The Canadian Press
It should come as absolutely no surprise that the CFL’s long-ruling king of trash talk said it best.
“My mom always told me, ‘If you’re mad you better do something about it or don’t say nothing,’” Simoni Lawrence said, basking in the glow of a dominant 40-10 Hamilton win over the BC Lions.
“You can do something about it or say nothing.”
The Ticats were mad and while the talk of the day was the cause of anger being over the Lions dancing on the Ticats’ logo in their walkthrough Friday, it went deeper than that.
RELATED:
» The Hammer drops on Lions; Ticats win at THF
» Ticats defence comes up big after setting tone early
» Images: Lions at Tiger-Cats
» By the Numbers: View Boxscore
“It didn’t really piss me off,” Ticats’ linebacker Don Unamba said. “I don’t care, really. It pissed some teammates of mine off, so it was motivation.
“I mean, it really stems from last week. We let them off the hook.”
Letting an eight-point lead with a minute left on the clock shapeshift into an overtime loss was crushing and humiliating. That festered all week. Then, that video of the Lions dancing on the team’s logo surfaced. Truthfully, that kind of thing happens regularly across the league. But, you pour gas on an already smouldering fire and…
“I got something to say. I just want to talk to the BC Lions. Don’t ever disrespect the hardworking, hard-nosed Steeltown (people),” Hamilton receiver Brandon Banks told TSN’s Matt Scianitti after the game.
“You can dance,” Lawrence said, “you can do whatever you want. But at the end of the day you’ve just got to come down and play football.”
The Tiger-Cats made sure they were going to do that. They scored on their first offensive drive. They pick-sixed Jon Jennings’ first pass of the game. They poured points on the board and the game was effectively over at halftime.
The game was heated from the second both teams stepped on the field. Lions kicker Ty Long was bumped by the Ticats in the pregame. Throughout warmups, players were talking trash from each side of the field. The officials stopped the game quickly in the first half to ask each coach to tell their players to rein it in a little.
“Players were mouthing off at each other and I guess that probably led to them stopping (play),” Jones said after the game. “I think it might have had something to do with (the logo).”
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats defence came up big in the conclusion of their back-to-back series against the Lions, tallying six sacks, three interceptions and two touchdowns. (The Canadian Press)
“Not everybody knew about it but I’m sure the people that did, definitely did. The word definitely got out,” said Ticats QB Jeremiah Masoli, who threw for 175 of his 189 yards in the first half.
“Felt a little disrespected by it for sure, that’s our home logo but what other teams do during their walkthrough doesn’t really matter.”
The game was emotional and physical and Hamilton controlled all of it from the second it started. The defence held BC to 222 yards of net offence. The two pick-sixes it got on Jennings felt death blows. Masoli finding Banks for a pair of touchdowns and Luke Tasker for another blended together, making the game feel like an out-of-control carnival ride.
For Unamba, who had five tackles and an interception, it felt like things were getting back to normal.
“We felt like that a lot of times, to tell you the truth. That’s just how our defence plays,” he said.
“That’s our defence. That’s what I’m used to seeing us play like.
“That one last week hurt. To get a win like today, we can forget about (last week). We got a win now and now we’ve got some motivation to go into the bye week.”
“It’s a big win, not just with the bye week but for this point in the season for us to be .500 now and everything in front of us,” Masoli said. “I think that’s a big statement win for us, coming off of the way we lost last week.”
The Ticats have four games left, all of them against Eastern opponents. Against the Lions — a team they could see as a crossover opponent in November — they got a playoff-like level of intensity out of a blowout win. They got mad and they did something and it could set them up for bigger things this year.
