History writes itself. Friday night, the Montreal Alouettes will host the fearsome Saskatchewan Roughriders for their eighth game of the season.
Why should we particularly care about this duel? Well, this will be the first game featuring the Sparrows head coach, Jason Maas, and his quarterback, Cody Fajardo, against their former team.
There we have something.
What’s more, the Prairie squad fired Maas, the club’s offensive coordinator, at the end of the campaign. She also decided not to retain the services of Fajardo and preferred to grab Trevor Harris, who was the starting quarterback with the Alouettes last year. Suddenly, it starts to turn us on.
“I want to wait until the last minute before making a decision,” said Maas, Thursday noon, in order to keep us visibly in suspense in the heart of an excellent thriller.
Fajardo suffered a nasty collision in his team’s 27-14 win over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats on Saturday. The 31-year-old veteran didn’t miss a single offensive streak, however, even after the tackle.
Since then, we have cultivated the intrigue. This week, the Californian took part in a half of training and mostly spent several days in the infirmary due to this left shoulder injury. It is impossible to say if the right-hander will be sent into the fray or if he will continue to keep the media in suspense for another week.
“I wanted to be on the court and practice, prove to the coaches that I was able to throw, to move with my shoulder pads. […] And it’s not like we’re playing the Gray Cup tomorrow. There are many opinions and many other people who help us make this decision. Everyone knows that if it was up to me, the decision would not be made at the time of the match. Tomorrow I’ll be playing,” said the protagonist of the week, Fajardo.
In the meantime, we are preparing for the eventuality that this clash, filled with animosity, will indeed take place.
“If it was the first week of activities, it would be a little different, with everything that happened during the off-season. But you know, we’re down to seven games on the clock,” said Fajardo, who wants to calm things down from the start.
“There’s obviously a kind of attachment to a team I’ve spent the last four years with and played a lot of football games for. On the other hand, at this stage of my career, I have played for four teams. So if I started circling matchups against all of these teams on the schedule, that would pretty much make up every team in the league,” the quarterback dares to excite.
“Obviously there is a lot of preparation and media hype,” he concedes.
“Just seeing the guys and the ones I’ve faced in practice, I can tell you they know me and I know them too, and that’s what’s so exciting. It will be an interesting game of chess between the two sides, because we know each other quite well,” he concluded.
In the end, it will be just a match like the others. Until it isn’t anymore.
Among the few certainties of this story, we can add a few names to the list of absentees for Friday’s meeting. Running back William Stanback, who rushed for 106 yards last game, and tackle Almondo Sewell won’t be in uniform.
“Stan did not respond to the treatments at all as expected yesterday. He also felt some glitches. Just like Mondo. […] We hope it will be better next week,” Maas said.
