The Canadian Press
Rust never sleeps.
Neil Young may have been singing about the ongoing battle against musical complacency. Nevertheless, his concept is one that that adheres well to the game of football and sometimes it does not have anything to do with complacency at all.
Thursday night’s game at Mosaic Stadium, between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and Toronto Argonauts, features two teams looking for early season mechanical harmony. It will be a tale of two hard-working quarterbacks, each with some questions to answer as they get back into a regular groove and attempt to reclaim their places at the top of the charts. Complacency isn’t their thing. Rust doesn’t follow orders, though, and has insisted it be a part of the story.
The Argos hope their veteran quarterback, Ricky Ray, has emerged fully from the creakiness of very little pre-season action at all after a bumpy start.
The Roughriders will look to Darian Durant to shake off a year’s inactivity, save for a nice test drive of a full half of football in their second pre-season game.
Those quarterbacks, by the way, serve as hints of larger stories surrounding each of these teams as they get set to tangle in a game that can help one of them set the proper tone for the season, the other to rebound from an improper tone set in Week 1.
For Ray, the 36-year-old who is now into his twelfth season of CFL football, there is a desire to show that the quarterback we all saw in the second half of the Argos’ loss to Hamilton is more like what we’ll see the rest of the year. After a slow start that included Ray’s first pass attempt of the game slipping out of his hand on delivery, he started to get smooth as the first half came to an end, although the Ticats were comfortably in control by then.
“Gettin’ a little bit better start,” Ray said after practice this week when asked about any goals he has for the game at Mosiac Stadium.
“I just thought he wasn’t necessarily seeing the field as well, early in the game, as he normally does,” said Head Coach Scott Milanovich. “He got himself in a rhythm in the second quarter and played like we know.”
In the Ray example, might lie a harbinger of Durant’s 2016 regular season debut. If he doesn’t come out a house afire, it shouldn’t be long before the eleven-year vet we’ve come to know emerges once again.
“To build that chemistry, it’s been tough but we’re getting there and I like where we are right now,” Durant said earlier this week, reflecting on not only his own return to action but on a redesigned receiving corps that no longer has Weston Dressler, Ryan Smith nor Chris Getzlaf in it. After missing almost the entire 2015 season with an Achilles injury, the 33-year-old Durant faces, in a sense, what Ray did the week previous; Stepping into the epicentre of a full throttle gridiron battle after a long spell of mostly inactivity of that nature. Even for a seasoned veteran, that can be withering, at least for awhile.
“Once we get into that first, second drive, we should be fine,” said Saskatchewan Head coach Chris Jones, whose answers usually reflect the way he likes his football played; quick and direct.
Familiar Faces in New Places
A lot has been made of the connections this new look Riders’ team has to the Edmonton Eskimos, but there sure are an awful lot of guys who used to wear double blue on Jones’ roster as well and if playing against your old team is accepted as an impetus for enhanced performance, there should be a number of former Argos flying around with great abandon in this game.
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They may not have the same chip on their shoulder that, say, Chad Owens did in last weeks’s opener, but there should be a great deal of the “how do you like me now” attitude coursing through their veins in any case. Running back Curtis Steele, receiver John Chiles and linebacker Greg Jones are all expected to play big roles for the Riders as they attempt to rise from the disappointment of 2015 and give Mosaic a proper, winning send-off. Defensive back Shane Herbert, cast off by the Argos in final cuts this year, has also jumped onto the Saskatchewan roster.
The Roughriders are a team of shiny, new parts and it is more likely than not that they’ll need a number of games under their belts before they really start to reflect the rebuilt vision Jones has for the team. That will be partly about familiarity. It will also be partly about doing it the Chris Jones way. He pulled his team off the field and into the locker room for a spell during a practice this week. “That’s between me and the football team,” Jones said, declining to give any details. “We got a way that we’re gonna do things.”
For the Argos, it’s about resetting the tone that was crammed down their throats by the visiting Hamilton Ticats last week. Outplayed in every sector of the game – break it down by unit and Hamilton would have gobbled up all the check marks – the Argonauts are hungry for an effort that shows they’ve got all oars in the water.
Cohesion and a positive tone. Elements that both the Argos and Roughriders will attempt to muster in a big, early season game for two teams looking for a bounce. For Toronto, it comes on the heels of a less than ideal first outing, with redemption on their minds and the determination not to get their wheels stuck in the ditch in the early going. For Saskatchewan, it arrives after a dismal 2015 and a long off-season of “can’t wait to get this thing started.”
Which is also the feeling two veteran QBs came into the season with. One has played through the rust. The other starts to Thursday night.
