Two years ago an away game meant travelling a maximum of half an hour. However, with three teams from the Pinzgau area we have been forced down the tunnel of doom that is the B311 three times now. The drive itself is pleasant enough but it’s a motorist’s equivalent of Charles Darwin’s compost heap. It’s not a dirty road or anything, but almost half of everything on the road has failed in some aspect of its life. Failed to learn to drive, failed to do an eye test, failed sell the farm, failed to buy a car that goes fast enough, and failed to have its driving license confiscated – the result being that you’re constantly looking for opportunities to overtake on roads that are like Stephen King books. Just as you move out to overtake, an oncoming lorry appears from behind a bend which was not there before.
Added to that, on this occasion I’d decided not to drive myself and instead to afford the luxury of criticising someone else’s driving. This should not have been an easy task as Dani, our chauffeur for the day, is young, intelligent, drives a car with enough horsepower to pull a barge, and normally has every piece of digital navigational equipment known to man. I have to remind you, nevertheless, that this is the same Dani who was driving when his car full of tracking sensors, satellite radar systems and IQ monsters managed to drive to Tyrol before arriving at the Piesendorf game an hour too late. Ably accompanied by Claudia (also party to the Tyrol disaster), another IT expert, clutching her printed road maps and Google Maps shots of Zell am See, the rest of us (Barbara F., Christian O. and myself) felt as safe as you can feel in such situations. Dani did not have his battery of electronic aids with him!
So five minutes out of Bad Reichenhall Dani and Claudia were so engrossed in their ecstatically nerdy discussion on servers and software that we missed a turn-off and Dani decided to cut the solid line in the middle of the road and re-invent the Highway Code to double back to the missed exit. I presume he had checked the route before we left and I presumed Claudia had a print-out of the stretch of road we were driving on, but that is (one) the problem(s) with these hyper-intelligent whizz-kid IT farts – unless an alarm goes off on their Blackberrys, they forget to go to the toilet.
Still, no more nerve wracking situations until we got to what we refer to as the ‘roundabout of destiny’ in Lofer. This where the nerds missed the signposting because they were all looking at their palmtops and i-pods and apple-jacks and whatever else. The road sign was invented about 3000 years ago and is still a reliable way of finding the place you want to go. This time Dani switched on the vital function known as his ‘memory’ and decided not to go down the wrong road. So far so good.
No further incidents until we got into Zell am See itself. Having armed myself with the knowledge of there only being one long road down the side of the lake I assumed the turn off ‘south’ would be at the southern end of the lake. I mentioned I’d checked the website and we should wait for a sign saying Zell am See ‘south’, which half way down the lake seemed to throw the front row into confusion. Dani asked if we should get off the road here. ‘No’ I said, ‘not unless it says ‘south’, so of course we left the road at the wrong place but fortunately we got straight back on the road. All the while Claudia was clutching her Google Map print-outs of exactly this road, but maybe she was waiting for a message on Dani’s dashboard to say ‘open your hands’ and ‘read your map, now!’
Anyway, this navigational detachment from reality we managed to find ‘south’ and got to the stadium with a good 15 minutes to go. Having been very suspiciously quiet for the previous 15 minutes Christian got out of the car before we had even reached our final parking destination with the comment ‘I need a cig and a f*****g beer’.
Like everywhere in this area of the province of Salzburg you’re surrounded by hills and mountains. A spring green hedge down the Austria side of the pitch, a functional sports facility set-up on the other side and a running track round the outside made for a pleasant backdrop an afternoon of beer and footy. At four in the afternoon the pitch was still bathed in sunshine and we settled in behind the goals win the sun on our backs. The service at the beer stand wasn’t exactly fast, but because the lady looked directly at us when she was talking to us – instead of gazing into an item of ordering hardware – we managed to get our beers on a pay now – drink now basis.
These beers were necessary as the first 15 minutes were not exactly confidence inspiring. I won’t go into details but from my negative, pessimistic and destructive point of view we could have been three down. Zell’s strike, one Uba Uzo again looked a handful and we were caught on our back feet a number of times. Our saving graces were the fact that our new defender Harry Hirsch is exactly the kind of terrier that we need, not giving up until the referee blew; and Mario Milic with his speed and determination. He is our Leo Lainer but with with faster legs.
Our other saving grace was the fact that Zell am See probably could not score a goal in an empty net. They opened us up on seven or eight occasions in the first half with fairly direct play, but even with a clear shot on goal they were not capable of getting closer than the corner flag. I think they may have bought ten defensive midfielders by mistake as not one of them was able to make the numerous chances count. So the inevitable happened. We somehow manage to keep the ball out of our own net and after a bit of a scramble on 33 minutes Lubo Neubauer found himself 2 metres away from an undefended goal line and we were one-nil up. Shortly after this I am sure Claudia called Dani to find out what the score was and he probably logged onto the league’s website and waited for the update.
At half time Christian and I considered moving round to the hedge to get some sun on the right hand sides of our balding shaven heads, but laziness and inertia are powerful forces, so we just got some more beers and hung around listening to Claudia’s speech on the Icelandic dust cloud until the second half began, which it inevitably did.
So of course, within five minutes I felt this cold breeze on the back of my head and within another five minutes half of the penalty area was in the shade as the brutal arctic claw of the peak behind the goal cast its wintery veil over the proceedings. Far from cooling things down it all got a bit hectic. After starting to look like he might get a red to complement his yellow in the first half Peter Urbanek was substituted by Robert Oberhauser, who Dani was seen giving instructions to at half time. If in the history of Austria Salzburg there has been a shorter appearance, I can’t remember it being in the last four years. 53 minutes: Oberhauser on – foul 53 minutes – yellow card. 67 minutes: Oberhauser handball: red card – off! I neither saw the foul nor the handball as I was enjoying my beer, but I watched Violett TV before writing this and it looked like handball, but I can’t say whether it was deliberate or he was obeying demonic Dani’s dastardly plan. Maybe Dani implanted a chip in his brain and was manipulating him via satellite. Whatever.
Down to ten men we didn’t actually get any worse and despite some massive chances for Zell am See they couldn’t organise a crash in a shopping centre car park. They didn’t just miss by centimetres; they missed by 10 or 15 metres!!! On 80 minutes Cavic made way for the one and only ‘Mario Schleindl’, who had Zell’s defence on their toes again. On 85 minutes Zell’s Kevin Resch was off for a second bookable offence and just as it looked as if we would just about scrape a lucky one-nil, Mario Schleindl got to the bye line inside the penalty area and as a Zell am See stretched towards the ball that had already gone, Mario gratefully took up the invitation to lie down and Lubo converted the resultant penalty in the 93rd minute. Like I said, exactly the result we wanted, but it’s not as if we plastered them or anything.
Nevertheless, the relief transmuted into another beer and a couple of bottles of Jägermeister for the trip back to Salzburg and any attempts to talk about software and hardware solutions, dust clouds or airport chaos were drowned out by me talking drunk bullshit for half the journey and then begging for a toilet stop for the last half hour. Dani probably started up a programme on his on-board computer to calculate how far a drunk person can be driven before they need to go urgently and decided I was not an urgent case.
FC Zell am See - SV Austria Salzburg 0:2 (0:1)
Austria Salzburg played with:
Trappl; Urbanek (53. Oberhauser), Schmidt, Milic, Hirsch; Mayer, Federer, Neubauer, Feldinger; Cavic (80. Schleindl), Winkler (65. Rottensteiner)
Goals:
0-1: Neubauer (33.) (Assist: Cavic)
0-2: Neubauer (92., Elfmeter) (Assist: Schleindl)
Shots: Zell am See 12 / Austria 14
Shots on target: Zell am See 1 / Austria 5
Shots blocked: Zell am See 2 / Austria 3
Corners: Zell am See 5 / Austria 8
Fouls: Zell am See 18 / Austria 20
Offsides: Zell am See 6 / Austria 4
Yellow cards:
Zell am See: 1 (Resch, 62./foul)
Austria: 3 (Schmidt, 34./foul; Hirsch, 37./foul; Oberhauser, 53./foul)
Yellow-red cards:
Zell am See: 1 (Resch, 85./Foul)
Austria: 1 (Oberhauser, 67./Foul)
Zell am See, Alois-Latini-Stadion, 1100 spectators
Ref: Karl Imser; Assistants: Wolfgang Matzelberger, Robert Winter
