The fortieth minute of the match was running between Olomouc and Spartathe home team played a corner kick, the visitors’ goalkeeper Peter Vindahl went for the ball, but he did not agree with Asger Sørensen, the ball fell out of his hands, and instead of being safe in the goalkeeper’s arms, he immediately fluttered in the Spartan net after a stop by Filip Slavíček.
Seveřan and all of Sparta with him were lucky in the end, because VAR revealed Slavíček’s offside, the game continued with a goalless score and at the end of the match, the players from Letná Albion Rrahmani decided to win. VAR played a big role this time as well, Prague could be happy with three points thanks to five centimetres, which played in their favor when assessing a potential offside situation.
But back between the three poles. After the match in Olomouc, the 27-year-old native of Helsingør was heavily criticized there. And even worse for Sparta, he is not alone in this.
On Wednesday cup match on the field of Artis in Brno because his substitute Jakub Surovčík got a chance and it didn’t turn out well at all. Although coach Brian Priske’s men fulfilled their duty and advanced over the second league team after a 2:1 win, their path to it was significantly complicated by the Slovakian goalkeeper, who went through the youth and B teams of rival Slavia and reached Letná via Vlašim and Jablonec.
The almost two-meter-tall goalkeeper ran far from the goal for the ball shortly before the half-time break after a kick from one of the home players, but instead of kicking back to the opponent’s half, he just missed the ball with his feet, which Quadri Adediran used uncompromisingly to equalize at 1:1.
43 goalkeepers, but none can catch
Two misses from the guardians of the Spartan sanctuary in four days did not go without a reaction from the football public. For example, a podcaster and fan of Sparta, who goes by the nickname ACSVory on social networks, compared the pair of goalkeepers to the popular tandem of hard-working but not very skilled animated DIYers Pat and Mat.
At the same time, he dug into the goalkeeper position in Sparta already on Wednesday. “You have about 43 goalkeepers under contract, but unfortunately none of them can catch,” he lamented.
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“Vindahl and Birma are extras, without much benefit to the team,” noted journalist Lukáš Pečeně and the lackluster performance of Serbian footballer Veljko Birmančevič, but at the same time praised Rrahmani’s finish.
Some would prefer to recall the one who put together the Vindahl-Surovčík duo in Sparta. Filip Horký, a former journalist and, as he writes about himself, a fan of red colors, began a deeper analysis. “Fortunately, it is only about the fifth half-season when we only have one ‘proper’ goalkeeper, who is out of form in only the third half-season. So it is logical that we do not have a quality replacement,” he wrote and added a comparison of the goalkeeper pairs of Sparta and Slavia from the 2023/24 season, with Vojtěch Vorel next to Vindahl in front of Surovčík and in Eden Jindřich Staňek replaced by Aleš Mandous, Antonín Kinský and Jakub Markovič.
Spartan coach Brian Priske also commented on Peter Vindahl after the match. “First of all, I want to say that goalkeeper coaches mainly work with goalkeepers,” he referred the journalist to the pair of Aleš Hruška and Martin Ticháček. But then he stood up for his ward. “I think he played a good game. Yes, he shouldn’t have lost the ball, but otherwise he gave a very good performance,” defended Vindahla.
On the other hand, he recently held Sparta up with a great performance in the Conference League at Legia Warsaw. Nevertheless, the goalkeeper position is becoming an increasingly common topic among fans.
