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After the bottom fell out of ticket sales, after the failure of promoters to actually promote the game and after neither team bothered to show up for a practice, the belief was everything had gone wrong for Winnipeg’s NFL pre-season game that could go wrong.

Then the Oakland Raiders and Green Bay Packers took to the turf for their pre-game rituals at the home of the Blue Bombers, Thursday night.

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And what had been a bit of a gong show became an all-out comedy of errors.

The lasting image of a night that was supposed to be about welcoming the planet’s best football players to our little house on the prairie might be the men in suits standing around and looking at holes in the ground in the end zones.

Actually, the holes in the ground were covered with turf. These were the patches left when they had to remove the goal posts used by the Bombers and replace them with NFL-appropriate posts deeper in the end zones.