Meadow-Side / Week Nineteen
Zino Stiles-Johnson – Correspondent for TSS
The first Wiesespiel match I ever saw, when I was 10 years old in June of 2011, was many things. First, it was an accident. My family were vacationing in the impossibly beautiful village of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, and as we hiked through that verdant valley, looking in awe at the waterfalls and the snow-capped Jungfrau, we suddenly walked into the back of a small knot of people assembled to cheer for their boys in a sporting event.
My English mother and American father didn’t know what we were watching, but several ardent Swiss boys were eager to explain. It was Wiesespiel, we learned – the Meadow Game. The home team had welcomed their rivals from nearby Grindelwald, and we tried to make sense of the melee of bodies and runs, kicks and scores. I didn’t grasp it all, but I adored the beauty and simplicity of the game, and our family of five was invited back to a local pub to celebrate the home team’s victory, where we were treated as if we’d rooted for this crew for decades. I remember the score, 22—13, because their captain wrote it in red chalk everywhere as we walked to the inn, and I remember that I ate more rösti than any girl should ever eat, and I was given an “Ibex” tea towel that I treasure to this day. Did that day shape my life? You bet it did.
Those boys spoke with reverence of the Big Swiss Teams: the local heroes down in Interlaken (remember, the Yodelers had won the Tyrol Cup in 2009, two years before this reminiscence is set), and the giants of Swiss Wiesespiel: Matterhorn, Bern, and Zurich and their combined 31 (at that time) titles.
I digress to make this point: every teenaged dreamer, every Barrel League bruiser, every Farm League striver … everyone who ever picks up the Pumpkin wants to play in the Tyrol League. Every team – the 64 League squads and the countless village and amateur outfits scattered over central Europe – desires that. To travel to Salzburg. To test their mettle against the Black Eagles. To play while the Alpenhorns echo around Bern’s Meadow.
With deep respect for those honorable wishes, let’s visit together a few towns where supporters can speculate about how their beloved teams will fare next season in new leagues after earning promotion.
Congratulations to the Lienz Schnappers, whose promotion to the Farm League was well-earned after they beat Ivres on the season’s final Saturday, 13—8, to seize the automatic Promotion. The Italian team suffered three losses to end the season and relinquish a lead they’d crafted over 15 weeks, thus falling into the 3/4 against Sölden. The Oranges seemed spiritless after their late-season collapse, and the Ötzi were in no mood to let the southerners off the mat; their 25—13 romp sent them to Switzerland, where a sharply-disciplined Männedorf team awaited. The Otters didn’t lose in their home, lakeside Meadow all season, and Sölden never looked convincing as a threat to end Männedorf’s home mastery. The Otters 17—10 victory sees them join Lienz in the Farm League. Disappointment for Ivres and Sölden, but it never feels wrong when an Austrian and Swiss team find success.
The Steyr Blacksmiths had to beat Mettmenstetten to pass that same team and avoid relegation, but the Middies routed them 26—8 to avoid the drop. The Voiron Weavers had no such final-day tension: they won only 2 matches all year as relegation beckoned to them inexorably as early as late January, so they will enter the 12-team pandemonium that is the “Bottom of the Barrel.”
In the Farm League, four teams conveniently separated themselves through the Christmas season and into January, but an injury to Captain Horst Bachmutter slowed a slick Kochel attack and doomed the Smiths’ ambitions to mount up into the Harvest League, with the Ulm Steeples the other team to make the play-offs but fall short of promotion. Two Austrian teams with felicitously-named mascots will join the fraternity of Harvest League teams for the 2025-26 season; the Fulpmes Hammers and Anvils did seem to wield those very tools as they pounded an overmatched series of opponents in finishing 15-2-1 and assuring all observers of this division that they belong in the Harvest League – they claimed the First Promotion position by a clear 8 points in the league standings. The Scheibbs Lamplighters would feel hard done-by were they left behind, as they handed the H&As one of their losses and their lone tie before edging out Kochel for the other Promotion.
In the Farm 3/4, Kochel’s Bachmutter played as a man among boys (not a cliché in this case, as he is 38 and two lads playing Gate for Ulm were 17 and 19), helping establish an 18—8 lead at the 40, and score an imperious skot in the second half, only to injure his knee on that very play. The Smiths were not threatened in that 26—16 win, but without Bachmutter, they could not make inroads against an organized and stubborn Lamplighters defense that plays with an old-fashioned double Lock and dares its opponents to puncture it. Off to the Harvest, then, with two more Austrian teams on the rise.
The Axams Wamperts and the Biel/Bienne Watchmakers had strangely parallel seasons whose many trials and failures resulted in predictably parallel outcomes: injuries, mid-season formation changes to a (frankly reckless) wing-first attack orientation, and disastrous outcomes with defenses overwhelmed without Locks available to supplement static Gate play. The Moena Janissaries, which finished 8th in the Harvest League, boast a beautiful kit – I bought a jersey at halftime of a match I attended on a very cold Wednesday in mid-January (remember the lower two leagues each play two mid-week games), but their appealing garments would not have rescued this woeful squad from relegation had Axams and B/B simply stayed the course with stodgy but much more solid Lock-heavy formations (Schiebbs’ promotion offers first-hand evidence of that).
But, now … let me dwell for a moment on two teams who will promote into the Wheat League for the coming season, two teams with wildly different pedigrees and un-alike paths to the top half of the Wiesespiel hierarchy.
When one considers the most revered and prestigious playgrounds of the adventurous, wealthy and reclusive, Sankt Moritz, Switzerland, rises from its exalted seat, clears its throat, and waves demurely. This jewel at 6000’ elevation, with its pristine lake, has twice hosted the Winter Olympics and remains the first vacation choice for many of the royalty – both literal and metaphorical royalty – of Europe. That status has made Wiesespiel seem an afterthought: November and the months following are ski season, not Meadow Game season. Yet, over the past decade or so, the old game has up and gained a cachet in this exclusive enclave, and the Pioneers proved to be as gritty and salty a team as any in the lower three leagues. Seven years ago, they languished in the Barrel League. Four years ago, they rose to Farm League, and two seasons ago, they burst with pride into the Harvest League for the first time since 1956.
This year, the Manager, Elia Berge, read all the predictions anticipating a “sure-fire three-team battle royale between Mulhouse, Chamonix and Brixlegg for a pair of free passes that will let them call themselves big boys,” as one publication [that is distinctly not the TSS]crassly put it (to the great frustration of a certain “Special Correspondent” with whom I work, who was offended by the hokey diction of that passage, but also by any editor who doesn’t know when to employ “among” rather than “between”). And Berge and the Pioneers players decided to disprove those assumptions about which teams would earn promotion. They won in Chamonix in Week 16, they won in Brixxlegg in Week 17, and they won, back home in Sankt Moritz, in Week 18, to claim third place and force their way into the 3/4 against the Chamois, a team whose steady decline has puzzled many. Their win in the 3/4 at home was punctuated by raucous applause from several thousand supporters who applauded their Pioneers as they have cheered, in previous years, a gold medal downhill skier or Prince William and Princess Kate.
Brixlegg had beaten the Pioneers in Week 14, but since then, Berge had used, essentially, a fourth Gate by pulling one Schliessmann primarily back into defense. “Make them beat us,” the Manager told his troops before the match that would send one team upwards into the Wheat League. The Coppers couldn’t, and Sankt Moritz won on the road, 16—14.
Mulhouse had removed any doubt by about, oh, the end of November, as to which team was going to rule the Harvest League. Never mind a 34—5 dismantling of the aforementioned Wamperts: the Locomotives played like their namesakes weekly, and woe unto any opponent who found themselves on the tracks in front of this Train. Their 17-0-1 record was surprising only in that they endured a tie when the Chamois defended their home Meadow in a bitterly-fought 6—6 draw.
While the TSS’ most senior writer, Mr. Abrahams, generally eschews predictions, I will dare to speculate this much: Wheat League … beware the Locomotives. Remember, Mulhouse has won three Tyrol Cups; behind Grenoble’s 7 Cups, they are the second-winningest French club. But, after collecting that third title in 1985, they fell into a long period of lassitude and, it must be said, poor leadership. A change at the top and the happy arrival of a wave of talented young players has had an electric effect on the team and the town, which, located as it is in northeastern France, at the not-very Alpine elevation of 800 feet, has always been a bit of an odd fit for the Meadow Game. But the fire is back in Mulhouse, the talent is deep, athletic, and disciplined. Get ready for this unit, Wheaters. The Locomotive is coming.
Finally, a note on the descent in several Leagues of some of the most famed and accomplished teams in the Austrian League. Falling from the Tyrol League into the Alpine are none other than Matterhorn and Munich, teams with the 2nd– and 5th-most Tyrol Cups, respectively, in this League’s 153-year history. The Black Eagles fell two points short of matching Salzburg and Füssen, failing to collect a point in their final two matches (against, admittedly, Bern and suddenly unbeatable Zurich). The Lederhosen were, as several Bavarian sports dailies wrote, “an embarrassment,” completing a 4-14-0 record that left them with their lowest total – 12 points – in 70 seasons in any League.
Twenty-six Tyrol Cups. Relegated.
At the bottom of the Alpine League, Klagenfurt and Innsbruck’s only struggle was to finish 9th rather than 10th, a contest that ended in a dubious victory for the Lindwyrms. They finished 7 points out of 8th, far below the innocuous Vaduz Diplomats. Those famed teams have themselves won the 4th– and 6th-most Tyrol Cups, respectively. That’s 18 more Cups relegated to the Wheat League.
The lesson here? Wiesespiel demands excellence and punishes mediocrity. The game doesn’t hand victories to reputations or gleaming Cups on a shelf back home. Four towering teams, winners of 44 Tyrol Cups, all of them with a Cup in the past 15 seasons, were not good enough this season. The players on those teams asked for no quarter and accept that they were beaten by better teams. They earned relegation. But come November, come Goose Day, they will endeavor to fight back.
And TSS will follow those stories, and countless more.
See you next week for the Tyrol Cup Final in Bern – the current center of the Meadow Game universe.