THIS GIVEN SUNDAY: GEYER HAT-TRICK KEYS SURGE TITLE

The European League of Football has a new champion, its fourth in five seasons, after the Stuttgart Surge overcame the top-seeded Vienna Vikings in a tense Championship Game that went right to the wire.

Having trailed throughout the first half, the hometown Surge rallied after the interval, drawing level at 17 apiece in the third quarter before Riley Hennessey found eventual MVP Louis Geyer in the back of the Vikings’ endzone to put daylight between the teams once more.

Geyer proved to be hero of the hour, snaring all three of Stuttgart’s touchdowns as neither side gained real traction on the ground. The ‘homegrown’ receiver has a flair for the spectacular and gave a large part of the 36, 784 crowd what they wanted on each score — as well as several plays in between. With opponents initially keying on A-import Mike Harley Jr, Geyer was able to establish a solid rapport with QB Hennessey, especially in the playoffs, leaving rival secondaries with two problems to ponder and that pattern endured into the biggest game of the season.

Reece Horn opened the scoring, pulling in a pass from Vikings QB Ben Holmes before the Austrian side extended their advantage with a long Dennis Tasic field goal following Nikolaus Huszar’s interception of Hennessey. Stuttgart needed to respond and, after the defense began ramping up its pressure on Holmes, Hennessey came out firing, almost immediately going with a deep shot from his own 20 that drew a defensive pass interference call on the Vienna 23. A subsequent offside was allowed to play out, and the Surge capitalised as Hennessey found Geyer to the far right of the endzone. Well-covered, the German had to contort his body to snag a ball that was thrown behind him, but came down with it all the same.

Vienna and Holmes came straight back, however, with Holmes leading his team back down the field before handing off to Karri Pajarinnen for the score, re-establishing the lead at 10 points just minutes into the following period.

The second quarter showed the first signs that the game would evolve into a defensive battle, with the Surge getting to grips with Holmes — quite literally — and denying the Vikings further points and allowing Hennessey and his offense to go to work. It took until the end of the period — and a second Hennessey interception when close to the Vikings endzone — before they could cut the deficit, but the veteran QB conducted a clinical drive that appeared to have resulted in a touchdown to Mike Harley Jr only to be denied by a Vienna time-out called just before the snap. Undeterred, Hennessey tried the same play next time around, but the pass to Geyer was incomplete — before a false start penalty increased Stuttgart’s task to 3rd-and-11. Again Hennessey stood firm and, third time being a charm, found his favourite target to cut the gap at half-time to a mere three points.

The margin did not lost much longer than the electrifying half-time performance from hip-hop icons Die Fantastischen Vier and the Rhein Fire cheerleaders, with Stuttgart taking the opening possession back down the other end, mostly on the back of a lengthy Tomiwa Oyewo burst, before slotting over a field goal to tie the game at 17.

Defense then began to take over, on both sides, with punts being traded back and forth. The small gains that were made were often insufficient to sustain drives, but Vienna finally broke the stalemate with an athletic effort from TE Florian Bierbaumer hauling in a slightly misdirected Holmes pass to help keep the Vikings moving. A tush push and two plays later, however, the ball was back in Surge hands as Mitch Fettig picked off Holmes in his own endzone.

Given the chance to take their first lead of the game, Stuttgart fairly raced back down the field but, with the endzone in sight, another Hennessey strike — this time to Harley Jr — bounced off the receiver’s fingers. Two plays later, the Vikings made the profligacy pay, as Divine Buckrham intercepted Hennessey by picking the ball almost out of his target’s grasp.

Again the Stuttgart defence stood tall, forcing the Vikings to punt from deep in their own end as Holmes proved unable to escape the pressure being heaped upon him. When Harley Jr capitalised on the space ahead of him to set the Surge up on their opponent’s 31, the ‘home’ team knew they had a golden opportunity, and Hennessey took just two plays, including a run-and-slide after calling his own number on first down, to find Geyer, almost alone, running left to right across the Vikings’ endzone. The receiver’s momentum ended with a vault of the advertising boards as the Surge bench exalted.

With plenty of time still on the clock, however, the Stuttgart defence again had to do their thing, especially bearing in mind how Holmes had carved open the similarly-potent Paris unit to force overtime in Week 14. Taking a sack far behind the line of scrimmage was not in Vienna’s gameplan, and forced the Austrian into a 4th-and-18 attempt from Holmes to Bierbaumer that fell incomplete, the officials deaf to wishful claims of pass interference from the Vikings’ sideline.

Although Stuttgart proved unable to make the most of another possession, gained on the ensuing turnover on downs, an encroachment penalty when facing 4th-and-1 just inside the two-minute warning at least prolong their hold on the ball, leaving Holmes and the Vikings less than a minute to find the miracle they needed. Although the quarterback was able to advance the chains, the clock kept ticking, leaving the 2022 champions one last opportunity to keep the ball, and their title hopes alive. Holmes found Horn to gain a few more yards, but the receiver’s attempt to lateral the ball to Yannick Mayr close to the endzone was broken up by the defense— to the jubilation of a vast majority of a crowd comprising fans of all 16 franchises.

To no-one’s great surprise, Geyer would be recognised as the game’s MVP, the hometown hero getting his moment in an arena where he was an adoring fan of the city’s soccer team in his youth. It would have, equally, been no surprise had the Surge defense produced the man-of-the-match. The battle at the line of scrimmage was won by the men in black, with the Stuttgart linebackers throwing themselves into the pass rush that kept Holmes so off balance for much of the game. Five first half sacks became eight by the end of the game, with Robert Lachmann establishing potential MVP credentials with three takedowns of his own.

For the Surge, it was a breakthrough that has been coming for a couple of years. Having been transformed from an 0-12 team in 2022 to losing finalists just a year later, and then succumbing at the semi-final stage twelve months ago, many would have crumbled. Hennessey, who would confirm his retirement after the game, returned for one more shot at the crown, as Jordan Neuman — the architect of the turnaround — instilled both a belief and a laser focus from the minute Stuttgart was confirmed as host of the title game. “We managed to stay focused on what mattered most: our sport, our goals,” the head coach was claim later, his team’s dream now a reality that may still take some time to sink in.