Aug
Never-quit attitude suits Esks
Courtesy Edmonton Journal:
Richie Hall is a spiritual man with a quiet-spoken but unshakable belief in life’s simple verities.
Don’t give up. Believe in yourself. Support your teammates. Keep fighting. On and on.
Slowly but surely, the Edmonton Eskimos are assuming an identity that reflects their head coach’s beliefs.
It showed in their overcoming a 22-0 deficit and beating the Saskatchewan Roughriders 38-33 on July 25; showed again in their 28-21 loss to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, in which a final scoring drive fell short.
It certainly showed on Thursday night, as the Eskimos battled from behind all game long, took their first lead with less than four minutes remaining, lost it, and finally scored the winning TD with nine seconds left on the clock.
“Oh yeah, it’s not over until it’s over, that’s always been ingrained in me,” said Hall the morning after the Eskimos’ wild, comeback 38-35 victory over the Calgary Stampeders.
“That’s what we tried to do when I was in Saskatchewan and this is what we’re trying to do here.
“You keep fighting, you keep fighting, you keep fighting, and at the end we’ll look up at the scoreboard and see if we had enough.”
Who has not heard, if not absorbed, this lesson many times over since childhood?
How many actually live it, never cutting corners or taking mental-health breaks before the fight is done?
Hall lives it. He reminds his players of it daily.
To that end, on Wednesday, Hall screened a five-minute clip from a movie called Facing the Giants for his team’s benefit.
The clip focused on the coach of a Christian high school football team running a drill called a bear crawl, in which a blindfolded player goes as far as he can on his hands and knees while carrying a player on his back.
“How far do you think you can go?” the coach asks.
“I think I can go 40 yards, 50 yards, something like that.”
So, away the player crawls, the coach exhorting him to keep going, you can do it, and so forth.
“I’m sorry coach, I can’t give it any more,” the exhausted player finally says.
“Well, you’re in the end zone,” the coach replies.
“Sometimes we put limitations on ourselves,” Hall said. “How many times have we (all) gone through crises where we don’t know how we’re going to get through it, but you do make it?”
Of course, steeped in defensive football as he is, Hall wouldn’t mind a little more “do-unto-others” from that side of the ball.
In football, as with most team sports, defensive stinginess is next to godliness and Hall’s team is giving up an average of almost 32 points a game, for heaven’s sake.
Despite the team’s 4-3 won-lost record as it enjoys a bye week, the Eskimos have scored 187 points and given up 222, which may be enough to provoke even a deeply spiritual head coach like Hall to want to toss something hard at the nearest stained-glass window–at least figuratively.
“The major concern is we have to be more sound fundamentally,” Hall said. “I thought Henry(Stampeders QB Burris)and(receiver Jeremaine) Copeland had a good game, I’m not taking anything away from him.
“But we were in position, also, where, at some point in time, we have to come up and make a play. Because he’s made it.
“I know we’re not going to make every play, but we have to make some plays.”
You have to respond, in other words. Make the interception — something the Eskimos have yet to achieve this season. Make the knockdown, cover the person.
All in all, the Eskimos offence responded with more big plays Thursday night than their defence, which did produce a couple of sacks and four knockdowns.
But a timely interception by defensive back Jason Goss, to cite one example, would have stifled Calgary’s last scoring drive altogether.
He just missed picking a ball that had been tipped by linebacker Mark Restelli.
Not that the defence needs to be reminded to tighten up, mind you.
“We made some big plays, but we also gave up some big plays, so it kind of equals out,” said defensive tackle Dario Romero, who recorded one sack and was a force in holding Stampeders running back Joffrey Reynolds to just 33 yards rushing.
“We’re getting there, defensively. All we need now is to take away the big plays and they really wouldn’t have anything.”
Of course, that’s the way it is in football, as in life: there’s always something to work on.
