Larry Taylor itching to end return TD drought
That would stifle rowdy home crowd
Larry Taylor rolled his eyes and a grin erupted on his face. He knew just what was coming next and all he could do was patiently answer the question.
“I’ve taken field goals, kick returns ... just haven’t taken a punt back since I’ve been in this Stampeder uniform,” sighed the diminutive Calgary return specialist. “That would be a good feeling when I get one of those.”
And what better place and time than at brand spanking new Investors Group Field in Winnipeg on Friday night, a sure way to stifle what is expected to be a boisterous crowd.
“It is about time,” Taylor continued. “I’ve returned one against B.C., got called back. It’s been a lot of big returns; we just haven’t gotten into the end zone. That’s something I take a lot of pride in. I’d like to take all of them back if it was up to me, but like I mentioned before everyone has to do their job and I have to do what I’m capable of on the back end. That’s the reason why I am the returner.
“It’ll be a good thing to get one on the road, in a hostile environment, break that streak. But the most important thing is I’ll take a win over anything.”
The last time a Stampeder scored a touchdown on a punt return was on Oct. 8, 2007, when Markus Howell victimized the Saskatchewan Roughriders. That is 98 games ago, longer by a good margin than any other CFL club. As easy as it is to point to one individual and have those expectations, what often gets forgotten is how the special teams unit is just that — the sum of its parts.
“That’s exactly what it is,” agreed special teams’ co-ordinator Mark Kilam. “It’s all 12 guys working together to get the job done because you’re working with the whole field. The returner doesn’t work if the parts in front of him don’t work. Same thing, if the parts are working in front of him and the returner isn’t finding what he’s supposed to find, then it doesn’t work.
“We’re still a work in progress. There’s things every week that obviously we haven’t been as good as we want to be, but the guys in the room are working hard trying to do the little things right and focus on the details and get better moving forward.”
The alarming succession of injuries the Stamps have suffered week in and week out hasn’t helped the continuity in that aspect of the game, either.
“Dating back to the B.C. game, there’s a totally different group of guys out there and that was, what, two or three weeks ago,” said Taylor. “Other guys need to step in and fill that void, get things going and pick up from where we left off.”
“The best units are the most consistent ones,” Kilam explained, “with what they do and with their personnel as well. But our whole attitude has always been ‘next man up’ around here, always was. That’s the life of the special teams’ guy.
“You’re going to have parts in and out of the lineup and we just have to get ourselves ready so that when we do get new parts, they know what they’re doing when they get out there.”
And then maybe, just maybe, we’ll see that elusive punt returned for six points.
“You can never focus on that,” Kilam pointed out. “It’s the same thing I tell our kickers all the time; we focus on the process and let the results take care of themselves. You can’t think end goal all the time because you’ll never get there. You gotta do all the little things in between to achieve the end goal.”