Somehow I’ve managed to be the driver out to Pinzgau on two occasions this year, although as I normally scrounge a lift and terrorise the people driving with bad jokes, sarcastic comments, driving tips, crumbs from my crisps and chronic flatulence, I have to accept my fate on the whole as being fair and just. So off we set – the five of us this time, meaning for Mini drivers like Christian there is no understanding of the difficulties of accelerating, overtaking and braking for tight bends. Except for Christian, of course, most Mini drivers are sh*theads.
Anyway, over an hour of driving and a load of five well-fed adult men in a car is a recipe for methane production. Farting was restricted to three people in the car. 1) Me – it’s my car and I’ll fart if and when I like. 2) Schafi, and 3) Mikko – two likely candidates; consumers of copious volumes of fast food and lovers of the golden nectar known to the common man as ‘beer’. Christian and Drax are both incapable of farting as Christian, in his role as president of our supporters’ club, cannot risk any more public faux pas after it was discovered that he was responsible for the lady-boy design of the club’s logo. Drax, on the other hand, is probably physically incapable of flatulent output. Don’t ask me why. Some people fart; Drax doesn’t.
So let’s cut to the chase. Having arrived in another badly signposted outpost of Austrian winter tourism we parked the car in some farmer’s field and headed off to the football ground. The problem is with villages out in the middle of nowhere, the people don’t put up signs because everybody in the village knows where everything is. Fortunately, making a virtue out of a vice, coming late means there are always other people to follow and the sound of the crowd to hone in on. When we got to the ground the first thing they did was to confiscate everybody’s umbrella in case it rained. Why didn’t they inform Austria Salzburg an ask them to put it on the official website? Stupid, but we still managed to smuggle in tons of other lethal weapons in the form of car keys, coins and credit cards.
The next problem with these Peruvian-style mountainous areas is finding a patch of land flat and big enough to put a field without carving out half of the nearest mountain. They failed as we were allocated their grandstand, which in the style of Fitzcarraldo, had probably been built by Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski in their more lucid moments.
Lucid, I say, as reality dictates a club on the edge of a Peruvian Amazon rain forest cannot expect more than a hundred spectators. All well and good, but this involved tramping up round the side of the pitch to a precarious path on the side of the hill. Because Austria Salzburg is not the Amazon basin, it has more than 100 fans, so the rest of us spread out at the top of the steep embankment to the right of the grandstand. Not that this was dangerous in itself, but some Einstein had decided to position the unsecured heavy metal barriers right at the edge of the steep slope leading down to the pitch 8 metres below. If anybody had farted at the wrong time there could have been deaths in Maria Alm.
As a side note, it seems weird to me that so much attention is paid to the ‘safety’ of fans in our ground in Maxglan, but would there have been any legal consequences if someone had fallen down the embankment or if a crowd of 2000 had turned up. Is that the rule? – If you have no decent stadium in the middle of the countryside you can put up crap fences and have as many spectators as you like, but if you have one of the best stadiums in the division, you can’t.
OK. So no deaths and the match started much as most of the spring end of the season has been so far. We try to play Brazilian football and lose the ball in midfield, the other team plays up-and-under football and every clearance mutates into a final pass into the space behind our defence. Possession, pass – pass – pass – pass – pressure – ball lost – ball banged upfield and a desperate scramble ensues to get back and clear the ball. As old horse lungs, Peter Urbanek, was on the bench again, apart from Mario Milic, we lacked speed at the back. So obviously there was a lot of panicked clearances up into the air and if Maria Alm hadn’t been as crap as Zell am See at finishing, they could have made it a miserable trip for us.
As it happened, the only start of the game was the referee, Mr. Thomas ‘Himself’ Hochstaffl. I don’t know where these people come from, but anybody who has played football for five minutes in the park knows the difference between a foul and a theatrical fall, or a deliberate or accidental foul – or whatever. Although Mr Hochstaffl will never be as popular with the Austria faithful as Mr Lassacher, there were times it looked as if they’d both been to the same referees’ training camp.
Lesson one: You have yellow and red cards – make sure you use them. And while the game was competitive in places, most of the flying was done to illicit free kicks and the punishment should have gone to the bad actors – on both sides. Seven yellow cards in one game is not a world record, but they change the course of a game because players either stop taking risks – or get yanked off by their managers to avoid being sent off (see Cavic after 45 minutes).
Lesson two: You are a figure of authority. Stamp your authority on the game. So every 30 seconds the whistle blew and players were called to the referee not to do this, not to do that, the next time you’re off etc. Respect!
Anyway, as you can imagine, because I’m writing this report 8 days too late a lot of the details have escaped me so I’ll just tell you the essentials. We were average, and despite everybody saying we should have won 10-0 because of the all the chances we missed; so what? If you score, you score – if you don’t, you don’t. If you hit the post it’s not because you are unlucky, it’s because you are inaccurate! Maria Alm were so bad that even when they were awarded a penalty for a dubious fall in our penalty area, the penalty itself looked more like a backpass and Alex Trappl saved us the three points.
For all our hits and misses and possessional domination of the game, and tactical superiority and the rest of the bollocks; the only reason we won the game was because we scored one goal and Maria Alm couldn’t have scored in goalposts the size of their stately clubhouse. And why did we score a goal? It wasn’t an amazing piece of strategic genius or a well worked 15-move set-piece. It was Mario ‘the god of all things blonde and fluffy’ Milic who picked up on a loose ball about 25 yards out and forced their keeper to dive the wrong way just to save his life.
By half time Drax and Christian were half bombed and I’d already had my beer I was forced to drink a ‘Sprite’ of all things. When I was a kid Sprite was only popular until ‘Lilt’ came along. Lilt was supposed to be a ‘refreshing tropical drink’, but if people in the tropics drank Lilt’ all the time, then their islands would already have sunk into the ocean. So Sprite it was, and a spam bap, which is the nearest thing I have to a good explanation of ‘Leberkassemmel’, the Austrian socio-cultural-economic equivalent of fish and chips (northerners) or jellied eels (cockneys).
The most remarkable thing about the second half was that it took 70 minutes before Peter Urbanek finally got his run-about, and as soon as he came on we looked more dangerous, but we still didn’t manage to put anything in the back of the net. The only other thing was that the stadium announcer seemed to be allowed to say stupid things whenever our players had to concentrate and they had perched what could only be described as a Willy Wonker style ‘strange and wonderful noise machine’ on the top of one of their sheds, which obviously needed two of the best brains in Maria Alm to operate it. It’s what they call fan culture.
Forget the rest of the game. Full time 1-0 to Austria Salzburg and because my passengers were already pissed up, they all decided to run down the embankment of death and across the pitch to the promised land they had heard about. Apparently, they made the biggest, bestest, crispiest schnitzels in the whole world, but when people are drunk they need to eat large amounts of fatty, salty food to keep themselves sane, so I guess Drax and Christian were delirious and there had probably never been any schnitzels; they were just culinary mirages.
After the disappointment of a poor game and not finding the schnitzels it was only logical that my passengers split up into five groups of one so that I could not easily herd them back into the car for the long haul back to Salzburg, and when I did find them all, each of them said ‘just the one beer’ and then we can go! By the time you drive back from Maria Alm and drop each piss-head off in its own respective hovel you can guarantee it will take another two hours, plus the time the idiots need to finish their beers. So at this moment my mobile rang and my girlfriend asked if I would be home in the next half hour because she had cooked for us. My girlfriend is not an Austria Salzburg fan.
UFC Maria Alm - SV Austria Salzburg 0-1 (0-1)
Austria Salzburg played with:
Trappl; Milic, Reifeltshammer, Schmidt, Hirsch; Rottensteiner (70. Urbanek), Federer, Mayer, Feldinger (29. Oberhauser); Winkler, Cavic (46. Leitner)
Goal: Milic (37.)
Shots: Maria Alm 8 / Austria 22
Shots on target: Maria Alm 4 / Austria 6
Shots blocked: Maria Alm 1 / Austria 0
Corners: Maria Alm 0 / Austria 7
Fouls: Maria Alm 25 / Austria 34
Offsides: Maria Alm 4 / Austria 3
Yellow cards:
Maria Alm: 3 (Hölzl, 25.; Ofensberger, 65.; Bajramovic, 71.)
Austria: 4 (Federer, 10.; Cavic, 44.; Oberhauser, 66., Rottensteiner, 69.)
Maria Alm, Unterberg-Stadion, 1450 spectators
Ref: Thomas Hochstaffl; Assistenten: Johann Steger, Reinhard Weiß
