and now we have guys coming back. I think those guys are eager to prove that they are for real.”
The returning players had a major impact on the game.
On defense, where this game was really won, defensive end Greg Peach returned and recorded four defensive tackles and forced a fumble – one of four turnovers on the day for the Eskimos.
Slotback Adarius Bowman caught five passes for 81 yards and added 43 more yards on a punt return off of a trick play.
Marcus Henry only caught three passes for 27 yards, but Kavis Reed noted he was a key in a number of plays by creating room for Bowman downfield.
Offensively, it wasn’t by any means a flashy performance. The Eskimos produced only 293 yards of net offence.
Quarterback Ricky Ray threw for just 131 yards passing, but he did throw two touchdown passes.
The running game chipped in with 127 yards on 31 carries and the offensive line did a great job of wearing down the Stampeders front seven who were clearly out of gas by the fourth quarter.
In fact, the offence did three things extremely well:
1) Dominate in time of possession. The Eskimos had the football for 35:40.
2) Zero turnovers.
3) Capitalizing on four turnovers by the Stampeders to the tune of 24 points.
A Picasso? Not by any means offensively. Efficient? You bet.
Derek Schiavone replaced Damon Duval in the field goal kicking department and he was four for four. Duval, perhaps not happy about receiving a demotion, kicked the pigskin off the football to the tune of a 50.9 yard average.
With the win the Eskimos now have a share of first place in the West Division with the Calgary Stampeders, which sets up an intriguing re-match at Commonwealth Stadium on Friday night. The Eskimos have won the season-series, which is huge when you consider tie breaker scenarios at the end of the season.
Win again on Friday night and the Eskimos will have first place outright and essentially, a four point lead over the Stampeders.
Not so fast however.
Considering the Eskimos laid a beating on their provincial rivals on Monday, in their own stadium to boot, the Stampeders will likely be in a very foul mood. It’s very difficult for either team to win both ends of the Labour Day series. Even head coach Kavis Reed knows it’ll be hard to match the emotional level his team achieved on Monday.
“Good teams like the Calgary Stampeders are going to come out and play very good football on Friday,” Reed said. “We know that, we know that Calgary is going to study the film very carefully. Their coaching staff is going to make the adjustments. We got to be ahead of the curve in order to have a chance on Friday.”
And often being ahead of the curve doesn’t involve who has the better schemes on Friday, but which team has the better legs. To play two games in five days in the game of football is near insanity.
Every player find a cold tub and don’t let it go.
NOTES: Slotback Fred Stamps will return to the lineup Friday after missing the three games with an abdominal injury. He still leads the Eskimos in receiving yards with 619. … The last time the Eskimos swept the Labour Day series was back in 2004.
