Riders edge Als

Johnny Manziel finally got his first CFL touchdown, but the quarterback wants to start winning football games.

Manziel threw two touchdowns in a losing effort as the surging Saskatchewan Roughriders beat the Montreal Alouettes 34-29 on Sunday afternoon.

“If we would have come out here and gotten a win, and there were zero touchdown passes on the board, I would be sitting here happier than I am right now,” said Manziel, who’s still looking for his first victory of the season. “But I got the monkey off my back.”

Manziel completed nine of 16 passes for 138 yards.

The former Heisman Trophy winner added 45 yards on the ground. He was sacked five times.

The Alouettes starting quarterback found the end zone for the first time this season on one of Montreal’s nicest plays of the year.

On a carefully executed trick play early in the second quarter, Manziel handed the ball off to

running back William Stanback, who reversed it to receiver B.J. Cunningham with another handoff. Cunningham flicked the ball back to Manziel, who went deep for the 47-yard score to a wide-open Adarius Bowman.

“I’m not going to lie, I didn’t have 100 per cent faith in it because it didn’t really work in practice,” said Bowman. “But coach said it would and he said it was up this week. It was nice for the team to

execute it and get it done.”

The touchdown put the Alouettes ahead 14-13 in Manziel’s fourth CFL start.

“We had been trying to call it since the first play of the game,” said Manziel, the former first-round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns. “I was just trying to get B.J. to get me the ball as quick as possible because I could see what was happening down the field.”

In the fourth quarter, Manziel threw his second touchdown of the game

when he found Ernest Jackson in the end zone for the 20-yard score to make it 31-29. Montreal almost tied the game with a twopoint conversion but Manziel was stopped on the one-yard line.

That’s as close as the Alouettes would get, as Saskatchewan’s Brett Lauther kicked a 23-yardfield goal with 4:14 left in the game.

Montreal has lost three games in a row and dropped to 3-11-0 on the season.