UEFA Nations League 2020/21: Norway vs Austria

After quite some time the UEFA Nations League made its return and in group 1 of League B, we have four teams on the same level, making it one of the most interesting groups of this tournament. On the first matchday, Norway hosted Austria while in the other match of this group Northern Ireland faced Rumania.

Austria played in this first match of the UEFA Nations League without their two greatest stars; David Alaba who is on holiday after winning the UCL with Bayern Munich and Marko Arnautović who currently plays in the Chinese Super League. This would make his time at the national team very complicated due to the coronavirus. On the other side, Norway had their newest superstar Erling Haaland with them, but Martin Ödegaard of Real Madrid was not available.

In this tactical analysis, we will look at the tactics of both teams which led to the 2:1 victory of Austria over Norway.

Starting line-ups

The coach of Norway Lars Lagerbäck went with his typical 4-4-2 formation with Rune Jarstein in goal, Haitam Aleesami and Omar Elabdellaoui as full-backs and the central defence was made of Kristoffer Ajer and Tore Reginiussen. Sander Berge and Tore Reginiussen played in the central of midfield and Stefan Johansen as well as Morten Thorsby had the task to provide width. The greatest quality and fear was clearly in their attack with Joshua King and Haaland.

On the other side, Franco Foda lined up his team in a 4-2-3-1 formation with Alexander Schlager between the sticks while the back four was made of Andreas Ulmer, Martin Hinteregger, Stefan Posch and Stefan Lainer. Stefan Ilsanker and Xaver Schlager played in front of the back four and the three offensive players behind the lone striker Michael Gregoritsch were Christoph Baumgartner, Marcel Sabitzer and Karim Onisiwo.

Austria’s build-up structures and Norway’s compact 4-4-2

Austria were clearly the side in this game which dominated the match, had more possession as well as more goalscoring chances while Norway mainly sat back deeper in a compact 4-4-2 block. Occasionally and especially more frequently in the second half, Norway tried to press higher. However, it was not that efficient as not the whole team pushed forward together, which meant that Austria would always have at least one free player.

In the first section of this tactical analysis, we will focus on the different build-up structures of Austria during the game since for a huge majority of the game we saw that they passed the ball around at about the height of the halfway line and looked for a forward pass while Norway just waited for them to make a mistake.