Normally at this juncture I would be writing a match report building a story around the facts, but this afternoon, Friday 1st May 2009, the story wrote the facts. What happened today in Plainfeld escaped any earthly logic known to me and would have been funny had it not been so pointless, illogical and unnecessary.###GALLERY###
Wikipedia has this to say: A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation communicated with the intent of being humorous. These jokes will normally have a punch line that will end the sentence to make it humorous. A bad joke can be a situation that is badly planned, or illogical. Not that Wikipedia is a faultless source of wisdom, but it does give us a point of orientation for what was otherwise to be considered an other-worldly Mayday experience.
Plainfeld is the most craply signposted backwoods village on the planet and myself and a number of other Austria Salzburg fans spent a good 200 generations driving into various back gardens and private car parks looking for non-existent signs and posters advertising the game, and searching in vain for police and firemen to direct us to the ground. The first people I saw directing drivers to the ground were standing just outside the venue itself and the pitch is not exactly next to the main road; it’s not a place you stumble upon. Think of backpacking in Peru or hitchhiking in Columbia and you get the feel of things.
If you could see the venue itself you would know why they didn’t want visitors to find it. Once again, the Austria fans had been reserved a flimsy and inadequate fence at the top of a steep embankment behind one of the goals. Penned in between makeshift steel building site fence units on one side and splintery wooden barriers on the other, with a wobbly wire fence keeping us back from the abyss, the only thing missing was the electric fencing and cattle prods.
I ask myself how come we have a problem with the authorities and powers that be in this league as regards our own grandstand and facilities, yet every other farming village is allowed to do as they please, setting up barriers without anchoring them; pressing people behind fencing far too shabby and weak to take the weight of more than a small child? Remember the definition of a bad joke?
Glancing at the pitch the first question that came to mind was to ask why the teams were warming up on the under 11s practice pitch. I can only guess that it’s actually a 5-a-side pitch with full size goals as every time the goalies cleared, one bounce later the ball was in the hands of the other keeper.
Which brings me to the game itself. Without dwelling on all the reasons why it was always going to be a hard game – steamy weather, soft miniature pitch, lumberjack opponents and collective hangovers from the previous night – one man stood out from the rest. One man chose to bear the standard, fly the flag, define events and shape history in such an all-encompassing and cataclysmically irresistible way that life in the division would never be the same again…
No doubt about it, Austria Salzburg were crap on the day, but as Plainfeld were no better, we were expecting a scrappy 2-1 win or a 3-2, and as the first half wore on, surely enough a 1-0 lead for Salzburg was squandered and the a 2-1 lead similarly discarded. A scrappy game ensued with lots of tackles, loss of possession, ball recovery, badly timed headers and so on; but absolutely nothing you don’t see a thousand times every weekend.
As I was told to be careful about criticising referees after the St Georgen game at the start of the season. So I will let today’s referee, Mr Lassacher, speak for himself. In an interview given on the league’s own website on Thursday, 12 July 2007 – and I quote:
sfv-schiedsrichter.at: Which 3 words best describe you?
Correct, strict and single-minded.
Mmmmhh???
sfv-schiedsrichter.at: Why did you become a referee?
It happened purely by chance!…..
Aaaaah!
sfv-schiedsrichter.at: Which headlines would you like to read about yourself?
None. I don’t like reading about my work as a referee! You only get to read things when things go wrong.
OOooooh!
In the first half Mr Lassacher limited himself to a couple of headmasterly displays of ‘I’m in control here’, which only served to irritate the benches of both teams and the fans, and a yellow apiece for each team, but after the break it was curtains up – spotlight on – action!
Again, actions speak louder than words.
47 minutes: Nico Mayer gets a more-or-less deserved yellow card.
48 minutes: Alex ‘Bambi-eyes’ Trappl sees yellow for something Mr Lassacher rated as unsporting. Whatever it was – we couldn’t see. Alex was obviously upset.
49 minutes: Red for Alex Trappl. None of us had been able to see anything malicious so we assumed the red was a yellow red for criticism.
With Austria down to 10 men and one striker, Xandi Seywald, swapped for a goalkeeper, Stefan Huber; and with Nico Mayer subbed to save him from another yellow, things were looking bleak.
70 minutes: Yellow for Pecaranin for – whatever?? It’s not as if we were a million miles away and we just couldn’t see why the cards were flying.
71 minutes: Yellow for Heli Rottensteiner for some misdemeanour or another. Even though we’d been watching the action like our lives depended on it, we couldn’t make out what the problem had been.
75 minutes: Yellow for Kopleder???? Foul??? Again; maybe, but I didn’t see anything.
75 minutes: Yellow for Plainfeld’s Georg Schwarz for a crime referred to on the sfv website as ‘other’ or ‘sundry’, which is strange as all the known fouls and misdemeanours have names, but I’ve never heard of ‘other’ being a crime.
80 minutes: A straight red for Stefan Federer. Like Alex Trappl, Stefan also drinks the blood of virgins, terrorises sheep in remote areas of Transylvania and decapitates shepherds as they sleep. Yet again, although we had all be watching the action like farmhouse cats watch mice in the fields, none of us could say they had seen anything.
With Austria down to 9 men and more cards in the game than at the world gin-rummy championships, bleak had long turned into farcical and every two minutes play was stopped for this or that, and the only people laughing were the Plainfeld players. We couldn’t see the joke.
How do you mark for corners with just nine men? A bad game had long since disintegrated into an up-an-under free-for-all. With the nerves of the players and fans already in tatters it was almost inevitable that there would have to be a grand finale.
90 minutes: Heli Rottensteiner is red carded for unsporting behaviour. Now even the most mild-mannered Austria fans were going bonkers and the usual hail of plastic beer glasses and fireworks gave the referee another opportunity to stop play for a few seconds.
We were all convinced the ref would blow for time, but no, play was allowed to continue and as one last desperate attack was mounted on the Plainfeld goal a cross sailed into the area and….
…onto the head…
of….
IVAN PECARANIN!!!!!! GOAL 3-2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He who laughs last – laughs longest!!
Full time.
And finally, a last quote from Mr Lassacher’s interview two years ago:
Lassacher: I keep a record at home of all the games I referee including sendings-off and line-ups.
SFV: sfv-schiedsrichter.at: You must have a big pile of files now!
Lassacher: Absolutely!
Although there was a punchline at the end of this joke, it was still a very bad joke!
Roger Lord
USV Plainfeld – SV Austria Salzburg 2:3 (2:2)
Austria Salzburg played with:
A. Trappl; Milic, Pecaranin, Würnstl, Csenki; Rottensteiner, Mayer (57. Federer), Neubauer, Seywald (50. Huber); Kopleder, Schleindl (46. O. Trappl)
Goals:
0:1 Kopleder (19.) (Assist: Neubauer)
1:1 Schmitzberger (33.)
1:2 Neubauer (38.) (Assist: Rottensteiner)
2:2 Abay (45.)
2:3 Pecaranin (92.) (Assist: Rottensteiner)
Shots: Plainfeld 4 / Austria 14
Shots on target: Plainfeld 4 / Austria 10
Corners: Plainfeld 2 / Austria 11
Fouls: Plainfeld 22 / Austria 26
Offsides: Plainfeld 6 / Austria 1
Yellow Cards:
Plainfeld: 2 (Schmitzberger, 45. +5/foul; Schwarz, 75./others)
Austria: 4 (Neubauer, 45. +3/criticism; Mayer, 47./foul; Pecaranin, 70./foul; Kopleder, 86./foul)
Yellow/Red:
Plainfeld: 0
Austria: 2 (A. Trappl, 49./unsporting behaviour; Rottensteiner, 93./unsporting behaviour)
Red Cards:
Plainfeld: 0
Austria: 1 (Federer, 80./assault)
Plainfeld, 600 spectators
Ref: Josef Lassacher; Assistants: Johann Franz, Zahid Omerovic
