‘NOT JUST A REGULAR SEASON GAME’ FOR VIKINGS

With all due respect to the other 14 teams in the European League of Football, there is really only one game in town in Week 3, as the reigning champion Rhein Fire play host to the team they beat in last season’s championship game, the Vienna Vikings.

The Fire come into the rematch having had a bye in Week 2, while Vienna started the season 2-0 with victories over both Prague and Fehérvár — neither exactly powerhouses — and with the home side having beaten Paris in a tough opening game, unbeaten records are on the line for two sides expected to feature in the postseason.

“I think you’d be naive to say it’s just a regular season game,” Vikings head coach Chris Calaycay told reporters. “Everybody knows that this is a matchup of two undefeated teams, it’s highly anticipated and that’s that’s an awesome thing. But, going into it, it’s still Xs and Os; still 100 yard field and hashes and field goals. And we’re two very different teams than we were last year.

“We talked about it this week as, obviously, you have to address it. This is not last season but, for the guys that were with us last season, obviously there’s a scar from that [final game]. But scars build character… and that’s the big message from me to the team, that we have to handle things in the sense that this is a new game, a new season. This is not like a revenge game and let’s go get it because of one thing or another that happened last year. We’re focused on getting this team better each and every week.”

While the Fire have two games’ worth of Vikings game film to draw on, their early bye week means that Vienna are at a comparative disadvantage — and even more so since Rhein and Paris played out a low-scoring affair in Week 1.

“That’s really interesting because they didn’t have many plays versus Paris — and then you saw what Paris did versus [Stuttgart] Surge and kind of understand what kind of defence they were going against,” Calaycay reasoned. “I think we only had 48 plays total from Ryan to scout from. But it is what it is. You’re never going to know everything that’s going into a game anyways. You’ve got to be able to play your stuff and be able to react to the different schemes that are going on during the game. That’s what coaching is about. That’s why we get the reps in practice that we do.

“We can talk about it on the sideline in between drives and say, ‘Hey, they’re trying to do this, or they’re giving us a different front, or they’re giving us a different coverage — and we have to be able to adjust to that. We practice a lot against each other and we show each other different things, whether it’s bare looks or three-man front looks or whatever. Going into the game, I have a lot of confidence in our guys that they’ll be able to adapt quickly.”

Even though long-time head coach Jim Tomsula remains absent from the Fire touchline, with Richard Kent continuing in the interim role, Calaycay expects the home side to continue churning out the sort of game that has made them perennial contenders — and back-to-back reigning champions that put up 50+ points in each of their title successes.

“Looking at the history of the Rhein Fire and what they do defensively, especially since Coach Kent is still there, I don’t expect a whole lot of changes out of them,” the American commented. “They have good personnel, they have a good scheme. They’re sound. They didn’t give up a whole lot of points in the first week of the season, so I don’t see them changing much.

“Offensively, they’re a little bit more interesting because they got Jonathan Scott in as a running back early in game week and he only got three carries, so I expect to see him utilised a little bit more. If you look at the receiver corps, Jordan Bouah and the import receiver [Rory] Starkey, they’ve got a good receiver corps. Obviously, they’ve traditionally had a great O-line, and [quarterback] Chad Jeffries has had just one game in the Rhein Fire uniform, so I expect them to expand. Obviously, with a bye week, they have had more time to do that.

So there’s a lot of things coming into this game that are interesting — and we’ve got to be able to react to it. That was something we wanted to make sure that we did in the offseason: improve on defence. We’ve had one of the top three defences in the league every year statistically since we’ve been in the ELF, but my goal for the entire team in the offseason was to get a little bit better at every positional unit — the D-line, the linebackers, at DB, same thing on the offensive line — and I think we did a good job of that.”

The Vikings will have further new faces on their sideline in Düsseldorf, although this week’s big signing, linebacker Aaron Donkor, isn’t exactly unfamiliar to the home team, having been a part of the Fire side that beat Vienna in last year’s final.

“[Jan-Phillip] Bombek being injured at the beginning of the preseason is obviously a big loss for us,” Calaycay admitted. “But Aaron Donkor… he’s pretty good. When Bombek went down, we obviously had to start looking and seeing, but do we wait until Bombek gets back in the middle of the season? What’s the plan? Who’s out there who’s available? We saw that Donkor hadn’t re-signed with Rhein, so we reached out. It was a longer process [than anticipated], but that’s okay. Aaron’s a very thought-out man and wanted to make sure that it was the right thing for him, in his position in life, to go forward. At the end of the day, after he was with us and watched a game, he decided that it was a place that he wanted to be, so we’re very happy about that.”

The Vikings have also brought in Swiss/Italian tight end Till Pirtle, who qualifies as a ‘homegrown’ player under this year’s expanded ELF regions, allowing Calaycay to rethink how he operates his offense.

“Our offence has been designed to have an ‘11’ personnel group, a ‘12’ personnel group, a ‘21’ personnel group, so we like to be versatile,” he explained. “We didn’t think we were going to need it at the beginning of the season, but that’s the beauty of the ELF, that you can have these changes up to the signing deadline in Week 9 for when there are injuries and you can make adjustments to your roster.”

Having been soundly beaten in the championship game last September, Calaycay knows that his team will have to be ready to face the Fire from the first kick — something they struggled with at times throughout 2024.

“If you remember, at the beginning of last year, we were a little bit sluggish,” the coach said. “It’s still the beginning of the season for both teams, and I think it’s important that we take that next step in the direction of how we approach football games from a tactical standpoint, execution standpoint, focus standpoint and discipline, eliminating mistakes and penalties and turnovers.

“But we got to start off fast and then just eliminate the silly mistakes. We’ve had a turnover on the second drive, we’ve had a blown coverage, and that can’t happen. It’s just one of those things that happens sometimes in football, but we can’t we can’t afford that versus good teams.”