Despite a very courageous game from the Poles, Austria’s greater quality made the difference.
At the start of the tournament, Austria and Poland seemed like the two sacrificial victims of Group D, crushed as they must have been by the excessive power of the Netherlands and France. Instead, both produced two good quality debut games, albeit with completely different approaches. This didn’t stop Poland-Austria from becoming a difficult match for the crowd to digest but if nothing else it produced an interesting tactical clash from the start. On the one hand there was in fact a team designed to be very proactive, intense in pressure and good at moving the ball, on the other hand a team that was more cumbersome with the ball but also very willing to accept difficult matches.
And from the very first moments of the first half, Poland-Austria took exactly the turn one could have expected: the Austrian players plant their feet in the attacking midfield, finding a lot of space to move the ball, given that Probierz’s very Italian 5-3-2 does not bring much pressure, crushing almost the entire team in the penalty area. Sabitzerby far the brightest on the pitch for the entire first half, starts from the left but in fact often finds himself moving horizontally, creating superiority where needed and producing, alone, 4 of his team’s 6 shots. Trauner’s 1-0 goal, left free to strike twice in the area, seems like a manifesto of the match, with Poland forced to play more often inside their own area than outside, also thanks to the pressure from Austria, against which the Polish players had no tools to respond, trying no more than two-three passes before looking for a long ball to the tips, easily preyed upon by Lienhart and Trauner. Even without possession, the will of the Poles seems to overcome lucidity. In the first pressure Buksa and Piatek run a lot but without a particular goal and so do the midfielders behind them, with Zielinski in the lead, who often miss, leaving the opponents the possibility of comfortably taking the attacking midfield with little effort. To see something better we have to wait for the twentieth, when Poland finds the first opportunities – poorly managed – with Zalewski and Zielinski. Yet, the Poles, despite struggling to carry the ball in three-quarters, the few times they manage to do so seem capable of creating something. In addition to the first two shots, Probierz’s team manipulated Austria’s defensive block reasonably well thanks to the movements of Zalewski and Frankowski and the accompaniment of Slisz. This quality manifests itself definitively on the equalizer, in which, following the development of a corner, Zalewski plays the ball again and, after a series of bizarre touches in the area, Piatek pushes towards goal.
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After the equalizer Austria did not react particularly well, despite maintaining control of the game, Rangnick’s players appear much more chaotic and hasty with the ball, allowing Poland to defend more aggressively, breaking the encirclement that had marked the first half of the first half. The result is that the game gets very dirty, with the teams ending up bouncing between the two areas without being able to spin the ball too much or too well. The only flashes of quality are brought by the two center forwards: first Lewandowskiwho came on at game time for Piatek and immediately showed a decidedly more brilliant work with the ball than the former Genoa player, and then Arnautovicwho with a wonderful veil gets the goal of 2-1 Baumgartner, better than Austria in the match against France but decidedly evanescent today. The second Austrian lead ends up completely extinguishing Poland’s ambitions, who spend the last 25 minutes watching the Austrians control the ball and even come close to the third goal, which then arrives on a penalty obtained in transition by Sabitzer and converted by Arnautovic, and also on the fourth, with a shot of Laimer which goes out by a few centimeters at the end, capping off a match that wasn’t very entertaining but which in the end confirmed the strengths and weaknesses of the two teams.
We couldn’t expect great things from Poland: having played for over 150 minutes without Lewandowski was a serious attack on the only real way in which Probierz’s team could pose a threat to its opponents. Nonetheless, the Polish players must be recognized for their considerable courage, which produced two matches that were not pleasant to look at but in which they were able to create various difficulties for their opponents. Inevitably, with Lewandowski reduced to a sad half-hour cameo, Poland ended up relying heavily on Zielinski and Zalewski, both of whom were not very brilliant in decision making but still able to bring some quality. In particular, a note of merit goes to the Roma player: although still imprecise in the last metres, Zalewski, both against the Netherlands and against Austria, was the best of his team, giving vital signs that seemed to have completely disappeared after two tragic years in Rome.
Austria, on the other hand, held the field well for half an hour, then ended up sitting back a bit on their technical superiority, showing a lot of condescension during the 1-1 draw and remaining quite imprecise even with the ball for almost the entire second half. In the end, what made the difference in Poland-Austria, as expected, was the greater quality of Rangnick’s team. If Sabitzer was the brightest in the first half, in the second the former Bayern man also dropped his level and in the end the scene took it Arnautovic who, after a first half in which he ended up in a Greco-Roman wrestling match with Dawidowicz, found, with the veil on Baumgartner’s goal, a play that was both aesthetically beautiful and fundamental for the result, ending up hiding a declining performance, started well and then got worse as the minutes went by. The critical issues of this team are concentrated precisely on this last aspect. Poland put in a lot of will but in reality little else to justify a similar match; also for this reason Austria will have to prove more lively and continuous already against the Netherlands, where they will need something more than a good half hour to avoid elimination.
2024-06-21 18:32:41
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