We saw in the recent Austrian Bundesliga campaign not just great football, but also several outrages. LASK Linz made a team training during the lockdown what was back then not allowed and due to that, the Austrian football association subtracted four points from them. Also, at the end of the season, their head coach Valérien Ismaël had to leave the club and got replaced by Dominik Thalhammer.
Meanwhile, Mattersburg became insolvent meaning that the club would not get the licence for the Austrian Bundesliga for the upcoming season. Therefore, all of their players were suddenly free agents.
Andreas Gruber who was since 2017 at Mattersburg joined then LASK Linz as he was one of the stars of Mattersburg. In this scout report in the form of a tactical analysis, we will look at the qualities of Gruber and how he will fit into the tactics of LASK Linz.
Role at Mattersburg
In this first part of the scout report, we will have a very quick look at Gruber’s role at his former club Mattersburg to then look at his style of play and lastly we will talk about his role at LASK Linz especially based on his first appearance for the team in the first round of the ÖFB Cup.
The Austrian played at his former club as a winger, offensive midfielder and occasionally even as a striker. However, the clear majority of the time he was a right-winger what we can also see in the heatmap for all his matches in the recent season in the Austrian Bundesliga. He played overall in 20 games and was 1652 minutes on the pitch in the Austrian Bundesliga even though he had to fight with injuries showing that he was in the recent campaign among the key players of Mattersburg.
In his heatmap above it stands out that his preferred area of the pitch is clearly the right-wing, but that he also likes to be active in more central areas of the pitch. As already mentioned prior in this tactical analysis, he got also used as offensive midfielder or striker in the past, but you saw that he feels most comfortable to have his starting position for his actions on the wing.
When he played for his former club in the wide-area, he had the task to stretch the game by being positioned close to the touchline. A perfect example for that can be seen in the example below as he is positioned wide to create some distance between him and the opposing full-back and additionally he uses the full width of the pitch.
