Their Wagons Circled, They Fight Flames

Each corner of the Raider locker room was quieter than the last, and rightfully so. Harvey Williams sat hunched over, reliving his horrible fumble. Across the way, Jeff Hostetler was wondering how seriously mangled he would have to be to rate a roughing-the-passer call. As for Art Shell, the coach, the less said about his play-calling, the better.

Yet the unluckiest figure in the room had to be Lionel Washington, the man who made the play that clinched the game for the Raiders, who then ran right out to unclinch it. Washington had done the locomotion 31 yards with an intercepted pass. He happily hip-hopped into the end zone holding the football aloft in triumph, nearly getting Leon Letted in the process by forgetting to look over his shoulder.

“They kept saying what we needed was a big play,” Washington said.

He provided one. He took a look-what-I-found pass away from a spun-around San Diego Charger with seven minutes to play to reprieve the wasteful Raiders from their sinful ways, scoring a touchdown and seeing his teammates celebrate after spotting their opponents a 20-point handicap. What a comeback. Say, maybe the Raiders weren’t the worst pro football team in California after all.

Mmmm, sorry. They are. The Raiders already got killed by the 49ers, who then lost to the Chiefs, who couldn’t even beat the Rams. And now comes this further discouraging, weakness-exposing, 26-24 giveaway to the Chargers, who are undefeated, underappreciated and very possibly the best football band West of the Mississippi, let alone in the state.

These guys can take hits as well as dish them out. A wild roar of gratitude that welcomed Hostetler back to action when he returned from an injury was not repeated at the Coliseum when the visiting quarterback, Stan Humphries, did likewise. But one could credit this example of toughness shown by Humphries as having decided the game, because could second-stringer Gale Gilbert have driven San Diego back to victory this way? Not bloody likely.

So what? a Raider said.

“The guy gets paid to do his job,” defensive end Anthony Smith said. “A quarterback gets hurt, that’s life. A lot of players get hurt and come back in and do their jobs. Don’t hold ‘em in such high esteem.”

Besides, there was plenty more for the Raiders to worry about than whether San Diego Stan received a red badge of courage for saving the day. Not for nearly a month will the Raiders--winless at home--play again on their home field. By then, they will have visited both New England and Miami, an excursion slightly less fun than the Love Boat’s. By then, they could have a record of 1-5 and be looking at the rest of the NFL from the bottom up.

Something has to change in a hurry. Shell’s reluctance to run the football is becoming more maddening by the week, and then, just when it wasn’t safe to run the football, either he or his offensive coordinator (and the buck stops with Shell) made the regrettable decision that a handoff to Harvey Williams was what the Raiders needed more than a chip-shot field goal that Jeff Jaeger could have made wearing a blindfold.

The play was designed to misdirect the defense to one side while Williams slanted off to another. A nose guard, however, smelled a rat and followed the running back step for step. He couldn’t do a cutback, couldn’t put six points on the scoreboard when three would have helped enough to eventually win the game.

“That play was one of the many things we should have capitalized on,” Williams said. “Make that, I should have capitalized on.”

Sorry, Harv. Not your day. While trying to switch the football from his sore left hand to his fine right hand, nine minutes from the end of the game, Williams coughed it up. He was 14 yards from a Raider touchdown at the moment, and Williams said: “That was a big disappointment for me, because I don’t fumble.”

Which made things even harder to accept when his losing this football made the Raiders lose this game. “Man, I’d rather be blown out,” Williams said. “This is a little hard to swallow.”

So it is. For now all we know about the Raiders is that the only team they have beaten, Denver, is a team that has beaten nobody. It is a team with a leader, Hostetler, who says the only alternative he can think of is to “surround the wagons, because we’re being attacked from all angles.”

Their leading rusher, Williams, had 24 lousy yards. Their leading receiver, also Williams, caught as many passes as Rocket Ismail, James Jett, Daryl Hobbs and Andrew Glover did combined. Their starting tailback, Tyrone Montgomery, was outrushed by every teammate who carried the ball, including his quarterback. And their special teams must be taking special sleeping pills that help them nod off before each kick.

The big comeback? “Unfortunately,” receiver Tim Brown said, “in the NFL you don’t get paid for coming back and making a game of it.”

That’s the bad news. The worse news is, the Raiders have only one more date with Denver.