Glory in Graz: SK Sturm's first Bundesliga title
Ivica Osim and Sturm Graz’s magnificent maiden championship
Greetings, High Protein Beef Paste subscriber.
The main piece in this week’s newsletter is one I wrote a long time ago and published elsewhere. I assume you didn’t read it then.
I’m working on something that’s got nothing to do with football and I’ve dipped into my article archives to free up a bit of headspace this week and maybe next week too.
It’s about SK Sturm Graz winning the Austrian Bundesliga in 1997/98. Ivica Osim has passed away since I wrote it. I consider this second publishing a belated tribute.
It’s quite a long article so let’s get straight to it. Enjoy.
Glory in Graz: SK Sturm's first Bundesliga title
By the time Ivica Vastic coolly dragged the ball away from a desperate challenge in the last minute and passed it into the bottom corner past helpless goalkeeper Franz Almer, the first Graz derby of the 1997/98 season had long since been won.
It was July, opening day, and SK Sturm Graz put rivals Grazer AK 1902 firmly in their place with a 4-0 win on GAK’s own turf. Vastic, black hair bobbing all the while, was majestic.
The late flourish was his second of the match. The first was the essence of artistry, a succession of elegant rolls and drag-backs leaving opponents on the grass before the simplest of wall passes teed up a flawless finish.
After their opening ceremony, parachutist and all, it wasn’t the derby GAK had anticipated.
Their city rivals would only be off the top of the Bundesliga table once all season. Even that was brief; Ivica Osim’s side made short work of Sturm’s first national championship. Roman Mählich flicked the first goal of the season beyond Almer with the outside of his boot within the first couple of minutes. Vastic was the architect of Gilbert Prilasnig’s tap-in to make it 2-0.
Sturm played another eleven matches without defeat and nineteen more immediately after that. In all they lost only three times in the league in 1997/98, twice in the vinegar strokes of the season with the title already won.
Sturm weren’t natural candidates for dominance, no matter its brevity. In the first half of the last century they won the regional championship in Styria eleven times but it wasn’t until the 1980s that they finished even second in the Bundesliga, which was inaugurated in 1974. A proposed merger of the Graz clubs was shouted down the same year.
In 1983/84 they reached the last eight of the UEFA Cup under the stewardship of Gernot Fraydl, a former national team goalkeeper who started his playing career with GAK and returned there as head coach after his time with Sturm ended. They were knocked out by Nottingham Forest thanks to Colin Walsh’s extra time penalty in Graz.
Vienna was now the nation’s football powerhouse. The Bundesliga title was the domain of SK Rapid Wien and FK Austria Wien throughout the 1980s; the likes of Sturm Graz had much work to do if they were to topple the giants of the capital.
By the early 1990s they were in a perilous financial state and in need of a saviour.
Hannes Kartnig, an advertising entrepreneur and president of soon-bankrupt ice hockey club EC Graz, became Sturm’s president too. He appointed Heinz Schilcher as his manager and the club embarked upon a policy of prioritising young players in the first team. Kartnig was Sturm’s president throughout and beyond their short-lived time at the top but his is an unfortunate shadow over their success.
In 2006 he filed for bankruptcy on behalf of the club and resigned as president a month later, fulfilling the demands of the investors who arrived in his wake. Later, his dealings at the club came under scrutiny when he was tried for fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy and tax evasion.
Secret payments to Sturm players formed part of the trial and Kartnig was sentenced to five years behind bars and a seven-figure fine in 2012. Year after year of legal warfare would follow.
In 1994, long before his offences were revealed, Kartnig appointed Osim as Sturm’s head coach. The Sarajevo-born former Yugoslavia coach had most recently been in charge at Panathinaikos.
In his first few years Osim and Sturm developed an impressive team broadly in line with the club’s new youthful ethos. In 1994/95 they missed out on a first Bundesliga title by a whisker but “Ivan the Professor” was considered a natural and charismatic leader with that in-built knack for football management.
He was blunt with the media and, apparently, prone to bouts of abrasiveness in general. Osim earned the respect of his players by being a masterful manager of men, his skillful knitting together of diverse dressing room influences regarded as one of his greatest attributes.
Osim was Yugoslavia’s manager at their last FIFA World Cup in 1990 and was vocal over the years about his experience in Italy, where he was given the unenviable task of navigating his squad through political divisions that were well on the way to irreparability.
One of his children, Amar, is a respected manager and has had three spells with Željezničar, where Ivica started his managerial career after two spells as a player. Amar is their most successful manager to date.
In Japan, where he saw out his managerial career, Ivica left JEF United Chiba in 2006 to become the national team manager. He was replaced by his son, who was promoted from assistant manager.
The following year Osim Senior suffered a stroke while watching a friendly international between Austria and England. When he woke from his coma his first instinct was to ask his wife, Asima, what the score was. He returned to football but never on the front line.
Back in Graz he’d stalked the touchline in Jeremy Clarkson’s jeans and Gérard Depardieu’s hair, overseeing an attractive passing team who were patient in possession but always in search of the right moment to clip the ball behind the full backs or up to Mario Haas, the team’s attacking beacon and a firm favourite of his coach.
Haas was their top goalscorer and the point of a celebrated triangle completed by Vastic and midfielder Hannes Reinmayr. Mählich was a box-to-box player with a fabulous engine. He performed a world of defensive work and still found the energy to make crucial runs beyond Haas. He was one of those players who were dwarfed by their own shorts in the 1990s but his modest stature didn’t stop him dishing out bruised ankles on the regular.
West Germany international Franco Foda, later a rather unpopular head coach of the Austrian national team having cut his teeth in the dugout at Sturm, was a rock in defence alongside Gunther Neukirchner, Darko Milanic and Ranko Popovic.
Osim also had at his disposal the distinctive Prilasnig, who had plenty of imagination on the ball but whose feet sometimes seemed to betray him, and Mario Posch, who wore an earring on the pitch and carried himself confidently but was as likely to lose a fifty-fifty as win one against decent opposition.
Between them they formed an alleyway no forward would want to walk after dark.
This unlikely cohort made a blistering start to the 1997/98 Bundesliga season. They scored four goals in each of their first three matches, following their win at GAK with a 4-1 away victory over FC Tirol Innsbruck.
Vastic scored his third and fourth goals of the season that July evening, a fine demonstration of captaincy by example. He was born in the Croatian city of Split and started at local club RNK before moving to Austria to play for First Vienna.
Like Osim he would later move to Japan but he played for a number of clubs in Austria before and after his time in the Far East, taking citizenship and winning 50 international caps.
He was a surprise inclusion in the national squad for UEFA EURO 2008 and became the first Austrian player to score in both the World Cup finals and the European Championships, ten years apart. He was the jewel in Osim’s Sturm team and took full advantage of his tactical freedom. He had a devilish creative mind, beautiful balance and the skill required to spin his mental brilliance into tangible reality.
The sight of their handsome captain, shirt collar up, turning defenders inside out for the hell of it, is a memory worth cherishing for Sturm supporters. Sturm’s third four-goal return came against LASK and they were on their way to a twelve-game unbeaten run. That record sequence included a pair of back to back wins over Rapid Wien, first away and then at home, at the end of August.
They also beat GAK once more before finally losing to LASK on September 23rd. Despite the termination of their unbeaten run, Sturm were back with a 6-0 win over SC Austria Lustenau at Arnold Schwarzenegger-Stadion. Vastic scored his ninth and tenth goals of the season, Reinmayr his second and third.
The Viennese midfielder had been something of a journeyman before joining Sturm, where he spent six successful years sparking off his love/hate relationship with Osim, who admired his technical ability.
The player described himself as a sloppy genius; he was probably neither but his claim carried some weight nonetheless. Reinmayr was a dribbler by instinct and an incisive passer of the ball whose first thought tended to be an attacking one. He occasionally revealed a shortness of fuse in the company of a referee, but that hardly distinguished him from his fellow professionals.
By the 1997/98 season Reinmayr was an established starter in Osim’s Sturm team and was a major contributor to the club’s first national title. The 6-0 win against Lustenau was the first of another nineteen consecutive matches without loss as Sturm tore through the season like a dog with a bog roll tube.
The sixth, in November, was a 5-1 away win over the same opposition. That Tuesday night belonged to Haas, who scored a hat-trick on his way to a table-topping tally of seventeen goals.
Haas started and ended his playing career with Sturm. In between, he had spells with Osim’s former club, Strasbourg, and under him once more at JEF United. His time in Japan was hit and miss but in Graz he excelled. Where Vastic was elegant and effortlessly mobile, Haas was a physical focal point.
Sturm’s attacking play was often improvisational, whether it was channelled through Vastic’s twinkling feet, Prilasnig’s pioneering spirit from full back or Mählich’s midfield dynamism. Haas was their constant.
They returned from the 1997/98 winter break to rack up win after win after win. By the spring they were untouchable and another win over Rapid (Reinmayr scored twice, Vastic once) underlined their superiority. Another defeat of GAK, by March their nearest rivals in more ways than one, was the froth on the coffee.
The first half of 1998 was an elongated victory lap for a team who were truly unstoppable. They lost just once in their first 32 league games and were champions in all but name long before their coronation in April.
Haas and Reinmayr were on the scoresheet in the 5-0 slapdown of Austria Vienna that sealed Sturm Graz’s first championship. There were seven games and more than a month remaining. They lost twice, against LASK and Rapid, and three of the five occasions on which Sturm failed to score occurred in the last four matches.
Their winning total of 81 points was a Bundesliga record. Rapid were 19 points behind in second. The champions scored 80 times and conceded only nine goals in eighteen home fixtures.
The beginning, middle and end of their story is that nobody laid a glove on them.
When faced with foreign opposition in the Cup Winners’ Cup, Sturm’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses were exposed – they weren’t able to impose themselves in adversity and they weren’t clinical enough when it counted – and their European campaign was extinguished by AEK Athens.
The ÖFB-Cup took them within 90 minutes of an historic double. They didn’t concede a single goal in their first four rounds but SV Ried beat Sidorczuk three times in the final.
Like all great champions Sturm did it all again the following year. Osim guided them to their second Bundesliga title but they had to settle for a three-point gap. Claiming a domestic treble gave them plenty to celebrate regardless.
They played in the UEFA Champions League as Austrian champions in 1998/99 and 1999/2000. In 2000/01, as runners-up, Sturm topped Monaco, Galatasaray and Rangers to win their Champions League group. Continental success was offset by a humbling return to earth domestically. The Osim era was winding its way back to the mean.
Before long the Austrian game was gripped by Red Bull Salzburg’s dynastic dominance, but not before Sturm won the title for a third time in 2010/11. Their coach was Franco Foda, who was in the second of three periods in charge at the club.
36-year-old Mario Haas was in his team. The striker was a Sturm player for the third time as he approached the end of a twenty-year career. He had a hand in every league title Sturm Graz have ever won.
The present and future of Austrian football is fuelled by taurine. In 1997/98 Sturm Graz soared to the championship not on sugary wings but strapped to a rocket. For that one season they left an entire league for dust as they rattled in four-score goals on the way to a title that had, it turned out, been theirs since a thumping derby win in the first game.
That springboard gave them more than civic bragging rights. It sent a message to Vienna for which it had no response but submission. Finally, Sturm had escaped the shadow of the capital and they did it in explosive style. It had been a long wait.
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