Yesterday’s game in Piesendorf was sent by God to answer a number of questions; above all the question, ‘Where the f**k is Piesendorf? A voyage to the bottom of the table and the back of beyond. After consulting the online Map24 service I discovered that the days of cosy half-hour drives to backwoods nests ten minutes from the motorway were over. Whatever way you cut the cake, for a Salzburg regional league game Piesendorf is a long haul of around an hour-and-a-half into a valley where winter comes knocking at the end of September and leaves at the beginning of April.
The second question raised is a question of faith; whether to take the longer, high-speed motorway route from Salzburg or the shorter country road route cutting across Germany. Of course, we decided to take what turned out to be by far the slowest option through this lonely corner of Germany where every second driver in front of us was a tourist or a grumpy senior citizen who seemed determined to drive at least 30 kilometres an hour below the speed limit. With the best French automobile technology money could buy and four well-fed adult males in the car, each on or above his respective ideal weight, overtaking turned out to be almost impossible.
The roads on the German side are sort of second division picturesque; nice without being worth seen a second time. Once you get into the southern parts of Salzburg province, while the scenery is pleasantly unspectacular, the architecture becomes more industrial, functional and dowdy, and whereas we left Salzburg on a damp and overcast day, by the time we arrived in Piesendorf it looked like November.
Of course, one of the joys of driving out into the backwoods, and one of the reasons they are called the backwoods, is the joy of getting lost. The other car with the photographers decided to leave the new SatNav in the glove compartment and rely on common sense. To the rest of civilisation SatNav can be considered an improvement upon common sense and I’m sure our intrepid team of photographers used the ride back from Tyrol constructively to apportion blame on each other for missing the first half by ending up in the wrong county. THE WRONG COUNTY – HA – HA – HA!!!
As Piesendorf was built a few centuries before cars, roads and public transport, it was not comforting to find the local voluntary fire brigade doing the ‘this way – that way’ dance as they directed people into cul-de-sacs and private driveways. If the village does not have a traffic concept for the hordes of Babylon, rock concerts and sporting events, then why put people on duty to administer this chaos?
Any road up, although the ground was relatively small, soggy and uneven, we had to be grateful that the game was taking place at all, as apparently people have been working all day to brush off the worst of the torrential rain that had flooded the pitch in the night. It also has to be said, from our cordoned off sector we had a perfect view of the game, standing on solid wood benches on an embankment; two beer stands and a running supply of crispy chicken bread cakes and hot dogs. Furthermore, the hosts had even set up four squeaky clean portaloos, usually seen filled to the roof with human excrement at rock festivals. More fun for the young male Austria fans as they enjoyed trying to blow them up with firecrackers and extinguish them with their trouser snakes; less fun for the young ladies going in after them.
The game itself started according to plan. On about seventy seconds Lubo Neubauer sent in fantastic cross, or pass or whatever to Oliver Schmidt, who scored an absolutely world beating header, or volley, or overhead kick or tap-in or whatever – to give Austria Salzburg the lead and set the tone for the next twenty five minutes or so. (As the ‘Verdammten’ photographers don’t know what the first half goals looked like I shall describe them as goals of incomprehensible skill and grace). Austria Salzburg, despite the poor pitch, put together a lot of moves which looked like real football, and Piesendorf looked every bit a team begging to be relegated. Not that the individual players were bad, but that they were individuals who looked like they’d never played together before. No set moves, no clever runs, no combinations – nothing.
On 13 minutes little Heli Rottensteiner latched onto a clever, unbelievably deft feed-in from Zarko ‘the chest’ Cavic, and scored the best goal in the world ever to make it 2-0 to Austria Salzburg and there was never any doubt as to where the three points would end up. The only questions of doubt were, ‘would Dani, Lorenz, Claudia and Georg’ get out of Tyrol in one piece, their car being the only one in the whole of the province of Tyrol with a purple Austria Salzburg pendant hanging from the driver’s mirror; and would they get back to see another goal from Lubo Neubauer assisted by Berndt Winkler on 23 minutes; a goal of such stunning, breathtaking beauty that even the home supporters had tears in their eyes? Well, the answer of course is, no, they did not see these goals. Shame on them!
To my mind, after the third goal the game seemed to deteriorate as the Austria no longer needed to waste their energy on making runs and tracking back and for the rest of the half the game was a too and fro with no particular place to go. Still, Christian, who I have warned about his beer belly on a number occasions, seemed to be happily running backwards and forwards between the hot dog and beer stand and his place at the side of the pitch. Maybe he thought if he ran to the beer stand ten times he might lose weight. (Er – NO!)
Half time; 3-0 to the Austria and I realised Drax and Christian had both been doing the beer, bogs and hot dogs relay race, although nobody looked to be suffering as yet. Teetotaller Hannes was doing what non-drinkers do and stoically soaking in the atmosphere and watching the portaloos happily steaming away. Meanwhile the rest of the Austria crowd around us, who’d obviously come with the chartered buses, were soaking up every drop of alcohol they could get there hands on, which could be seen positively as a contribution towards the financial well-being of USK Piesendorf, the club at the edge of or even beyond the edge of the world.
Piesendorf came out for the second half looking like a team expecting to get a seriously slapped bottom, but as it turned out, bad as they were, Austria Salzburg caught the high balls and thrashed clearances bug, and as the pitch got even heavier the game simply became a great advert for heavy drinking. I’m not saying there weren’t any more good scenes, but at 3-0 beauty ceased to be a parameter. The more passes got lost on the boggy surface, the less effort was made to move the bass around on the floor.
After 68 minutes it was Winkler who put in Lubo Neubauer again to make it 4-0. At this stage it would be easy to ignore the performance put in by the referee. However, as the SFV is apparently very nervous about criticism made of referees, I have this to say: Mr Klinger was even better than Mr Lassacher last season in Plainfeld, and just as good as Mr Aufschnaiter in the game against Hallwang.
Austria Salzburg is a charitable beast and has so far conceded at least one goal in every game, so it was no real surprise to see Gabor Sztancs pull back a consolation goal for the home team and set off a roar from the balcony of the clubhouse. Fortunately, this followed immediately by Schützei’s A-ra-ta-ta-Ta-ta-ta-Ta-ta-ta-Ta – AUSTRIA! and the locals were drowned out by the travelling support.
Just to underline the pointlessness of any further resistance, Anton Feldinger rounded off the scoreline with a well-taken 5-1 on 90 minutes, and as the ref blew for full time it was clear the only benefit Piesendorf would have from the afternoon would be expressed in financial terms. So as the first two coach loads of drinker filled up and headed of home, the rest of us decided to pop in for a ‘quick drink’ before hitting the road.
Drax and Christian had been taking quick drinks all afternoon. However, when they said let’s go to the clubhouse with three roofs for a ‘quick drink’, I knew I’d be driving home in the dark. There is no such thing as a ‘quick drink’ in Austria. In German the word is ‘gleich’. It means right away – immediately; or it does officially. It has the semantic equivalence of the word ‘mañana’ in Spanish. So off we went to the clubhouse, where to my surprise, the locals seemed either pleased or at least not pissed off to see Austria fans singing and drinking in their bar; and in the course of one or two ‘quick drinks’ Drax and Christian got talking to one or two locals and found there was a certain degree of sympathy for the Austria Salzburg cause.
Friendly discussions in Austria always seem to end in a round of schnapps, so after two hours of quick drinks and a round of schnapps they needed a ‘final’ beer to swill it down. As the non-drinking driver it was my job to stand there and point at my watch and explain that I’d told my girlfriend I’d be back around 9 o’clock. The job of the drinker is to ignore you completely, so they did. I found myself in a discussion with Hannes on Timothy Leary, philosophy and mind expanding drugs. At this point I noticed Drax was starting to slur his words and as we finally (I thought) headed for the door he started walking like a prototype AIBO, which was funny until his eyes glazed over, did the Sylvester Stallone Rocky voice and started talking to God in the big porcelain telephone; a taste of things gone by!
To cut a long story short an hour later my two human SatNavs were sleeping like babies and me and Hannes were left to study the dark and windy road, the car so full of alcohol fumes I was worried about using the electric windows. It took us ages to get onto the motorway and by the time we got to the southern outskirts of the city of Salzburg I almost had a bad conscience about waking Christian to get the right motorway exit. I guess that if we are promoted to the Westliga (Austrian 3rd division) these long trips could become a regular occurrence, except I will not be the boring party-pooping driver every time; I will be the avenging angel taking that one last beer two hours after the driver promised to be home, and I will be the one falling asleep two seconds after getting in the car; and that is the true shape of things to come!
Roger Lord
USK Piesendorf - SV Austria Salzburg 1-5 (0-3)
Austria Salzburg played with:
Trappl; Urbanek, Schmidt, Pecaranin, Milic; Rottensteiner (62. Leitner), Mayer (66. Federer), Neubauer, Feldinger; Winkler (71. Seywald), Cavic
Goals:
0-1: Schmidt (2.) (Assist: Neubauer)
0-2: Rottensteiner (13.) (Assist: Cavic)
0-3: Neubauer (23.) (Assist: Winkler)
0-4: Neubauer (68.) (Assist: Winkler)
1-4: Sztancs (75.)
1-5: Feldinger (91., penalty) (Assist: Seywald)
Shots total: Piesendorf 7 / Austria 23
Shots on goal: Piesendorf 1 / Austria 12
Shots blocked: Piesendorf 0 / Austria 3
Corners: Piesendorf 5 / Austria 7
Fouls: Piesendorf 28 / Austria 27
Offsides: Piesendorf 11 / Austria 7
Yellow cards:
Piesendorf: 3 (Amering, 14./foul; Nyari, 38./foul; Wrabel, 77./criticism)
Austria: 0
Piesendorf, 850 spectators
Ref: Reinhold Klinger; Assistants: Erwin Mair, Muhamed Kajtazovic
