After the opening 18 games of this season in the Austrian Bundesliga, Austria Vienna showed until now quite disappointing performances as they sit in the seventh position. If they still sit in this position after the first 22 games of this season, they won’t be in the playoff for the championship, but in the relegation group as the first six teams are in the group which will fight for the title.
Considering that Austria Vienna are usually one of the best teams in Austria, it’s quite a bad campaign for them and they just scored 28 goals in the first 18 games of the season. However, the most positive aspect of their season is the striker Christoph Monschein as he scored 15 goals and made five assists. In light of this, he has 18 scorer points while his team scored 28 goals. Just these numbers show how important Monschein is for his squad.
In this tactical analysis in the form of a scout report, we will look at the abilities of Monschein and why he is so important for Austria Vienna’s tactics and his team in general.
Positioning and movement
Austria Vienna used in this season different systems. Their coach Christian Ilzer lined his team up in a 4-2-3-1, 5-3-2, 3-4-3 and also sometimes in a 4-3-1-2. So, we see that they used different formations and also sometimes just played with one single centre-forward while in other games the had two strikers upfront. Monschein was in every single match of the 18 league games in this season part of the starting eleven what already shows that he’s clearly the first-choice striker of his Austrian coach.
The Austrian forward doesn’t like to just stay in the centre on the height of the opposing defence and wait for crosses and through passes, but often drifts to the outside or drops a bit deeper as we’ll see in this analysis. This can be perfectly seen his heatmap for the opening 18 league games of this Austrian Bundesliga season. It gets visible that Monschein often stays in the middle up front but doesn’t permanently stay there during the game.
Since as a centre-forward the Austrian often faces a centre-back who man-marks him, he sometimes likes to position in the wide-areas since there he has a bit more free space around him. However, he just positions on the wing when one of his teammates (either the second striker or the offensive midfielder) occupies the central area upfront. In the example below, the number 10 Alexander Grünwald is positioned in the centre what allows Monschein to position in the left wide-area where he has the free space to receive a good pass from the defensive midfielder Thomas Ebner.
In the situation above and also in the following one, the Austrian forward tries to utilize his acceleration and pace. He stands at 5’10” what is an average height and is quite fast. He tries to make use of his pace whenever he looks for free spaces and provide an option for a through pass. His intelligent movement at which we’ll look later once more in this tactical analysis, combined with his physical abilities makes it sometimes really hard for the opposing players to defend against him.
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