Interesting article.

[AMOROSO!]

Look what I found: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/feature?id=270868&cc=5739

Written by Soccernet's German football expert.

To an outsider, it looks quite interesting. What's your take on it?

[Kostas]

Amo,mexri to austriako podosfairo eftase h xarh sou?

To PM mou...apanthse to to gamhmeno,den mporw den mporw na perimenw

[tgv325]

Not bad, but I know too few of the game in that time.

[Alexx]

As you would suspect, some sensationalising and some plain errors are in the article. First of all on the political side. Like mixing up Austro Fascism and german Nazi party. The Nazi party was put illegal by Austrofascism years before 1938, etc ), but whatever.

One of the best stories as far as football goes is missed by the article. The 2-0 win didn't just happen as such. It was a game where Austria was supposed to lose. So they outplayed them and deliberately missed to score in demonstration style a row of times....just to win anyway in the end. That game was a far bigger demonstration than presented in the article.

[Fred Elliot]

Sounds a bit like FC Start's match in the Ukraine.

Was Sindelar playing in the 2-0 win? What a player he was, according to the books. I should have liked to have seen him play.

[MxPx]

Sindelar did not only play in the 2-0, but he also scored the first goal and (deliberately, so they say) missed several chances before that.
After that game, he got invitations to the german Reichsteam. Sources say that Sindelar "didn't even ignore them".

Definitely one of the most interesting stories in the history of Austrian football.

[Alexx]

He played football like no one else,
He was brimful of wit and imagination.

He played with ease, a light touch and humor
He always played, never fought.

Friedrich Torberg,
(A Ballad on the Death of a Football Player)



He had this quintessentially elegant, disembodied style which brought him the sobriquet "der Papierene" (Paper Man). Yet he was by no means like a sheet of paper in the wind: he did not shun duels and was quite capable of winning a tussle for the ball.
His famous "storming" forward breaks left whole teams reeling behind.

In 1927, the Mitropa Cup-the predecessor of the European Champions' Cup-was founded in Venice aftter a proposal of the Austrian Hugo Meisl. Clubs from Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary took part in the tournament. Matthias Sindelar led his team, "FK Austria," to two victories in the Mitropa Cup, the second won against "Sparta Prague" in 1936.

There would have been no "Wonder Team" without the great coach Hugo Meisl. The sensational series of victories of the Austrian national team began in May 1931 with a 5-0 win against Scotland in Vienna. By April 1933, 16 games had been played, with the Austrians registering 12 victories, 2 ties and 2 defeats with a total score of 63 to 20 goals. Sindelar notched up 27 goals in this successful series. One of the team's two defeats was in London in December 1932 when they lost 3-4 against England. But despite their discomfiture, the way the Austrians played became legendary. John Langenus, the Belgian referee of the game, commented: "Zischek scored twice, but Sindelar's one goal was a masterpiece, which no one ever again accomplished against such opponents as the English. Not before him, not after him. Sindelar started out from the halfway line and in his inimitably elegant style simply bypassed anyone who opposed him, finally doubled back and put the ball in the net."

British football clubs offered FK Austria Wien huge sums for what was then Europe's most fascinating forward. But the Paper Man had become a national asset, not for sale, priceless, as later Pele‚ was to be to Brazil. To see him play, people not only thronged Vienna's "Hohe Warte" or "Stadion" soccer fields but even travelled abroad, like the writers Friedrich Torberg and Hans Weigel. Or actor Attila Hörbiger, one of the stars of the Vienna stage, who in his ripe old age still enthused about Sindelar's fabulous style.

Old photographs conjure up the wizardry of this great artist of soccer. In one picture, he has just headed the ball. With his arms wide apart, his legs above the ground, he looks after the high-flying ball exhausted, open-mouthed, with tousled blond hair, as if moonstruck, while some players from the other side dumbfoundedly await disaster.

In March 1932, Austria defeated Italy 2-1 in Vienna-thanks to two memorable Sindelar goals. One was scored through a corner kick: left wing Adolf Vogi curled the ball to Fritz Gschweidl, who headed it over an Italian defender to Sindelar, and the Paper Man in his turn headed the ball over another defender, rushed after it and headed it past the goalkeeper into the corner of the Italian goal. People still talk about this piece of wizardry which only the Wonder Team's strikers and the Paper Man were able to accomplish.

Only a few of the Wonder Team's games: 6-0 against Germany (Berlin, May 1931), 5-0 against Germany (Vienna, September 1931), 8-1 against Switzerland (Bale, November 1931), 8-2 against Hungary (Vienna, April 4 1932), 4-3 against Sweden (Stockholm, July 1932), 6-1 against Belgium (Brussels, December 1932) and 4-0 against France (Paris, February 1933). These games were sheer ecstasy. What Sindelar offered the fans at Austria's 8-2 victory over Hungary was the holy madness of football, true magic. Not only did he score a hatrick but he also assisted in all the other Austrian goals in the game (4 scored by Schall, 1 by Gschweidl).



The third World Cup was scheduled for 1938 in Paris. Austria had qualified, but then the country was occupied by Germany. Following the annexation by Nazi Germany (in March 1938), quite a number of clubs, such as the Jewish "Hakoah" or the Czech "Slovan", were closed down. Vienna's "Austria" was renamed "Ostmark" on 12 April 1938, but the fans wouldn't stand for it and the club reverted to its old name on 14 July. "Austria's" players were told to shun Jewish club officials. But when Sindelar met the club's former chairman, Dr. Michl Schwarz, he called out to him in public and demonstratively in his Viennese dialect: "That new club führer has forbidden us to say hello to you, but I'm always gonna say hello to you, sir!" Schwarz later went to Paris into exile. Some Austrian top players were earmarked to play in a future "Greater German" team. The Nazis hoped that the German side would win when "Ostmark", the ex-Austrian team, played "Germany" on 3 April 1938, a match scheduled to celebrate the "Anschluß." Sindelar, as the Austrian team's captain, insisted that they should one last time wear their red, white and red national colors. And 60,000 spectators saw them win 2-0. One of the two goals was scored by the Paper Man, as brilliant as ever despite his advanced age of 35.

When he was more or less conscripted into the "Greater German" team for the 1938 Paris World Cup tournament, Sindelar desperately tried to get out of it by pleading his age and injuries. Sepp Herberger, then the "Reich's coach" (and to become West Germany's postwar national team manager), who had watched Sindelar more than once and thought him brilliant, later reminisced: "He acted like the fine chap I knew he was and as which he was so much appreciated and even revered in soccer circles. He asked me politely to leave him out of it (...) When I insisted again and again, I got the impression that there were also other reasons for him to refuse. I almost had the impression that it was dismay and hostility at the political developments which weighed on him and were the reason for his refusal. Finally I gave up. I thought I understood him. He looked as if a heavy burden had been taken off his shoulders when I told him."

It was probably at that time that Sindelar began to go through a profound psychological crisis. Not only was Austria falling apart but so was his club, another FK Austria Wien. Nausch, the team's captain, emigrated to Switzerland with his Jewish wife, midfielder Jerusalem went to France. As Torberg wrote in his poem:

For a while he stood looking on,
before he left to go home.
In soccer, as in life,
the Vienna School was finished.

The Vienna School in music meant Haydn, Mozart and the other great composers. In soccer it meant Sindelar, Gschweidl and their teammates. It meant the balance between construction and feeling. The art of counterpoint. The one-two pass. The utter precision of the performers. The unexpected chord. The element of surprise. A distinct sense of humor.

Sindelar's personal modesty was legendary. He lived in a ground floor apartment at Quellenstrasse 75 with his mother, who ran a small laundry in the same house. Although women worshipped him, he does not seem to have had a permanent relationship with any of them. In 1937, he bought a coffee house.

The last time Sindelar played was in Berlin on 26 December 1938 in a game between his beloved Austria Wien and Hertha BSC. He scored a goal, too. He died on 23 January 1939, a few days before his 36th birthday. His death was so mysterious that it contributed to the Sindelar myth. Next to him on the bed was an unconscious woman, who never came out of her coma: Camilia Castagnola, an Italian, whom he had met only a few days before. "Carbon monoxide poisoning" was the finding of the post mortem. The "accident" (perhaps caused by a defective flue) was never really cleared up. Police reports on the Sindelar case have disappeared, they are said to have been lost at the end of the war. But this is how Friedrich Torberg ends his ballad "On the Death of a Soccer Player:"

He was always good at combined moves,
and so he thought of one for days on end.

His sense of strategy gave him a feeling
that the gastap was his opportunity.

The gate through which he then passed
loomed before him mute and very dark.

He was a boy from Favoriten,
his name was Matthias Sindelar.

[Viola]

Thanks, Al.