Lawrence on scoring pick-six: ‘It’s electric, especially in Hamilton’

HAMILTON — When Simoni Lawrence scored his second pick-six of the season on Friday night, he could feel the energy from the fans in the stands at Tim Hortons Field.

“Any time you get in the end zone, it’s just one of those things that you think it’s always going to happen every time you step on the field,” Lawrence told members of the media following his team’s 23-17 win.

“It’s like, when you play football for a long time you always understand how that goes. It’s electric, especially in Hamilton. The fans, when they were screaming, it felt like it was all going through my body and your whole body gets numb.”

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Lawrence’s interception returned for a touchdown gave the Tiger-Cats a lead in the third quarter that they would not relinquish for the rest of the contest. Along with his score, the Ticats WILL linebacker also tallied a team-high eight tackles on the evening.

“It just boosts the whole moral of the whole team. It fires us up,” defensive lineman Ja’Gared Davis, who had a sack and five tackles in the contest, said about Lawrence’s touchdown.

“Not only us, but it fires the fans up. It gets us going. He came up with a great play in a crucial time that we were backed up. He saw the quarterback make a throw, the receiver didn’t catch it, Simoni was there with the great hands, secured it and he took it to the house. I’m about to change his name to House-Call Simoni.”

Lawrence wasn’t the only part of the defence that was contributing, however. The entire defensive unit disrupted Bo Levi Mitchell and his offence all night long. Mitchell connected on just 16 of 28 of his passes for 170 yards and an interception before being replaced late in the game by Jake Maier.

“They kept us in the ball game early. There’s no doubt about it, we were about to get our hands on some footballs on some key plays,” said head coach Orlondo Steinauer. “With the ebb and the flow of the game, it was necessary for our defence basically to keep us in the ball game and they did that.”

Along with the impressive defensive effort, the Ticats were also impressed with the outing they got from their QB David Watford. The team’s third-stringer connected on 86.4% of his passes (19 of 22) for 149 yards.

But it wasn’t just those stats that Watford brought to the team.

“The way he’s so composed on the sideline, he keeps everybody going,” said Lawrence of his quarterback. “He’s very positive. And then when the plays break down, he put his head down and he got tough yards and he wasn’t scared to run behind his pads.

“When you see someone busting their butt like that for you on offence, playing in the position of quarterback, I think it raises everybody’s level of play on the defensive side of the ball as well.”

Hamilton now gets ready to head out on a short week ahead of their Week 8 matchup on Wednesday against the Ottawa REDBLACKS.