Of course, the long version started about 20 hours earlier at a 40th birthday party in Abtenau. By the time the next morning arrived I knew the day was going to be a duty rather than a party. I went back to bed and stayed there until it was time to be driven home. Fortunately, just before I arrived home, Mikko called me back and was pleased to have an excuse to pick up someone who gives him straight ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers. Are you coming to the game? Yes! Should I pick you up? ‘Yes!’
We headed off over the Haunsberg at ‘whenever’ – I have no idea. Parking was easy enough as there’s a car park just opposite the biggest (probably only) disco in town; Johnny’s Disco! I’ve heard the name for the twenty years I’ve lived in Salzburg, but have never been desperate enough to go out there. The town’s (village’s) main claim to fame is the fact that the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’ was first performed in a chapel in Oberndorf. Which is like saying Elvis Presley once had a shit in the toilet of our restaurant or Brian Clough once stopped off here on holiday to let his dog take a leak.
Officially this was an away game. As the town of Hall in Tyrol had refused to authorise the staging of the game at their ground, one of the alternatives had been a neutral ground, so for some reason a village even further away from Tyrol than Salzburg was chosen. I’ve long since ceased questioning the logic behind the decisions made by sporting officialdom in Austria, but bearing in mind taking our travelling support to quaint (boring) villages is like taking inner city school kids to a museum of fine art. OK, it’s not, but you can imagine at least some similarities. So if Hall didn’t want our fans in Tyrol it was not because of the numbers but because they have special needs.
Anyway, like in many of these out of the way villages you simply have to know where the pitch is, because otherwise it involves a hit and miss game of left and right turns and hoping to see people in your colours. Fortunately everybody else knew where they were heading so we just jogged along behind until we got to another example of the semi-permanence of timber constructions. Built God knows when, the clubhouse and the bar section were of the ‘let’s start with timber and then when the club gets bigger we can rebuild with bricks’ phase. 30 years on I guess they’ve only got as far as ‘let’s start with timber...’
Other than that, the other thing we immediately noticed was that the pitch was higher than the walk-in area. Whether that was a clever drainage solution or the surveyors had failed to find the site, the fact is watching a game of football from pitch-height can be a pain in the arse, unless you’re simple there for the atmosphere (beer). I wasn’t, since I was knackered and not in the mood for any more beer. It wasn’t one of those ‘mother-of-all-hangovers’ days, but it’s would have been better if I’d simply gone to bed instead of trailing off into the depths of Salzburg’s zones of no interest.
Right! Pitch. Perfect for pub football and the cold wind blowing diagonally across the ground meant that I was only OK because I was between the perimeter fence and the waist-high hoardings with a couple of people behind me breaking (the) wind. Oberdorf also had one of those building-site-leftovers grandstands with advertising boards nailed to the lower end of the roof to stop anyone standing above pitch height, behind the first row, from seeing more than the first ten metres of the pitch.
Enter the gladiators. After the slapping we received the previous week the team had been reorganised and injured players compensated for. After a couple of minutes it was clear that Hall was not going to dazzle with Barcelona-style pinball soccer, so it was up to us to stay compact and be patient, be ready for counter attacks and try to break them down.
Easier said than done on a pitch better suited to army assault course training, but after 28 minutes I looked down at my feet for one second of headachy hung-over absent-mindedness, which happened to be the exact same second when Mihael Rajic put us 1-0 up. We were doing more for the game, but still looked a bit wobbly at the back. After 36 minutes I thought Bernd Winkler seemed to hold onto one of their players, but maybe that was another time. Anyway, the ref decided it was a penalty and after converting it Hall were lucky to get to the break at 1-1.
Somewhere during the first half, or was it half time or at the start of the second half, I don’t know – Tschibo (who looks a bit like Mickey Dolenz of the Monkeys) turned up with Didi Winkler, Bernd’s brother and famous in Abtenau for the era when they got up to the second Landesliga in the mid 1990s. Tchibo had the daft idea of buying me a pint ‘to repair the damage’ of the previous night. Because I was a rude hung-over bastard I turned him down and because Tchibo is Mickey Dolenz and will not be thwarted, he bought me one anyway.
In the second half we put together more cohesive moves, or so I seem to remember. There are other bits of the game scrubbed from my memory for all eternity, like the sending off of Hall’s Manuel Gschwendtner after 58 minutes. I was more worried about Nico Mayer, who had already seen yellow on 49 minutes and also seemed desperate to see red – a favour the ref happily didn’t do him. But two minutes after Hall’s sending off Marko Vujic headed us into a 2-1 lead after some clever jinky-jinky stuff by Barbara Falkner’s favourite player, Dusan Pavlovic, who is apparently very cute.
Tom Hofer didn’t change anything around as we were doing the right things, somewhat ineffectively, but the game was going in the right direction. It’s not that we were rock solid at the back, but Bernd’s old school defending allowed us to resemble the days of Wolfgang ‘the gouty tomcat’ Wurnstl, when we used to build from the back. Resemble, I say, because we still managed to lose the ball in midfield and a counter-attacking team with 10 men is not likely to change its tactics, so every time we left gaps the balls were pumped forward into space. If Hall had been lucky they might have got a goal as our keeper Martin Eisl was having problems keeping hold of the ball – in the wind.
As it turned out, we didn’t let them back into the game and a Vujic penalty right at the death made the result look like a 1977 Ford Granada with shiny new O.Z. rims. The previous week I’d told Tom I’d go for a beer after the game, but I’d already known earlier that morning that it was never going to happen, so I sheepishly headed across the field to congratulate him on his first win and to slink off and find my chauffeur Mikko for the ride home so that I could finally take my headache home to bed.
Hall 1 – Austria Salzburg 3
Bfn - Roger
