Courtesy Hamilton Spectator:

Pre-season football games are for coaches and fanatics and, yes, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

There’s not much that the dispassionate observer can draw from a Canadian Football League match which comes after less than a fortnight of practice.

The eastern champion Blue Bombers left the front seven of their defence, every single one of them, home to enjoy a Thursday night without coaches in Winnipeg.

So what, exactly, could the average fan learn about the chronically-troubled Tiger-Cat offence? That’s why they invented game film, we suppose. Coaches look for the little things that escape an outsider’s eyes, and the camera supposedly catches all.

But even against the Bombers’ wannabe linemen and linebackers, and with the limited evidence of just a quarter-and-a-half at the helm last night, it was quite apparent that Casey Printers wants to make this his team, and his town.

The Ticat quarterback did not get off on the right foot here last year, arriving through a dense forest of signing intrigue, halfway through a horrific Cat season, making a rough start against these same Bombers, delivering ill-considered criticism of his new teammates and incurring a couple of injuries.

The league’s most outstanding player in 2004, Printers is a proud man who learns from setbacks and plainly wants to engineer that train onto a different track this year.

It’s not that the offence looked particularly good last night — Pollyanna juiced on happy gas wouldn’t even say that — when Printers was in the game. It was more how he projected himself.

Most notable was a play in which he ran a bootleg left when his object was to throw the ball and couldn’t find a receiver open, and slid in for a first down. Printers jumped up and demonstratively squared himself to the crowd — what there was of it — on the south side of the stadium.

Pumping his fists in a request for a show of noisy support, and getting it, Printers was trying to exert something positive. And he was trying to connect with the core group of Ticat fans, the type of people who come to a pre-season game coming off a three-win season.

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