AUSPICIOUS BEGINNING
Rush prevails over Calgary
CALGARY Title contenders are at their best with the game on the line.
The Saskatchewan Rush was proudly showing off its championship pedigree down the stretch in the opener of the National Lacrosse League’s West Division final at the Saddledome on Saturday, and the Calgary Roughnecks didn’t have an answer.
After 45 minutes of back and forth, the Rush went on a 6-1 run to start the fourth quarter and rode the outburst to a 16-10 win in Game 1. The series will now shift to Saskatoon for Game 2 — and a potential 10-minute mini-game tiebreaker — on Saturday at the SaskTel Centre.
Ben McIntosh paced the Rush with four goals, while Chris Corbeil, Robert Church, Mark Matthews and Nik Bilic all chipped in with a pair.
Curtis Dickson notched a hat trick for the Roughnecks.
“In a best-of-three series, every game means so much,” McIntosh said.
“There’s not enough room for error. Getting that first one, our job’s definitely not done, but it’s a good start.”
Roughnecks captain Mike Carnegie thought his team lapsed at the wrong time, which is exactly what championship teams rarely do.
“You’ve just got to be willing to grind it out,” Carnegie said. “Mentally, they might’ve had the best of us tonight. You can only do your job. You can’t worry about what the refs are calling or woe is me, you just have to go play the game.
“When you get away from that and you worry about other things, it ends up in the back of your net. I thought we got away from our game plan a little bit, especially in the fourth quarter and, I think, that was the difference.”
The vaunted Rush defence, the stingiest in the NLL during the regular season, keyed the win in head coach Derek Keenan’s opinion.
“We have a saying on our team: Rock, chisel, hammer,” Keenan said. “We just keep grinding away at it and, eventually, good things happen. They played tough.
“They play our offence tougher than any team in this league and we have to stick to it, otherwise it can go sideways on you quickly because they play us physical and they beat on us, and that’s the game, that’s lacrosse. Our guys stuck with it and we made some plays.”
It was a missed opportunity for the Roughnecks to fire the first salvo in what was expected to be a tight series between the two western rivals.
Now, the Roughnecks will face an amped-up Saskatchewan crowd that likely won’t need seats for the first-ever NLL playoff game in the province.
“We had to win anyway, right?” Carnegie said. “Even if we won this one, you have to go win 60 (minutes). Now, we’ve just got to go win 70. That’s the way you look at it.”
Tempers flared with 27 seconds to go when Saskatchewan’s Jeff Cornwall buried the final goal into an empty net, one of three into the vacant Roughnecks cage late in the game. “It’s a bit disrespectful,” Carnegie said. “I mean, the game’s in hand. At 15-10 with 30 seconds left in the game, what’s the point of scoring another goal? That’s old school lacrosse in me. You just don’t do that stuff. It is what it is and we’ll fuel the fire and, hopefully, guys respond appropriately.”