CALAYCAY: VIKINGS MUST TAKE CARE OF PARIS

While all eyes will be on the Rhein Fire’s visit to Copenhagen on Sunday afternoon, a game of similar proportions kicks off the day’s European League of Football slate in France.

Remarkably, given their respective statures in the league, the Vienna Vikings have yet to meet the Paris Musketeers in Paris, but the two teams have history, having met at the semi-final stage of last year’s ELF playoffs, with the Austrian #1 seed defeating the French upstarts in a 47-31 thriller that was closer than the final score suggests. And, with the rest of the Sunday schedule kicking off in the later slot, all eyes will be on the teams topping the East and West divisions respectively.

“They’re five-and-two right now and it’s a very, very tough atmosphere [in Paris],” Vikings head coach Chris Calaycay told Vienna’s weekly press gathering. “These top teams are fighting to make sure that they’re staying in the playoff race and, obviously, we’re fighting to make sure that we take care of our division and try to get that bye week. The atmosphere is picking up now towards the end of the season and it’s very exciting for the league.”

With the Vikings’ schedule in recent seasons being called ‘easy’ in some quarters, Calaycay is excited to have some tough tests on the programme this season, having already split the series with Rhein, done the double over Austrian rivals Tirol and seen off a resurgent Prague team just last weekend.

“The script is flipped a little bit because a lot of the narrative before was how easy our schedule was in the past and, you know, this is why the Vikings are 12-0 in a season. To me, it’s the same schedules that we’ve always had — you’ve just got to approach it week in and week out — but having Rhein and Tiroll and Prague, you know, all winning teams, I think that’s a cool thing.

“Our mentality hasn’t changed. We’re not looking past the Paris game this week. The approach for the whole team is that it’s 1-0 this week. We need to take care of Paris. We know they’re a very good team, and we’re on the road but, if we do that, we take a really big step in the right direction with the whole playoff seeding. There’s still a lot of season left — Nordic’s got to play Rhein twice, the Raiders have got to play Rhein again, Munich’s got a tough game, or a couple of tough games, coming up — but I can’t worry too much about what those guys do. We’ve really got to focus in on ourselves, and I think that’s something that we’ve done really well over our past four years.”

Calaycay’s preparation for the Paris game — while also encompassing the logistics of flights, hotels, rooming combinations and practice sessions — has had to focus on both the Musketeers’ offense and defense, given that the French side are equally proficient on both sides of the ball. With quarterback Jaylon Henderson now comfortably in his groove, and playing as big a part in the Paris’ run game as he is as a passer, the Vikings — who posted a shutout against Prague in Week 8 — know that they have to find a way to contain the American import.

“They’re the top rushing team in the league and they use [Henderson] as a running back so, from a schematic standpoint, they gain an extra blocker using that kind of scheme,” the coach explained. “There’s a lot of different factors on how the ball is going to be controlled in this game, and how many possessions we get. The turnover factor is going to be huge if those possessions are limited because you got teams running the football.

“We have to be able to control the run game and then get them into passing situations, and I think that’s where we really can take advantage of our outside rush guys — and our inside rush guys for that matter. Lucky [Ogbevoen] and [Aaron] Donkor have been extremely productive for us, and Timi Nuikka and [Noel] Swancar both had sacks in the last game, so we can do some different things to get pressure on them.

“And we have to be able to do that; we have to be able to tackle him. He’s a big, strong guy and I think it’s very important that we tackle well this game, just to to be able to control him. If they’re going to want to run the quarterback, which not a lot of teams do in the ELF, we have to get physical with them.”

On the other side of the line of scrimmage, meanwhile, the Musketeers lead the league in scoring defense, meaning that Vikings’ QB Ben Holmes and his array of attacking options will also have to be on top form.

“I think they’re very athletic in the back end, and they want to win their one-on-one matchups,” Calaycay noted. “And that’s the question. If you’re asking Ben Holmes what we’re looking at, it’s ‘Can we win one-on-one matchups?’. You know I like our guys, and I’m pretty confident with who we have on our roster, but we still have to execute and go make those plays on game day.

“Obviously, we got Karri [Pajarinen] back this past week, got him a few carries, and he did really well. But, you know, that running back room is pretty lethal in the sense that we’ve got Johannes Schütz there and Florian Wegan, and we’ve been running the ball very well, very efficiently. Those guys, each of them bring their own game to the offense and it’s pretty nice to have those weapons, but then, you know, there’s the rest of them: Florian Bierbaumer, Noah Touré, Reece Horn… You know the list, but there’s also Nils Keimel — and Yannick Maier is continuing to get healthy so it’s nice to get him involved again.

“If Ben [Holmes] was here, he’d be saying the same thing: it’s nice to have all those weapons that he can go to…”