Come with me if you want to live: Football ladies and gentlemen

Hellooo everybody. Life is going good here, I hope you are all doing fine. Last Sunday we continued our Graz sports tour started by the ice hockey game a few weeks ago. We went to see some football and the hometown team Sturm Graz play. The Austrian football league was on a winter break for a good while and the season continued at the end of last month, but this was the first home game we could attend. The game was played at the UPC Arena here in Graz, formerly named Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadion.

The game was against one of the two major teams from Vienna, Austria Vienna. The game was the last game of the “regular” regular season. The league system is little confusing here, but basically the 12 teams in the league play against each other twice and after that the top 6 play their own “champion’s group” to determine the champion and the bottom 6 play a mini league to determine who gets relegated from the league. Before the day’s game Sturm Graz was on that precious sixth spot two points ahead of the seventh team, so they had everything to play for to make it into the champions group.

The weather was nice and springy, just perfect for football. We got our seats in the “view obstructed” cheap seats in the main stands. They were cheaper because the covers for the team benches covered a bit of the view, but it was no problem for us and didn’t affect our enjoyment at all. We just got drinks and pretzels and enjoyed the show.

Happy boe

Familiar Puntigamer are a major sponsor

Austrian league is pretty good quality, definitely higher than Finnish. The clear number one in the league is Salzburg and they made it to the knockout stages in the European Europa league where they even managed to beat the Italian Napoli at home. The teams were not at that high level, but the game was good, and Graz pressed very well and got a few chances early on. Their striker just seemed clumsy and could not score from the early chances. Vienna clearly tried to be patient and weather the early pressure from Graz, but at around 25 minutes their defender got sent off with a red card for clumsily judo choppin a Graz player on the chest in a running race. After that Vienna just sat back and tried to defend. Graz was not great with their attacking and had something like 12 corners from which most went to the goalkeeper or into the first defender. Luckily, they kept their cool and around the 70^th it payed off when they scored the only goal of the match. It was a nice ball from a defender behind the enemy defence and a Graz player was fast enough to it and played it to the middle where the clumsy striker got a good enough shot off to pass the goalie. After that Graz managed to hold the ball basically to the end. The end team celebrations were fun as Graz managed to jump to third in the league before the champions group.