Bowman, Als looking to carry momentum into Week 4

Don Landry

CFL.ca

@CFLLandry

Allow me, if you a will, a bit of a tennis analogy when it comes to the Montreal Alouettes.

Their win in Saskatchewan was akin to breaking an opponent’s serve, always a wonderful thing to do in tennis. But, it doesn’t mean so much if you don’t, as they say, consolidate that break by holding your own serve in the next game.

That’s where the Montreal Alouettes find themselves as they prepare to host the Ottawa REDBLACKS on Friday night. Trying to consolidate a break, after ending a thirteen game losing streak.

John Bowman, the ageless wonder of a defensive end who is once again defying time in his thirteenth season in the CFL – all of them with the Alouettes – doesn’t follow tennis much, so my analogy falls a bit flat for him. But he does get the gist of it and has another way to say it.

John Bowman and the Alouettes won their first game of the 2018 season in Saskatchewan in Week 3 (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)

“If you don’t stack it, at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean anything,” Bowman says, mindful that his Als need to follow up on their win in Regina with another good effort against Ottawa.

Bowman has been through so, so much in his hall-of-fame worthy career in Montreal. The ups of consecutive Grey Cup wins under Marc Trestman in 2009 and 2010. The downs of the post Anthony Calvillo years, including the ugly losing streak that began almost a year ago, seeing the Alouettes drop the final eleven games of the 2017 season.

All that experience has the 35-year-old (he’ll be 36 later this month) native of Brooklyn, New York in a position of cautious calm in the wake of Montreal’s giddy, 23-17 Week 3 win in Saskatchewan.

The depths of Montreal’s struggles saw Bowman caught, publicly, tearing up on the sidelines as the 2017 season was coming to a close. He knows how bad all of that misery felt. He knows that it will take hard work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

It’s a message he had for his teammates this week, as the Als went back to work in the scorching summer heat.

“I just reiterated; don’t rest on what we did last week,” he says. “Defensively, last week, we had a pretty good game.”

But?

“We’ve still got a long way to go in this season. We’re building,” he says flatly.

There are a lot of new faces on the Montreal roster in 2018, especially on defence where the likes of free agents Jamaal Westerman, Joe Burnett, Tommie Campbell, Henoc Muamba and Mitchell White were added. That’s good and bad, Bowman says. The bad is that it takes awhile for a unit to become a unit, no matter the talent level. The good is that the talent level is high and that the names listed above are proven CFL veterans with plenty to give, both physically and mentally.

These are veteran players, meaning Bowman doesn’t have to be the vociferous beacon of the team. He doesn’t need to remind them about the kind of work needed to ensure a little momentum is not squandered.

“We’re right in the middle, age-wise,” he says. “So the knowledge is being passed on from everywhere.”

“I don’t have to lead the room. I just say my part and people kinda listen. Take in what they want and disregard the rest.”

There is another advantage to the amount of off-season turnover executed by Montreal General Manager Kavis Reed, Bowman says. The struggles of Alouettes teams of the past, including the team that dropped eleven in a row in 2017, mean nothing to the new guys.

“Eighty-five per cent of these guys weren’t here,” says Bowman. “I can name eight, maybe ten guys that were on this team last year that had to go through that.”

Because of that lack of baggage, Bowman says, starting the season at oh-and-two merely meant that the team started the season oh-and-two. There was no residual hangover. No sense of ‘here we go again.’

Henoc Muamba is one of the many new faces on the Alouettes defence this season (Jimmy Jeong/CFL.ca)

Instead, there was only a sense of needing to work hard to put the abomination of a Week 2 loss to Winnipeg (the Bombers blasted the Als 56-10, right in Montreal) behind them. They did that. Now, Bowman says, he and his teammates need to ensure that the even keel they’d kept after being trounced by Winnipeg remains in place after the relief of their energizing victory in Regina.

“Winning is good but playing good football is better,” says Bowman. “You can build off of playing good football. And even though we won last week, we still had fourteen or fifteen penalties and eight or nine of them were avoidable.”

There is, Bowman says, nothing to do except get to work. Whether you’re up or down, there is always that as a constant.

“Don’t care that there’s a heat wave in Montreal,” he says, dismissing the factors that might lead a team to let its guard down, including feeling a little too satisfied. “Don’t care that it’s a short week, don’t care that Ottawa had a long week. It’s just a game for us that we gotta be prepared to win.”

As Bowman had said, the Montreal defence did indeed have a pretty good game last week, punctuating the performance with four interceptions and a couple of pass knockdowns, one of them by Bowman, who was playing his first game of the year after being on the Alouettes’ injured list. With his unyielding energy added to the mix, the entire Als’ defence looked supercharged, whether that was by coincidence or not.

Bowman would be the first to tell you, though, that he is not a catalyst. That there are many quality parts to the Montreal defence.

“When (Kavis Reed) was putting this team together, we knew defensively we could be something special.” says Bowman, adding that rotational depth is something that the entire defence has going for it, especially up front where Bowman’s added presence can mean a pass rush breather for a unit that may yet spend an inordinate amount of time on the field going forward.

This is, after all, a Montreal offence that continues to search for a consistent, ball-moving identity.

“We know we’ve gotta carry this team right now, defensively, and we’ve gotta try and keep as many points off the board as we can and create more turnovers,” Bowman says. “That’s what our focus is every week.”

That focus will need to be extra sharp as the Alouettes try to follow up on a much-needed win with a big effort against a snarling visitor, on Friday night.

Time to consolidate that service break.

Follow CFL