It was another outdoor sauna for the Tiger-Cats as they continued to fine-tune themselves for Sunday night’s rematch against Saskatchewan in the Roughriders’ home opener Sunday night.
We’ll go straight from the frying pan to the fire: Does another 0-2 start—both losses by a single score, both within a hands-length of a victory near the end — cause the head coach to feel any extra pressure?
“I’m feeling it every week,” Scott Milanovich said today. “Every week is as important as the last one, is as important as the next one, is as important as the last one. That’s what we do here; we dump everything into one week. We don’t look back, we don’t look forward.
“Obviously this is a big one. It’d be good for us to get that first win but the process is more important right now than the result.”
The Ticats are, of course, walking into a hornets’ nest with the Riders’ fans pumped up after two comeback wins in which they outscored Edmonton and Hamilton by a combined 37-6 in the fourth quarter. They’ll be encouraging their team to pick up exactly where they left off, especially against the league’s other small-market club from whom they just stole a victory. It will likely be a cacophony of green and white anti-Cat calls.
But, rookie Ticat receiver Shemar Bridges, who leads the team in catches and ranks fourth overall in CFL receptions and seventh in receiving yards, counters that it could be a positive for Hamilton to meet the same opponents again so soon.
“You want to get back as quickly as possible,” Bridges said early this afternoon. “We talked about it and it’s very rare in life, especially in professional sports, that you have a chance to do it the very next week. We’re going to be ready; we’re going to capitalize on some things we didn’t do last week. And just keep getting better.
“We had some big plays but there was still more stuff left on the field and I think in a sense that’s encouraging because we were able to do some good things and there are still things for myself, and the team, where we can better.”
Milanovich said that the improvement in several areas from Game 1 to Game 2 was commendable but that the Cats can’t allow their upward arc to flatten out.
“I thought we were much better defensively,” he said. “Obviously, Trevor got hot in the second half. I thought we played much better offensively too. We kind of cooled off in the fourth quarter when we needed, in my opinion, to go out and win that thing.
“Special teams were much more … I don’t want to say detailed, but they were much more on their details and focused on what they needed to do. So despite the outcome, yes, it’s trending in a positive direction. Now the key is to continue doing the same the same things we’ve been doing and keep that upward movement. We can’t relax, we can’t level off.”
Richard Leonard, the veteran defensive back, says it’ll be helpful to have the same secondary in place for the second straight game: he’s at halfback on the wide side of the field with Dexter Lawson Jr. beside him; corner Jamal Peters and half Kenneth George Jr. patrol the other side and safety Stavros Katsantonis fills the middle.
They’ll definitely have to play closer to their receivers, especially in any man-to-man coverage, after playing too deeply behind the Rider pass-catchers in the game-tying drive late in Sunday’s fourth quarter. That’s playing directly into the quick-release tempo of Saskatchewan quarterback Trevor Harris. The Ticats may have made only two turnovers this year, but they haven’t created any and need some game-altering picks.
“We learned a lot,” Leonard said. “We have to play a little tighter. We have to make our plays when it’s time. We had a chance to end the game and we didn’t end it. So we have to look at that on the film and just know that we have to finish because if we finished, then the game would have been over with one or two interceptions we could have made.”
