Great teams usually find a way to win. It doesn’t matter how. And this is not the case for the Montreal Alouettes. Again, the story is the same.
All defeats are costly, but some are more costly than others, as George Orwell could have written if he had redirected his career towards the world of sport.
The Alouettes lost 23-20 on Saturday night against the Toronto Argonauts, but the scenario could have been completely different.
With the game tied at 20-20, the home side were on the verge of doing the unthinkable. That is to say beating the best team in the Canadian Football League, avenging their defeat last week against these same Argos and ending an ugly streak of three consecutive defeats.
With a deficit of just three points and 21 seconds left in the game, the offense found the field to at best tie the game and force overtime.
Fajardo handed the ball to Tyson Philpot in midfield and the latter stopped his run at the Argos 45 line. A perfect position for kicker David Côté.
However, the Toronto defensive front had the upper hand on the Alouettes offensive line and the kick was blocked. The dial showed 0 and the Torontonians snatched the victory from the Montrealers. In Percival-Molson stadium, murmurs, but above all a breathless crowd.
This defeat will be difficult to digest, but as head coach Jason Maas said, there are also lessons to be learned from the fact that we were able to heat up the best team in the country like this: “It hurts, but there are things to remember. I can assure you that this locker room will remain united to learn. »
If the best teams find solutions, the others look for them. And the Alouettes have still not found the key to breaking out of their torpor.
Jason Maas’s team had the opportunity to go up the field twice to score points in the last minute of play and they scored none.
“Yes, we competed against the better team and it was a three-point game, but we lost. We have to go back to the drawing board,” explained receiver Tyson Philpot, author of a touchdown on a 15-yard pass in the third quarter, very lucidly.
The Argonauts earned their 11th victory in 12 games, enough to formalize the East Division title. The Alouettes, for their part, fell to 6 wins and 7 losses. “We’re under .500 and teams under .500 are not good teams,” said quarterback Cody Fajardo.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are getting dangerously close in the standings and, knowing that victory was within their reach, this defeat is all the more painful for the Alouettes players.
“I repeat every week that we can compete with these teams,” Fajardo said. Now we have to beat them. »
However, the team did well. This is what makes this goal so difficult to accept. For a rare time this season, the offensive and defensive units passed the baton to each other. In the second half, the Alouettes scored 17 consecutive points. In addition, the defense was effective in shutting out quarterback Chad Kelly as much as possible, with only 21 passes completed on 35 attempts, and star running back A. J. Ouellette, limited to 53 yards on the ground.
The Argos had scored an average of 40.75 points in their last four games. Thanks to brilliant plays from Lwal Uguak, Wesley Sutton and Darnell Sankey in the second half, the Alouettes looked good.
At the end of the game, however, the defense let the Argonauts move up the field from one end to the other twice.
However, the attack should have taken advantage of the opportunities presented to it. In the absence of William Stanback, Fajardo was still able to orchestrate some offensive pushes. But the attack was anemic in the final moments of the clash.
“We lacked finishing,” said fullback David Dallaire.
It really feels like there were two matches in one. The first 57 minutes. Then the last three. “It’s a different football when there’s little time left. They made plays that we hadn’t seen during the match in the last three minutes. You […] have to learn to stay ahead when you have it,” concluded Marc-Antoine Dequoy.
But ultimately, there is only one goal: defeat.
