With Austria Salzburg just needing one point from their last three games and Adnet due for a drubbing to pay them back for almost kicking our arses in their muddy bear pit; with the sun shining and the beer flowing, around 1500 buoyant supporters and a party mood in the air, you could be forgiven for asking what the **** I’m talking about.


In the outside world Manchester United have just won the Premiership for the 18th time. Inter Milan are Italian champions. Barcelona are Spanish champions. Wolfsburg are on the verge of clinching the German Bundesliga for the first time in their history and Leeds United have failed to gain promotion out of the third tier of English football for the second season running. But apart from the latter in my case, ‘who gives a ****?
 
Anyone looking for Austria Salzburg on the net will find out that reality is not a uniform concept. Some links state: ‘see also Red Bull Salzburg’ – which anyone can see doesn’t make sense because the only real Salzburg team plays in purple not red, and is not called Red Bull, which is a drink and not a football team; so anyone with half a brain upwards is forced to look at the other links describing a club founded amongst the ruins of a megalomaniacal buy-out which forced the die-hard fans to re-establish their own club, while the rest of Salzburg sold their souls for a seat in a sterile stadium with no atmosphere, Coke, McDonalds and overpriced merchandising.
 
In the reality I share with around 2500 people in Salzburg, football is something to talk about, something we care about. Football is far more than just 90 minutes of shouting at people with ten times more talent than yourself; it’s more than buying the new away kit or waiting to be ignored by young men who earn more in a week than you do in half a year. It’s about standing by something you believe in, even if you don’t always win.
 
In my world purple is the colour, Austria Salzburg is the name. The club is now so successful because it’s a kind of family powered by people with no great material wealth, giving everything they’ve got; it’s fuelled by enthusiasm and the knowledge that identity is something you define yourself; not something that is given to you by false gods with fat wallets looking for advertising space. So for anybody in any doubt as to what is real and what is not real, do not look at Wikipedia or Google around for half an hour – come to Austria Salzburg and get a life!
 
So now we’ve established what is real, we can discuss the fact that the reality experienced by the rest of the outside world is something we are blissfully ignorant of for three or four hours on a Saturday. Having scraped a win in Adnet, a hamlet even further removed from the outside world than Maxglan, it seemed fitting the championship should be clinched at home, in Salzburg against the epitome of footballing averageness. The most you could say about Adnet was – they were here. Apart from that we didn’t really need them, so the most important event from a footballing point of view was a chip by Mersudin Jukic, perfectly designed and crafted to squeeze the maximum embarrassment out of any goalkeeper. On 31 minutes Jukic managed to scoop the ball over a flailing keeper finding the perfect angle of descent between the crossbar, goal-line and the aforementioned flailing arms.
 
The translation of Mersudin Jukic is ‘Small godlike man who likes embracing big crowds’. I won’t say Jukic likes doing god-like crowd embraces and mass adoration… he loves it! Salva got a big kiss and a cuddle and Mersudin Jukic collected 60 seconds of concentrated adoration from everybody up in the grandstand. This time we were all prepared to do him the favour as he finally shut the door on any gnat-sized chance Grünau might have had of getting their grubby fingers on OUR title. From this moment on Austria Salzburg were effectively champions. Not that Adnet didn’t have one or two chances, but they didn’t make anything of them, and today a shock defeat was not part of the plot. Thanks for coming Adnet, you can go home now.
 
Fortunately Adnet didn’t go home and stayed for the second half. With an unusual attack of arrogance I decided to leave my place to the right of the Ultras and go off to watch the second half with Drax and Christian down on the opposite touchline. Usually it’s these moments of negligence that cost you promotion, but with Grünau needing 9 points from two-and-a-half games I was able to let go for the first time this season, and after grabbing a beer I settled down to soak in the atmosphere. A very impressive atmosphere it was too. I wondered what it would sound like if I could hear myself chanting with the crowd in the grandstand while standing behind the dugouts at the other side, but it was all too much fish philosophy so I finished the beer just in time to bang the hoardings as the second goal went in on 59 minutes.
 
According to the sfv league website it was Jukic again, but I thought it was Lubo Neubauer, but in the end, who cares? 2-0 and the party was getting into gear and facts do not play an important role this side of reality. Apart from the numerous cards shown and substitutions made the only other on-field occurrence of note was a red card Matthias Brunauer for a second bookable offence, but unusually his dismissal was not met by calls for his death as, again, nobody cared! It was just a matter of waiting for the ref to blow for full time. While straining to see the clock and having to listen to some bloke laughing at his own jokes to the right of us, and a group of junior pyromaniacs setting off celebratory fireworks to our left, of course we turned round just one second too late to see Mersi Jukic wheeling away back to his favourite ‘I want to cuddle the masses’ pose.
 
On the website Lubo scored the goal, I can’t tell you, I don’t care. Mersi was cuddling the masses so hard the fencing broke in front of the stands and just a few seconds later the ref finally blew for full time and a mass orgy of punching the air, bear hugging and running around like headless chickens ensued, followed by lots of crowd adoring players songs followed by players adoring crowd songs – just like it should be.
 
I hope everybody lived happily ever after! In my world we are promoted as champions every year so if your reality just isn’t fun enough, then you’re obviously not living in a purple paradigm, yet. Think about it!
 
Thanks for another great season!
 
Roger Lord
 
 
SV Austria Salzburg - SK Adnet 3-0 (1-0)
 
Austria Salzburg played with:
A. Trappl; Milic, Pecaranin, Weiss, Csenki; Rottensteiner, Neubauer, Federer (54. Mayer), Seywald (70. Schleindl); Jukic, Kopleder (61. Leitner)
 
Goals:
1-0: Jukic (31.)
2-0: Jukic (59.)
3-0: Neubauer (91.) (Assist: Mayer)
 
Shots: Austria 27 / Adnet 5
Shots on target: Austria 14 / Adnet 3
Corners: Austria 8 / Adnet 3
Fouls: Austria 15 / Adnet 24
Offsides: Austria 4 / Adnet 3
 
Yellow cards:
Austria: 3 (Federer, 44./foul; Neubauer, 53./criticism; Jukic, 59./unsporting behaviour)
Adnet: 2 (Brunauer, 63./foul; Irnberger, 68./criticism)
 
Yellow/Red:
Austria: 0
Adnet: 1 (Brunauer, 87./unsporting behaviour)
 
Salzburg, Austria-Sportanlage Maxglan, 1600 spectators
Ref: Christian Struz; Assistants: Josef Doppler, Süleyman Sakat