Good job Moncton! You have demonstrated how achievement is realized by doing what can be done and not whining about what can't.
All right Moncton, this was your week to shine
By CHRIS COCHRANE Sports Columnist
Mon, Sep 27 - 7:15 AM
Fans display an Atlantic Schooners banner at the CFL game at Moncton Stadium on Sunday. The Halifax-based team was to join the CFL in the 1980s but never played a game because funding could not be secured for a stadium. (ANDREW VAUGHAN / CP)
How many shots to the face can CFL football fans in Halifax take before they finally say "enough is enough"?
I think we’re reaching that saturation point.
The city received conditional entry into the CFL way back in 1984 but funding fell through and the Atlantic Schooners project was eventually abandoned. Since then, for the past quarter century, there has been little good news for Halifax on the CFL front.
This past week, the CFL cause, and Halifax football in general, lost a little more stature.
It started with the official word that the next three Uteck Bowls, the Canadian Interuniversity Sport semifinal named after late former Saint Mary’s University coach Larry Uteck, will move from Halifax to Moncton.
Why? Huskies Stadium has seen better days. Moncton has a new one that can be expanded to seat 20,000 fans and Atlantic University Sport is trying to get a new football program started at the university there.
A second downer for Halifax football fans came Saturday.
Mount Allison University, an admittedly once-great AUS football franchise but in recent seasons a team that annually struggled to avoid the Atlantic Conference basement, upset the Saint Mary’s Huskies. In fact, it was the third consecutive loss for the now last-place Huskies, the team that is annually favoured to win the Atlantic Conference.
The Mounties’ win over the Huskies was a neutral-site game. Where did this gigantic upset take place? Hey, it could have been Sydney, perhaps Charlottetown. But no, it had to be in Moncton, this week’s centre of the universe for Maritime football.
And that brings us to Moncton’s coup de grace on the pro-football front, the biggest football victory in a week of significant Moncton football wins — Sunday’s sold-out Touchdown Atlantic, with more than 20,000 fans gathered in Moncton’s new stadium to watch the Edmonton Eskimos tackle the Toronto Argonauts in a regular season CFL game.
TSN’s pre-game show was filled with glowing comments about Moncton’s can-do attitude and the possibility of it someday getting a CFL team. The broadcast did a good job of creating a pathway in the national psyche that if a CFL team does ever come this way, Moncton is the leading and maybe ideal choice.
It was the type of publicity that the most ardent and wealthy supporters of a cause couldn’t have purchased.
Where does all this pro-Moncton CFL sentiment leave Halifax? Basically, Halifax is where it has been for a too long — watching from the sidelines. The city still has no stadium, has no plan that it has shared with the public to get a stadium and, even in Sunday’s TSN game broadcast, there seemed to be surprise at Halifax’s seeming indifference to the CFL.
That indifference has become one of the greatest assets in the Moncton charge.
But Halifax’s surrender need not be permanent. Remember, any eventual CFL move to the East Coast, something the league has wanted for a long time, remains a long-term project. So there is plenty of time to jockey for position.
First, there will be more CFL experiments in Moncton to ensure that the attraction isn’t simply a short-term infatuation.
Then there will have to be talk about expensive, increased permanent seating to make the stadium meet CFL minimum requirements. And, in what’s often the most difficult challenge, some millionaire investor or corporation has to put down the money to join the league and sustain a franchise.
Halifax isn’t out of the picture, although the attitude here needs a major realignment for the city to become a genuine player. But even the strongest proponents of the CFL-for-Halifax effort must concede that this was definitely Moncton’s week to shine.
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