Western Mustangs ready to try, try again against Laurier

There’s the old proverb, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Either Thomas H. Palmer or William Edward Hickson is usually credited with saying it first, so it goes back a ways. Those two were 19th-century thinkers.

The Western Mustangs are far more concerned with right now. And a little bit with last week.

Western will open the 2026 OUA football playoffs against the Laurier Golden Hawks, the same team that handed them a 55-39 loss to end the regular season.

After that, you’d better believe Western is ready to “try, try again.”

“I’ve been through this before,” said Mustangs head coach Michael Faulds. “Although it is a very unique [situation] in the OUA because we have 11 teams. There are two teams every year that you don’t even play. We feel a little bit like the CFL, where the Argos and Ti-Cats or the Stampeders and the Elks will play back-to-back weeks.”

But Faulds and his players know too well that those parts of the CFL season come with a level of forgiveness. They fall on Labour Day and then normally one week after that. Those games come when there is always a guarantee of a tomorrow.

Either Western or the Golden Hawks will have tomorrow wiped off their slate.

And the fact that the warm-up matchup was an old-fashioned shootout for the first 30-plus minutes only adds to the intrigue.

It hasn’t reached proverb status yet, but there is a saying in football that it is hard to beat the same team twice.

It’s even harder to duplicate the style of game the two teams created in their earlier meeting.

“It makes it the ultimate chess match for coaches and for players,” said Faulds. “What do we want to keep in the game plans? What do we like? What do we dislike? What do we try to counter with? What plays do we try to have add-ons with? And then that creates a little bit of overthinking too.”

You think you know an opponent, and then you spend an afternoon on the football field with them.

This game has now become an episode of Survivor: “Outwit, outplay, outlast.”

“You’re trying to prepare for so many different scenarios and things that we could do and that they could counter with,” explained Faulds.

When you’re writing proverbs on paper, you can crumple up a sheet or hit the delete key.

At Western Alumni Stadium on Halloween afternoon, things should play out along the lines of football fundamentals.

It isn’t as catchy, but “Outwit, outplay, outlast” converts beautifully into “Limit turnovers, limit penalties and execute when you get the chance.”

Laurier showed its level of desperation in beating Western a week earlier.

Now the Mustangs’ level of desperation has gone up.

And Western has every intention of using that to flip the script in the rematch.