Ain’t no brotherly love here!
After week of trash talk, Eli and Giants take aim at Eagles
PHILADELPHIA — They all yapped and yapped and yapped. And now one of the biggest games of the week in the NFL has taken on a life all its own.
Get ready for the bad blood between the Giants and Eagles to reach its boiling point on Sunday night at the Linc. A week ago, this was just a key battle in the NFC East, a chance for one team to assert some dominance in football’s most roughand-tumble division.
But that was before a landfill’s worth of trash talk, before Twitter photos and verbal jabs and an Oscar-nominated actor hating on NYC with Sharknado-level voiceover work. Now, the Giants are headed to the City of Brotherly Shove to face a team they despise like no other, to battle a crowd that can’t wait to unleash the boos, and to play a game that, one way or another, nobody will forget.
“Definitely no love lost,” said Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka. “It is what you live to play for when you are a little kid. These are the games that you want to be involved in because you know they are going to be remembered.”
And oh, the trouble that both these teams have gone through to make the Sunday Night Football stage memorable. Nevermind that it’s the divisionleading 4-1 Eagles against the surging 3-2 Giants, a team swimming i n good vibes thanks to a three-game winning streak. This is supposed to be the Giants’ first true litmus test of the year, a chance for them to prove that their win- ning ways aren’t all about fortuitous injuries to their opponents. The Eagles boast one of the league’s finest offenses, a unit so good that Philly is tied for the league lead with 31.2 points per game, even though last season’s leading rusher, LeSean McCoy, has yet to bust out. And even before all the trash talk was flying, Jason Pierre-Paul knew all of this.
“You can just feel it,” JPP said. “It’s a different feeling. It’s a different vibe. You can’t just sit here and say ‘Oh, it’s just a regular game.’”
And the Giants and Eagles didn’t treat last week like an ordinary week. It was Big Blue who started all the drama on Tuesday night, when Prince Amukamara and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie snapped the ill-advised photo seen ‘round the Twitter world, a picture of the cornerback duo and a fan creatively
reminding everyone that Philly’s never won a Super Bowl.
A day later, the Eagles were firing back up the Turnpike, reminding DRC that he’s never won a Super Bowl either, and promising to “rattle” and “hit” Eli Manning. And by the end of the week, Philly’s own PR department was turning sophomoric, mocking the Manning face and joking on Eli’s interceptions. And then, to top it all off, there was Bradley Cooper, star of such films as “Silver Linings Playbook,” and “The Hangover” dissing all of NYC, mocking the Big Apple’s accent and lifestyle and anything else he could think of in an Eagle-hyping online video.
This is what happens when you have rivals separated by less than 100 miles, said JPP.
“It’s a big game because it’s in the division, but it’s even bigger because it’s right out our back door,” PierrePaul said. “We’re on a bus, driving there. But at the end of the day, we don’t like them and they don’t like us.”
The irony of it all, said Giants linebacker Jameel McClain, is that the winner of Sunday’s game will be the team that settles down, the team that tones out the six days of anger and hate and disdain and rage. Forget all the talk. As Cooper said in the Big Appledissing Eagles video, the “best way to shut a loudmouth up” is to “shut it for them.”
“In the NFL, you always have to be in control, you always have to know that your one mishap could cause a game because these games are tight,” McClain said. “They always come down to the last play, they always come down to the last quarter or something, so it’s always being in control, controlled chaos.”
And for the Giants, that will be the great challenge. They’ll have to establish order in the chaotic maelstrom of boos that they helped create, silencing all those riled-up Eagles fans. They’ll need to keep their trio of rookie starters — RB Andre Williams, WR Odell Beckham Jr. and OG Weston Richburg — calm in one of the NFL’s most hostile environments.
But hey, that’s football, said JPP, and yes, the Giants know they’ve added more hate to this hate-filled rivalry.
“It’s a Sunday night game, and everybody’s watching,” JPP said. “It’s the Giant and the Eagles. Hey, it is what it is. We’re gonna fight.”