The scoreline from Stuttgart on Wednesday night undersells what happened. VfB Stuttgart beat Viking FK 3-1, and on its own that reads like a comfortable, unremarkable continental night for the home side. In truth, a 12-minute stretch of one player deciding an entire Champions League opener by himself made everything else, including Viking's genuinely spirited response, look like set dressing.
Ermedin Demirović scored all three Stuttgart goals. He put the hosts ahead in the 20th minute converting a low centre from Stiller, saw Viking's Zlatko Tripić level things two minutes later, then answered that equalizer twice in the space of a few minutes: first lifting a finish over Ostbø, then converting again shortly after. By the half-hour mark, in a competition Stuttgart had only just started playing, the game was over in everything but name. Sofascore's database shows no Stuttgart player had ever scored a Champions League hat trick before Demirović did it in barely half an hour.
That's the biggest story out of this match, more than the scoreline or Viking's defending, and even more than the fact that Stuttgart's coach had rotated Demirović into the lineup in place of Dženan Pejčinović for this exact fixture. That last detail is what makes it delicious. This wasn't the guy Sebastian Hoeneß was building his attack around. He was a change from the side that had just beaten Cologne, and within half an hour he'd made himself impossible to leave out again.
The shot numbers back up the idea that this was a hot streak, not a siege. Stuttgart out-shot Viking 17 to 9 and out-xG'd them by a wide margin, but the combined expected-goals total for the match was nowhere near four. Stuttgart scored more than the run of play strictly earned, which is what elite strikers on a heater do. Stuttgart didn't dominate for 90 minutes; they won because Demirović was ruthless in the window when Viking's back line cracked open, and once he'd done it twice, the rest of the night, Undav rattling the crossbar late included, was Stuttgart cruising rather than chasing.
Now the sympathetic part, because Viking deserve it. This is a club playing in Europe's top competition for the first time in decades, having only reached the league phase by grinding past Dinamo Zagreb in a playoff. They arrived unbeaten across their previous five matches, and for about 20 minutes in Stuttgart they played like a team that belonged, matching the hosts blow for blow and getting the equalizer through Tripić. Nobody should look at 3-1 in the box score and conclude Viking were overwhelmed. They were unlucky to run into a forward who decided, on this particular Wednesday, to have the best half of his season.
What I won't do is pretend this tells us anything about where either club finishes in this 36-team league phase. It's one match, matchday one of a long campaign, and Stuttgart don't play their next Champions League fixture until they travel to Slovan Bratislava. But if you're asking what actually mattered from Stuttgart 3-1 Viking, my answer isn't tactics or history. It's that a player who wasn't guaranteed a start last week just showed every Champions League defense what he can do in a single half.
