Go! ‘Necks! Go!

Originally I gave myself two weeks to finish the design and associated CSS work for this site. At the time I wasn’t sure that this would be an attainable deadline. Looks like I was wrong.

Welcome to the brand new Go! ‘Necks! Go! website. Featuring the popular colours of our boys in red, black, and blue-ish grey, this new design is what I happily call gonecksgo.com version 1.0. Lacrosse is a rough and gritty game and my intension was to bring that into this site as much as possible.

Over the next few weeks and months many new features will be added to the site. Some of which include photo galleries (filled with your photos), schedules (both live and televised games), game reminders, email alerts, league standings, and more.

As always I’m open to suggestions. If there is something you’d like to see on gonecksgo.com let me know.

The pattern has reared its ugly head again–this time to the disappointment of many fans. What pattern am I talking about? This season’s record goes as follows—win, loss, win, loss, win, loss. That’s the pattern I’m talking about. Anyway, back to the game.

Being the first game since last years regular season closer against the Toronto Rock (1-4)—a game in which we trampled the Rock on the scoreboard and in the fights–everyone knew it was going to be a good game. Here’s how it broke down. (more…)

I don’t know about the rest of you but I have to say the new announcer isn’t too bad but he could use some work. Granted he’s probably still getting comfortable taking over for the last announcer – if anyone knows who that was I would love to find out Bruce Barker, currently announcing for the Toronto Rock – but that’s to be expected.

One thing I do have against the guy is his attempts at getting some chants going. Sure, he’s new but he should at least get the chants correct before starting them. I can also understand his need to be different, to set himself apart from previous announcers but seriously. Come. On. Here.

The chant is simple and it goes a little something like this, “Go! ‘Necks! Go!” It’s not “Go! Roughnecks! Go!” there’s just no rhythm in that. Our new announcer, we’ll call him Gary until I find out his real name, Beesley has also started an entirely new chant. It goes something like, “When I say ‘How do we like it?’ you say ‘Rough’ ready…” but I just can’t get into that one. Maybe I’m just being a stick in the mudd. What do you think?

Over the last few days I’ve been working on the new design/layout for the site. Progress has been steady and my goal is to have something ready and up within the next 2 weeks. Unfortunately since this is a project of passion I can’t guarantee that date will be met but I’m treating this website like a client project as much as possible.

If you have any ideas about what you’d like to see on gonecksgo.com or you’d like to become a contributor to the site, get in touch.

Hot off the heels of being served up an overtime loss to the Arizona Sting the Roughnecks traveled to Portland to face the 2-1 Lumberjax. With our seasonal pattern of win-loss-win-loss I was silently crossing my fingers that the trend would continue, luckily it did. This also proved to be the game that brought both Lewis Ratcliff and Kaleb Toth out of their shells.

Now, in the past I’ve said that games have started off with a bang but this is the topper. Just 27 seconds into the opening quarter our boys – Ratcliff and Toth – teamed up for the first goal of the game (Ratcliff getting the assist). This would be the first of many goals set up and scored by the dynamic duo. About a minute later Portland’s Ryan Powell tied it at one. The rest of the quarter was all Calgary – Toth, Ratcliff, Travis Gillespie, and Kyle Goundrey rounded out the scoring for the Roughnecks.

The second quarter turned out to be the opposite with Dowling, Morgan (2), Dwane, and Stewart scoring for the Lumberjax. Tracey Kelusky and Devan Wray had the two Calgary goals. This put us at 7-6 for the Roughnecks at the half.

By comparison the second half of the game was started off a little slow. Portland came on strong with two goals – Powell and Merrill – while Ratcliff provided the lone Roughneck goal. On the other hand, I would have loved to have watched the fourth quarter. If anyone has video of it let me know. Our boys had 4 unanswered goals that quarter and I’m wondering if the expansion Lumberjax actually started crying during the game. The goal scorers for us in this quarter were Ratcliff, Toth, Gillespie, and McNish.

Looking at the stats for this game is seems that our accuracy is improving – 46 shots on goal against the Jax versus 50 shots on goal against the Sting. Yeah, it doesn’t really sound all that impressive but any improvement is good.

The Roughnecks next game is against our bitter rivals from the east, the 1-4 Toronto Rock. Game time is 1:30pm on February 5th. Get there early and support our boys by wearing red.

Fresh off of a win against the 0-3 Edmonton Rush, the Roughnecks had their first game against then undefeated Arizona Sting last weekend. This was the first time our Roughnecks would face the team that took the Western Division last year, robbing us of a repeat at the Champions Cup.

Going up against an undefeated team is always an uphill battle, even if it’s early in the season. Considering the Sting’s offensive power and our seemingly constant problems with containing Dan Dawson last year I had high hopes for our boys in red. (more…)