As the Saskatchewan Roughriders slowly begin to recover from a spate of early- and mid-season injuries, they’re also starting to see some players who were having a pretty decent campaign return to the line-up.
Defensive lineman Ali Saad is one of those players.
Saad went down with a calf injury in the lead-up to the Week 5 match-up against the Ottawa Redblacks back on July 3 and ended up missing a month and a half of action before returning against the B.C. Lions last week.
Needless to say, it was a tough turn of events for the second-year veteran, who had five tackles and a sack before hitting the six-game injured list.
“It was really difficult, I'm not going to lie, but I had these teammates and stuff like that,” Saad said after a recent practice. “They're like family to me, they always came around, spoke to me whenever I was down. Then coming out here, it feels a little bit rusty, but at the end of the day, these guys are helping me, these guys are bringing me back up to where I was.”
Saad was undeniably playing well when the injury occurred, and that didn’t help with accepting the turn of events.
“Mentally was mainly the big thing, because I came out really hot this season and was expecting a lot, especially in the beginning,” he said. “Injuries happen here and there, but at the end of the day, we just have to keep going.”
Saad had a single tackle in the loss to B.C., but the more important factor was getting back on the field and putting things to the test in a real game situation. And the results have been so far, so good, even if they can be always be better.
“I thought I was decent, I thought I was a little bit rusty at the end of the day,” he admitted. “I had some mistakes here and there, but overall condition is the main thing for me, I just got to get back into the groove.”
Of course, the end result of the outing was less than ideal in a difficult 30-16 loss to the surging Lions. The team has done what they can to move on, Saad said, despite the disappointment of how things went down in that outing.
“We were really upset about it, of course, but as we say, we move on to the next opponent and just keep stacking days from there,” he said. “The team, we sat down, we talked about it, we discussed the mistakes and what we did right and we just got to move on.”
That means changing the focus to the Toronto Argonauts this week and ideally seeing a much better performance than their 40-34 loss when they met in Week 4.
“They're a great team, great quarterback and everything like that, we love how he holds the ball for a while,” Saad said. “So at the end of the day, we're just going to come and send the pressure to him for sure.”
The Rider Broadcast Network will have all the action beginning at 2 p.m. with the pregame show on Saturday. The Voice of the Roughriders Dave Thomas will then have the game call, with kickoff at 5 p.m. at Mosaic Stadium.
