LANGLEY 41 WESTSHORE 7
What had the makings of a good football matchup turned into a bit of a dud at the newly-named Westhills Stadium on Saturday afternoon.
Early mistakes and costly turnovers and penalties left the Westshore Rebels on the short end of a sloppy 41-7 loss to the Langley Rams in a battle for second place in the B.C. Football Conference. The loss snaps a sixgame win streak as the Rebs stall out at 6-2 on the season.
The Rams move to 6-1-1 to stay within striking distance of the 7-0-1 Vancouver Island Raiders who narrowly defeated the Okanagan Sun 32-30 on Saturday.
The Rebels never really recovered from an unsettled start as they gave up a safety 1: 27 in, followed by a 35-yard Nick Naylor field goal to fall behind 5-0 8: 56 into the game.
Down 13-0, they finally got a spark on Greg Morris's 57-yard touchdown off a swing pass from Mark Black 4: 26 into the second quarter, but that would be the team's only scoring on a shocking day.
"We left a bunch of points off the board due to penalties and stupid little things, like sacks, when we were on their side of the field," said Black. "That'll kill ya."
Black was sacked at least a handful of times in the first half alone.
"They were coming hard off the edge and when they stopped us on first down and put us in passing situations, they continued to come hard," said Black, who took several hellacious hits.
Langley led 20-7 at halftime and turned it up in the second half, pouncing on numerous errors and undisciplined mistakes.
The crushing blow came when Black's arm was hit while in motion deep in Langley territory. The ball landed in Sheldon Van Roon's arms and the big defensive lineman went 8 0-plus yards the opposite way to make it 27-7.
"There were some holes in our protection because Mark took a lot of shots, but we must have put up 400-plus yards of offence with just seven points to show for it," said Rebels offensive co-ordinator Charlie Cardilicchia.
"Was it the outcome we wanted or production we were looking for? No. But the truth is we still did a lot of good things. I told the guys that defence didn't beat us, we beat ourselves.
"We made a lot of mistakes. Bad timing on penalties, then we had the turnover with the sack that put the game away. We kind of folded after that, which was crappy, but at the end of the day we fought for the most part.
"There are definitely things we need to clean up if we want to go beat the top two teams in this league," added Cardilicchia.
Rams quarterback Greg Bowcott connected with Malcolm Williams on a pair of short touchdown passes and found Nick Downey on another short pass that ended up in a 43-yard TD sprint. Xavier Daniel also recorded a major for the Rams, who were in Black's face all day long.
Black did connect with Eric Eggleston for almost 100 yards in receiving. Morris had the long TD reception and managed, unofficially, to get over the magical 1,000-yard mark in rushing for the second straight year. Needing 58 yards, Morris - playing in front of his mom who was visiting from Ontario - appeared to finish with 64, although the final tally was not in by press time.
The bottom line was, the Rebels needed to score first to take Langley's hopes away early. It never happened. Black had a streaking Vinnie Cannata down the sideline, but overthrew him by a few yards as he was clearly in behind the defence.
That seemed to set the tone for the entire day.
"Starting off behind against any good team is never going to do you any favours," said Cardilicchia. "It's a disappointing loss, but it's about a season with ups and downs, and as long as we finish on an up we can make this disappear." [email protected] Twitter/tc_vicsports
