London fans of American-style football must have been worried that the NFL had dumped their worst possible combination of teams into Wembley Stadium for yesterday’s game. Both the Vikings and the Steelers were sporting 0-3 records and their respective fanbases were setting off distress flares and starting to man the lifeboats. On the day, however, both teams put in a very creditable performance and the London fans got one of the best games in the international series as the Vikings ran up a scoring lead and (just barely) managed to hang on to it for the full 60 minutes of play.
Matt Cassel, starting in place of injured starter Christian Ponder, had a very strong game with only a few glitches, but he was bailed out a couple of times by his wide receivers. He ended up with a 123.4 passer rating: 16 of 25 for 248 yards and 2 TDs. Jerome Simpson had 124 yards receiving and Adrian Peterson notched 140 yards rushing on the day with two touchdowns. Greg Jennings had a highlight reel catch-and-run 70-yard touchdown. Blair Walsh started the scoring with a 54-yard field goal, but missed on a shorter kick later in the game (his first miss of the season). He’s now 12-for-12 on field goal attempts longer than 50 yards in his career — a new team record.
The Vikings secondary hadn’t stellar up to this point in the season, but on Sunday they were missing two starting players (CB Chris Cook and S Jamarca Sanford). For the first defensive series, The Daily Norseman suggested that the most appropriate music for them taking the field was Yakkity Sax (the Benny Hill Show theme). It wasn’t as bad as that, but every quarterback the Vikings will face for the rest of the season will be throwing as often as they can to wherever Josh Robinson is on the field … Roethlisberger made him look really bad. To be fair, Robinson is an outside corner and he’s having to play the slot this year, but you’d hope he would be better than he’s showing so far.
Late in the game, Big Ben appeared to suffer an injury to his throwing hand. The CBS announcers made a remarkably dumb comment about it somehow being worse to hit another player’s arm/hand than a helmet. Chris Kluwe’s twitter comment sums up the science behind that:
"You'd rather hit a helmet than someone's arm." Because physics herpaderps the scrotumizer and then wargleblargle the durdurdurs.
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) September 29, 2013
After giving up the last two games on last-minute scores, the Vikings defence finally managed to close out a game, sacking Roethlisberger close to the goal line and forcing a fumble.
A much-needed win going into the bye week … and the beginnings of a quarterback controversy. Should be a fun two weeks until the next game.
