SKV safely in the port, SKU is playing poker at the green table

Now that the upper midfield position has been consolidated, Vorwärts President Markus Knasmüller is no longer worried about the Red-Whites remaining in the Central Regional League. Previously, the live ticker on his cell phone had brought him “close to a heart attack” during the key game on Friday evening in All Saints, says the club boss. After three goals from Ziric (42nd), Goldnagl (52nd) and Collazo (59th), the Steyrers were 3-1 ahead shortly before the end, so the bag was almost closed. But in the 89th minute, the Mürztal team scored from the penalty spot and even equalized just a minute later. Again just a meager point, and Markus Eitl’s team won’t sail to the safe haven of the third division due to a lack of a decisive stroke? No, the coach showed a good hand: Paul Staudinger, who came off the bench, scored the golden goal in what was probably the last action of the game for a 4-3 away win. Three points that ensure that the specter of relegation this season has finally been put to rest at the Vorwärts Stadium. Knasmüller can be happy: The consolidation after relegation from the Second Bundesliga has been successful on all fronts. “We lost some games in the final minutes, the team still had to mature,” he says. After staying in the league, which is, according to human standards, a certain level of relegation, one could start thinking about promotion to the Bundesliga again, but as a medium-term project: “I don’t want to shout anything out yet,” says Knasmüller, “but what we said in the fall applies anyway that we would cancel a promotion because it would come too soon.”

The SKU Amstetten is traveling in the opposite direction and has taken the elevator to the basement. Coach Patrick Enengl clapped and cheered on Niels Hahn after his equalizer to make it 1-1 against FAC, the pure joy of football: The standings in the table have long since become a waste for the already relegated team, perhaps that’s why he defeated Floridsdorfer 3-2. Club board member Bernhard Reikersdorfer still has a remaining hope that the arbitration court will reject the appeals of the Bundesliga clubs Dornbirn and Leoben as well as the champions of the Regionalliga-West Austria Salzburg and confirm their license revocations from the Bundesliga. “We can only wait now,” says Reikersdorfer. The club’s “Plan A” is to focus on playing in the Regionalliga East, in which the local rivals used to play together in Lower Austria. State league, SCU Ardagger, deep in the relegation battle. The basic structure of a team already exists, “if we get another chance in the Second Bundesliga, we’ll grab it,” says Reikersdorfer.

The judgments about being and not being in the Bundesliga are sometimes as fateful as a voyage on the high seas, say many critics. SV Stripfing, formally an team from a cadastral population of 350 in the rural community of Weikendorf in the Gänserndorf district, had its license for the Second Bundesliga extended in March. The club near the state border with Slovakia has moved its headquarters to Deutsch-Wagram, from where it is exactly 19.7 kilometers as the crow flies to the Generali-Arena of Vienna Austria in Favoriten, where SV Stripfing will also be playing in the stadium in the future. According to the regulations, a Bundesliga team’s venue must be within 20 kilometers of the club’s headquarters.