“The qualifying round is a devil’s story”
The Bundesliga started its fourth qualifying round on Saturday at 5 p.m. with the games Admira versus Ried and Altach versus Hartberg. The two hosts were always there as the only two teams.
Klaus Schmidt faces a tougher relegation battle with his new team.
GEPA images
Klaus Schmidt, who got to know them as a Mattersburg and Admira coach and who is now making his debut as a Hartberg coach at another special place of work, in Altach, did the best job of combining the qualifying round: “The qualifying round is a devil of a story. Every team is really just afraid that it will lose.” So far, the Altacher have been able to deal with this fear well, they are something like the “champions of the qualifying round”. An “eternal table” would be the current bottom with 46 points from 30 games (11 wins, 13 draws) lead.
Qualifying Group – Matchday 22
The 19 points with which Vorarlberg moved up from 11th to 8th place in the 2018/19 season were surpassed for the first time – Wiener Austria even collected 22 points on their first visit to the 2019/20 qualifying group. With 1.95, the violets are also the team with the best point average after three seasons. They are followed by Rapid (one participation) with 1.90, Ried (one participation) with 1.70 and then Altach with 1.53. And there is still one hope for the club from the Ländle, which is four points behind in the race: So far, with Wacker Innsbruck, only one last player from the regular season has actually been relegated in the end. In 2019/20 the SKN St. Pölten was able to save itself, in the previous year the Admira.
SKN with minus record
So far, the people from the south of town have only scored an average of 1.10 points. “But many in the team already know the situation, have experience in the fight to stay up,” Willi Vorsager states that they are also avoiding relegation a fourth time. The WSG Tirol can look back on the worst average value of 0.70 points per game (in the 2019/20 relegation season), which only intervened on Sunday with an away game against the newcomer LASK in the qualifying round. The worst score so far has cost the SKN St. Pölten the league last year. The Lower Austrians had brought only three draws in the ten games and are therefore the only one of the previous ten teams that could not record a single win in the ten play-off games.
Qualifying round scorers
In the first two years, things went so well for SCR Altach in the qualifying round because they could rely on their goalscorers. In 2018/19, the Rheindörfler were the top scorer with Salzburg loanee Mergim Berisha, who scored goals, in the second year Daniel Nussbaumer shared this honor with St. Pöltner Cory Burke and Wattener Zlatko Dedic, who all scored four goals. Last year’s top scorer is now attacking for Rapid – it’s Marco Grüll, whose five goals ensure that promoted SV Ried only suffered a defeat.
Incidentally, the all-time top scorer of the qualifying round is the already mentioned Zlatko Dedic, who before his four WSG goals scored five times for the first relegated Wacker Innsbruck. The football retiree is not in great danger of being overtaken. Of his pursuers, Mergim Berisha, Martin Pusic, Manfred Fischer (all six goals), as well as Sasa Kalajdzic, Aliou Badji, Marco Grüll, Daniel Nussbaumer and Manprit Sarkaria (all five goals) are no longer represented in the qualifying round. Only LASK attacker Andreas Gruber, who once scored five goals against relegation for Mattersburg, could pose a threat to Dedic. In the regular season, however, he didn’t score once for Linz.