Argos’ Season Falls To A New Low Following Defeat Over Alouettes
Will Stanback scored two to fire the Montreal Alouettes to a 40-10 rout of Toronto on Sunday in their final home game of the season. The match was a battle between the two sides at the foot of the table.
Match MVP Johnny Manziel said: “I’m damn excited. It was a good win for our team.
“But finally to get the first win out of the way, and to do it at the end of the season where I feel we’re building into something, this season into the next season, it’s what we wanted to do… No matter how cold, how bad the weather was, today was fun.”
Manziel had lost his previous six games with Montreal.
In a season of lows and losses, the Argos reached the absolute depths of despair here on Sunday, to the point of complete embarrassment.
It’s one thing to lose, it’s another when you lose against an Alouettes team that’s almost as bad as Argos- according to the standings. Argos showed no ability to bounce back and no semblance of continuity, the score line clearly reflects that.
In every area of play, the Argos continue to show no signs of progress, particularly on offence.
James Franklin made more plays with his feet than his arm, but the offence spent most of the day going backwards on most possessions because nothing could be sustained.
There’s no identity, not enough play-makers, inferior quarterback play and puzzling play-calling that has turned the Argos offence into the CFL’s least entertaining group.
At least the Alouettes, now also 4-13, needed to be trickery and creative, with some emotion in defense, which made big plays and even scored a TD early in the fourth quarter when Franklin was stripped of the ball in the Toronto end zone and veteran John Bowman pounced on it to put Montreal up 32-4. Whatever chance the Argos had, and it wasn’t much, vanished at that point.
Head coach Marc Trestman wasn’t about to sugar-coat the team’s loss. He said: “Our performance was completely unacceptable, We didn’t play well defensively, we didn’t tackle from the first half of the game. We weren’t situationally aware. They had a reverse, a double play after a blocked kick.
“Those were big plays. We didn’t execute offensively in the first half. We were down there twice (in the red zone) and both times we had chances to score, but we didn’t execute. We had guys open, but we didn’t execute. We didn’t execute in the second half principally because we had penalties that kept stopping us from making first downs.
“I thought we played well in the third quarter defensively, but we didn’t maximize it because we didn’t execute offensively.”
There wasn’t anything the Argos should be proud of and the toll of a long and frustrating season is finally being felt as the season officially comes to its conclusion Friday night in Ottawa, thankfully for Argos fans.
On a cold and rainy afternoon at Percival Stadium, a day when Mother Nature showed some mercy as the weather did improve a bit, it all came crashing down, the Argos were completely exposed.
Peace
Burke
