Here’s a phrase you might not have heard since 1934. Hey, Austria look good. This is a new thing in many ways. What do we think of, traditionally, when it comes to Austria and international football? Indeterminate makeweights. The pre-war Wunderteam. A prosperous strudel repository. The Surrey of greater Germania. The 1990s pomp-rock target-man stylings of Toni Polster.
And now? Modernity. Energy. Grooved patterns. Austria finished top of a group that includes the teams ranked second and seventh in the world. They have been coherent, joined-up, even vibrant in a mannered kind of way, the only team in the final round of group games to score three goals, en route to a first victory against the Netherlands in 34 years.
Knockout football is something else. Talk of an easy run to the semi-finals seems optimistic, as is, for obvious reasons, the idea they may meet England there. Austria’s tournament may well come to an end against Turkey in Leipzig on Tuesday, although Ralf Rangnick’s team did beat their last-16 opponents 6-1 at the Ernst Happel in March.
Austria’s vigour in Germany feels novel and also significant. Specifically, it’s telling you things – and we are always hungry for these things – about England.
This is most obviously a tonal thing. Austria have been the most club football-adjacent team at these Euros. Other nations have seemed to be driven by patriotism, flag stuff, ancestral grudges. Austria have been playing with the fluency of a club team, their energy channelled into well-worn patterns and learned movements.
This is by design. In the game against the Netherlands, Austria fielded seven players who have spent time in the Red Bull franchise. Rangnick is the architect of that Red Bull style, installed early on as a kind of corporate tactics consultant. Those teams still play to his template.
It shows Austria play in planned swarms. High pressing, runners from midfield. Everyone knows their role. It is a method understood by the players who can riff on it or fall back into the structure in difficult moments.
While Rangnick has been described as working wonders in his time, he has been mining something that is already there. This is not “getting a tune out of the boy Baumgartner”, as though he is essentially a snake charmer or a confidence trickster. The hard work for this was done in the previous two decades, the fruits of having a coherent system and players raised to understand it. Create a culture. Express that culture.
And by now the rustling in the treeline is getting louder. Culture, coherence, method. It is at moments like these that England come crunching down the drive, rattling at the door handle, muttering through the walls. Most obviously because Austria are what England are not and have never been.