Observations & Opinions / Week Four
From Harold Abrahams – Special Correspondent for TSS
Villach, Austria
Memories from the Tyrol … Lindwyrm Milestone … Wheat League Jumble
Your Special Correspondent kept a date three years in the making this week as I journeyed to Villach, Austria via train, made my way from the station to the Hauptplatz – the main square of this adorable Tyrolean village of some 60,000 souls – and found, waiting at her usual table at the Tirolerhut Pub, 84-year old Villach super-fan Clara Muhr. We met in 2020 at 303rd Villach-Klagenfurt match, played in a foot of snow on December 8 before 11,000 supporters, a match the Huts won 12-11 after a late donn was ruled over by a referee who, Villach fans admit, couldn’t possibly have seen through the driving snowfall. This admission comes with a mix of chagrin (Villach is birthplace of the ‘Fair Play!’ cry that governs this League and its unimpeachable self-policing) and glee (it did mean a Lindwyrm loss, after all).
That afternoon in 2020, Tirolerhut Captain Frank Hofferan, a gentleman who’d have stood squarely with the finest men of the RAF or any other assemblage of brave and good men, marched me through a crowd of proud fellow residents of The County (when Frank Hofferan seizes your upper arm and marches you, you know you are going where he impels you) and to a fire-side seat reserved for Frau Muhr, proclaiming her to be the Huts’ greatest supporter. We agreed to meet for lunch and to view a Villach home match sometime soon: I wanted to hear a lifetime of stories of one who has seen more than 600 (!) matches of her “beloved boys.”
We ate our schnitzel, split a pretzel, each had a beer (she could have drunk me under the table), then walked a mile to the Meadow to watch Villach face a sharp Chamonix team that sported a 3-0-0 record. Villach had looked, in weeks 1-3, like a mid-table Wheat League squad, which is to say, underwhelming if spirited. Today, led by the redoubtable Hofferan and his pocket-man, the burly Wald Koppensteiner, the Tirolerhuts checked the high-scoring Chamois and won 12-7. Clara Muhr shared stories in her winsome way, recalling the 1970 championship team that she claims is the finest the Tyrol has ever produced (the Klagenfurters who won six titles in a row from 1898-1903 would object most strenuously to that claim) and naming the entire 1963 squad (including the substitutes) that lost the breathless Tyrol Cup Final to Bern by the wild score of 36-34. While she hasn’t seen every match the Tirolerhuts have ever played (she’s 84, not 184!), she is an historian of Wiesespiel without peer.
“The game has,” as she put it, “an enduring integrity that defies the times through which it has lived. Whatever else the players are in life, when they are on the Meadow, being watched by men and women who demand a certain conduct, they are honest and doughty men. Men playing the Meadow Game don’t cheat, they don’t scheme, they don’t feign injury where none has occurred. They behave with dignity and offer their finest effort.”
“When that integrity goes, as it has in most areas in life,” Muhr added with drama, “let the game go, too.”
But it hasn’t, and it won’t. Villach won this day, as they have far more than they have lost since their inception on September 3, 1872 (ahh … how it wounds them that Klagenfurt was formed as a team one day prior), and the delighted supporters cheered their heroes off the trampled snow with their traditional cry, win or lose, of “All’s well in Villach!”
All’s well with Clara Muhr, with Wiesespiel, and with any day spent in this charming town.
Around the Leagues:
Last April, the Hahnenkamms were the far better team as they eliminated Salzburg in the 2-3, 24-14. Not so this weekend as the Edelweiss traveled southwest to Kitzbühel and dominated the current Tyrol Cup holders 23-10. The last Holders to begin a season with 4 consecutive defeats, as the Kamms have done, were the 1981 Grenoble Gantiers (the ‘Empty Gloves’ team that forfeited their final two matches). The Flowers did not need the Trapp Bell to accompany them to Kitzbühel because they have, as always, Paul Lackner. The Field Mouse ran with joy and zest and, by the way, scored 3 skots, one from 45 meters. Can one claim, in mid-December, that the Klammer and Purtscheller Medals are already as good as won? Can one claim as well, in mid-December, that both the Kamms and the 0-4-0 Munich Lederhosen are both out of playoff contention?
In the Alpine League, Klagenfurt earned a routine 19-11 win over an Innsbruck team that played with less energy than one anticipates from a home-standing squad. The win was a record-setting 1500th victory in Wiesespiel for the Lindwyrms, the oldest team in the world to play the Meadow Game. Seasons haven’t always given teams 18 chances to win, as the current 10-team home-and-away structure guarantees, so all who enjoy this fine sport must applaud the generations of farmers, merchants, soldiers, churchmen and teachers who have represented Klagenfurt since that first victory, their 8-6 win (this newspaper is just one source that affirms that outcome, despite the vehement disputes from the Villach faithful) on September 22, 1872 (a fateful day, about which this correspondent has written many times). Allie Wurter led the team and travelling fans, of whom there were a hardly-to-be-believed 4000, in a boisterous rendition of their battle song, “The Ford of Lament” – that went on for 8 minutes. Tears flowed. There was melodrama, yes, but, please, let’s allow that, as there are also 1500 wins.
In the Wheat League, six teams are within 3 points – one win – of the top of the table, as befits this unpredictable band of competitors in a League played with less speed and discipline than you’ll see in even the Alpine League, let alone the Tyrol. From a mix of likely candidates, Bergamo and Eisenerz joined Chamonix at 3-1-0 for a three-way grasp of the lead in the standings. Lugano must claim to have had the toughest luck this week as three times, they lost possession when scoring a game-changing skot seemed far more likely. They run like their namesake Hounds: now, if they can only maintain possession of the ball.