Saints' air show stops Chargers in London
SAINTS 37, CHARGERS 32
Saints' Brees passes for 339 yards as New Orleans holds off San Diego, 37-32.
Reporting from London — Any uninitiated Briton catching the New Orleans Saints' 37-32 victory over the San Diego Chargers on Sunday evening might've deduced this NFL thingamajig from over there can prove rather vivid after all.
It can come down to a strapping sort such as Philip Rivers heaving a weirdly shaped "football" 65 yards through Wembley Stadium air into an end zone teeming with four receivers and eight defenders as the clock strikes 0:00.
It can feature a team such as San Diego trailing 37-20 with 14:49 left but pulling off this delightful little gizmo called an "onside kick" and later standing only 27 yards from tying the score just after this really bizarre concoction called a "two-minute warning."
It can hinge somewhat on an interception by San Diego's Eric Weddle with 5:39 left that looks ominous for New Orleans until that referee over there does this absolutely peculiar thing and goes over to watch the play again on TV, realizing there's no interception after all!
And far from the slapstick muddle of the New York Giants' 13-10 win over the Miami Dolphins in the rain and slop of 2007, it can showcase "amazing athletes making amazing plays," as Chargers defensive end Luis Castillo raved. Those athletes included the Saints' Drew Brees, who minced his former team for 339 yards passing and three touchdowns, and San Diego's LaDainian Tomlinson, who rushed for 105 yards and caught five passes for 65. In all, receivers caught 680 yards worth of passes, and the NFL made a gaudy second foray into London.
Even as neither the rain nor the streaker from 2007 showed up, some oddities did prevail.
A public-address announcer in the Queen's Park Tube station gave train instructions to those attending "the Yankee game." A line near the stadium stretched out onto the sidewalk -- from the counter at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. A game by the mighty NFL went dwarfed in town by a soccer event, that being Chelsea 0, Liverpool 1 (the home club always referenced first in England).
Then, also abnormally, an NFL regular-season game played to the kind of stirring noise that seems to echo naturally through Wembley, where the 83,226 sellout of 2008 outnumbered the 81,176 sellout of 2007.
The Saints' home game 4,626 miles from home "felt like a home game, but you know, it probably had even more of a playoff feel to it," said New Orleans mainstay Deuce McAllister, who in Reggie Bush's absence rushed for 55 yards and caught passes for 30.
