A look at the table would have suggested a 3-0 away win, but it never seems to pan out that way; especially away from home and although we had the majority of play, we lacked the element of surprise to rip them open.
This was another game where we showed how good our player-to-player football is, and how predictable our overall play is. Seekirchen simply doesn’t have the quality of players to shoot teams out of their ground, but they do have a few cheap tricks that always seem to work. Winning the ball on one side of defence and lobbing it over to the other side of the midfield for a cross back in from the by-line. We don’t know how to defend against teams that do that, like St Johann, and after a couple of scares we didn’t learn from, Seekirchen went 1-0 up on 39 minutes and for all our huffing and puffing on a crap, slippery surface, we were ineffective when it came to finishing.
One of the players of the season for us has been Klaus Märzendorfer and on the evening he was also one of the best scoring an important headed goal just before the break. However, those who thought there was going to be a goal fest in the second half were always going to be disappointed. Yes, the pitch was poor, yes, the weather was a bit dull – but not exactly the ‘battle in the rain’ claimed in the German version of the official website. The fact is we don’t know how to slow the game down to lull opponents into opening up at the back. We don’t know how to set up counter attacks. We need three passes after winning the ball anywhere on the park before we get it moving forward and we don’t have a range of set-pieces to chuck into the mix when we see the others are stonewalling.
So we tend to run at them, lose the ball, panic, win the ball, run at them, lose the ball, panic... It’s all close passing and almost no surprise opening passes to the other wing. So opponents know that if they work hard they can keep us out and there’ll always be a few chances to score on a counter attack. I can’t go into more or less detail than that at the moment, so however much more possession we had, we didn’t have the clear cut chances to make the difference on the scoreboard, so the game finished 1-1.
SV Seekirchen - SV Austria Salzburg 1-1 (1-1)
Austria Salzburg played with:
Trappl; Kreuzwirth, Sonko, Oberauer, Hirsch; Urbanek, Borozni, Mayer (60. Pavlovic), Reifeltshammer (62. Federer), Märzendorfer (72. Wührer); Vujic
Goals:
1-0: Junger (39.)
1-1: Märzendorfer (45.) (Assist: Hirsch)
Shots total: Seekirchen 13 / Austria 15
Shots on target: Seekirchen 6 / Austria 4
Corners: Seekirchen 6 / Austria 10
Fouls: Seekirchen 23 / Austria 19
Offsides: Seekirchen 2 / Austria 2
Yellow cards:
Seekirchen: 2 (Aigner, 26./foul; Mayr, 81./foul)
Austria: 3 (Sonko, 74./criticism; Wührer, 75./foul; Urbanek, 90./foul)
Seekirchen, 800 spectators
Ref: Mag. Bernd Hirschbichler; Assistants: Reinhard Fuchshuber, Stefan Harrer
