One used afternoon was enough to put an end to the Traiskirchen Grasshoppers season. The Hoppers lost in the wildcard games in Attang-Puchheim quite unsophisticatedly with 3:12 and 5:11. That’s enough in a best-of-three series to get kicked out. “I tried to explain that to myself on Saturday during a sleepless night,” mused Hoppers mastermind Peter Feichtinger after the elimination: “We went into the games as favorites, even the clear favorites,” the Athletics actually belong to favorite opponents, but not this afternoon. The biggest problem was that Traiskirchen didn’t get its offense going. “We scored at least nine runs in all the games we won. In those where we managed eight or less, we lost, ”Feichtinger calculates.
The defense remains the sore point
The fact that key player Tobias Kiefer was absent after the first game for family reasons was a side note in the end, because in addition to the stuttering offense, the defense remained the Achilles heel. “This is a season problem,” Feichtinger knows where to start. For last year’s runner-up, reaching the semi-finals was actually something like the minimum requirement. Feichtinger doesn’t see that the entire season is a disappointment because of this: “You have to think back to last year. We had a ball that went five centimeters over the fence against the Wanderers in the quarter-finals in the eleventh inning and we played our historically two best game against Dornbirn ”, this time the pendulum did not swing to the side of the Traiskirchner.
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