The Atlanta Falcons look to overcome their recent playoff pain when they face a New York Giants team today that fought their way into the post-season with a late rally.
The Falcons have twice made the playoffs under head coach Mike Smith and quarterback Matt Ryan, but were blasted 48-21 by the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round last year and in 2008 they lost to the Arizona Cardinals in the wild-card round.
Atlanta do not want to dwell on those performances, though.
Photo: AFP
“All the stuff that happened in the past doesn’t really make a difference,” Ryan told reporters. “It comes down to preparing this week and doing whatever we can to keep advancing throughout the playoffs.”
Certainly, Atlanta (10-6) look to have quality in all the right areas. Running back Michael Turner (1,340 yards rushing), receivers Roddy White (1,296 yards receiving) and Julio Jones (959 yards) and Ryan (4,177 yards passing) make up a nicely balanced offense.
However, Ryan will be up against a Giants pass rush that has produced 48 sacks this year and has been particularly effective in the final stages of the regular season.
Photo: AFP
The Giants (9-7) booked their place in the wild-card round with an emphatic win over division rivals the Dallas Cowboys in what was a winner-takes-all encounter where Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo found himself suffocated by New York’s pass rush.
Tom Coughlin’s team were 3-1 in the final four weeks of the regular season with a pair of wins over Dallas and a victory over the New York Jets, after a mid-season wobble had threatened their playoff hopes.
New York quarterback Eli Manning has been in inspired form, passing for a career best 4,933 yards and has been particularly effective late in games when he has five times led them to wins when they have trailed in the fourth quarter.
“I think it’s just being competitive, wanting to win,” said Manning, who had 15 fourth quarter touchdown passes this season.
“It’s also the teammates understanding the circumstances, being smart, understand, ‘Hey, this is crunch time. We need plays. We need to play our best football at this point.’ So I think it’s the level of play of the whole offensive unit [that] all of a sudden steps up in crunch time,” he added.
Manning’s ability, particularly at crunch time, was evident when the Giants won the Super Bowl for the 2007 season with his last gasp touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress, but what is new this season is the emergence of an exciting wide receiver.
Victor Cruz, undrafted in 2010, was picked up by the Giants, but did not make a single catch in his brief involvement last year.
This season, he has turned into a revelation with 1,536 yards receiving, including a 99-yard touchdown catch against the Jets proved crucial in the Giants’ run to the playoffs.
Last week he made a 74-yard touchdown catch to get New York ahead against Dallas and celebrated with his now trademark salsa dance.
Manning believes his receiver has that little something special that can make the difference in a big game.
“He’s got a knack for making a little tick or a play that is designed to get four, five or six yards and turn it into 60 and 70 yard plays,” Manning said “He’s not trying to do that every time. It’s just the way he plays, it turns out that way.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier