Robert Page picks an attacking lineup for Wales’s win or bust World Cup playoff and his leading man dazzles on centre stageWith 23 minutes gone there was a moment of uproar inside the Cardiff City Stadium as Harry Wilson was blocked off outside the Austria penalty area; uproar that gave way almost immediately as Szymon Marciniak blew his whistle for the free-kick.Suddenly the air was alive with a weird kind of buzz, like the moment in a storm just before the lightning bolt hits and things start to lift: the hairs on your arms, seats flipped up, people in the stands starting to raise their hands above their heads. Gareth Bale paced it out and waited, charging the moment a...
Juventus winger on as a substitute pierces dense fog of attrition with a goal to bring the Azzuri’s Euros back to lifeThere was no sense of inevitability as the ball landed at Federico Chiesa’s feet. No real feeling of grace. An agonising, attritional 95 minutes of football had seen to all that. Like tired boxers in a 13th round, Italy and Austria were simply circling each other, waiting to see whose legs gave way first. The awkward high bounce, forcing Chiesa to control the ball with his head to prevent it from going out of play, simply reinforced the notion of a game in which nothing had worked and nothing would work.And then in a shuffle and a swing of...
Austria’s bothersome bunch of footballers provided a bitty test for England in a friendly which turned into a draining occasionThere was one luminous moment on an otherwise frantic, and frankly quite weird night for England’s footballers at the Riverside Stadium. With 57 minutes gone an odd-job front-line produced a fine surging move to create a first England goal for Bukayo Saka.Up to that point their opponents had been mean, bruising, and, lets face it, quite annoying. Austria’s footballers have one of the great sporting nicknames. Das Team is both accurate and appropriately free of frills. Das Team is a safe, functional thing. Das Team runs and kicks and presses together. Das Team also hasn’t won a game at a major...
In 1934 a revolutionary Austrian side reached the World Cup semi-finals on the back of a storming run. History beckoned. And then turned its backOn the morning of 23 January 1939 Gustav Hartmann burst through the door of a Vienna apartment in search of an old friend. He found him, lying naked alongside his unconscious lover. Matthias Sindelar, Der Papierene, the greatest footballer in Austrian history, shining star of the Wunderteam, the forward fulcrum around whom a ground-breaking new style of play wowed Europe in the early 1930s, was dead. He was 36.The most prosaic explanation is the most likely – carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blocked chimney flue was the cause of death recorded on the police report...
Algeria fans shouted ‘fix’ as West Germany and Austria played out a mutually suitable scoreline in 1982’s ‘Disgrace of Gijón’You have to pity the youth of today. They were born to banter, they think it’s normal behaviour to tell complete strangers on the internet what they have had for their tea. And worst of all, they have never experienced proper World Cup villainy. There was Luis Suárez’s handball in 2010, yes, but that was a fleeting moment from an individual rather than an extended body of work shared between a whole squad. The World Cup – which is about great stories as much as great football – is so much richer when a team leaves the rest of the football...