Forward Steyr: 1-0 home win behind the Iron Curtain

“We can’t expect to dictate and play away every opponent in the regional league,” says forward coach Markus Eitl. That doesn’t mean, however, that his team now always practices the masonry trade. The massive defensive work against Gleisdorf came unintentionally, at least it wasn’t in the match plan, it just happened on the pitch.

After a counter-attack by the red-whites in the 3rd minute, Ech Cheikh reacted to the confusion in the penalty area of ​​the guests from Styria in a flash and netted the 1-0 lead early in the match. “A double-edged sword,” said Eitl after the final whistle about the early lead. What the 917 spectators in the south and east stands and in the seating tiers saw, who filled the stadium with their antiphons like in the best days.

After the restart at the center circle, the red and white eleven switched to administrative work, hard-working, fighting for every ball and doing it very efficiently. After the close 1-0 defeat in Wallern last week, the team really wanted the three points and didn’t want to give them up. Therefore, Eitl’s eleven, already posted by the coach as a five-man chain in front of the penalty area to protect themselves, added a few bricks to the wall of their own accord. The result: Forward couldn’t get anything countable up front, Eminazari only missed Steyr’s second real chance to score in the whole game in the 88th minute.

From the point of view of the goal-seeing home crowd, the Red and Whites’ performance on Friday night may not have been the cream of the crop. However, the video analysis by the coaching staff also revealed a lot of positive things that could also be seen with the naked eye in the stadium. The team, which was reassembled after being relegated from the second division and has yet to find itself, has a really good defence, a bastion downright. “We only conceded one goal in three games”, Eitl sees a good start to the league with the current fifth place in the table. His team only allowed one real chance to equalize against Gleisdorf, which goalkeeper Valerian Hüttner thwarted with a brilliant save.

In the build-up of play, the team repeatedly encountered inaccurate passes, mostly even at close range. Against Gleisdorf, however, forwards also saw long diagonal passes to shift the game – the supreme discipline for every kicker – that landed right on the foot. “We have a few tools in our suitcase for attractive attacking football,” says Eitl. In any case, on Friday the team gave the spectators the feeling that this will definitely happen in the future.