27. February 2024
in ADMIRAL Bundesliga
Simon Pirkl made his professional debut at the age of 17. But it wasn’t until this season that he arrived in the Bundesliga with FC Blau-Weiß Linz. And of all places, he discovered his talent for scoring in the top division.
It’s April 19, 2014, Wiener Neustadt is a guest of Innsbruck, who are in danger of relegation. And a Wacker youngster is allowed to sit on the bench for the first time: Simon Pirkl. “I still remember it well, I was a little nervous, as cool as it was,” says Pirkl almost ten years later. “Back then we had really good players like Roman Wallner, Lukas Hinterseer and Christopher Wernitznig in the squad. You looked up to them as a young player – and suddenly you’re sitting on the bench and watching them from the sidelines. I remember that it was then that I really realized how high the standard in the Bundesliga actually is.”
Time jump to the present. Simon Pirkl now has almost a decade of professional football under his belt, will soon be 27 years old – and has his first half-season in the Bundesliga behind him. Finally, you could almost say. “The years in the second division with Innsbruck, Lustenau and Horn, but also with Blau-Weiß, were good for learning,” he says. After serious injuries early in his career, it looked at times as if he wouldn’t be able to make it to the top division. His cruciate ligaments tore twice early on, and at the age of 22 he was briefly without a club – and then there was a setback. A very strange suspension in his time with Horn. “It’s still a mystery to me to this day, I was one of four players who were suspended for sporting reasons, even though I was praised by the coach a week before. His explanation was that with me the other players would become worse. But well, I know that I was never an ‘Owezara’ myself and this funny story didn’t do me any harm,” he recalls. Not at all actually.
The end in Horn was the beginning of the Blau-Weiß success story, because immediately after Horn he signed in the steel city. “As a professional you simply have the ambition to play higher up, you think that you are capable of that level and you want to get the chance,” he says. From a personal perspective, his debut in the Bundesliga at the end of July last year could hardly have gone better. In the away game against WAC he was immediately able to celebrate his first Bundesliga goal. But in the end the 1:2 in the 91st minute was just a cosmetic result. In general, Pirkl seems to have discovered his instinct for goal in the Bundesliga. There are already three goals on the credit side. In the 2nd league championship season 2022/23, however, he failed to score a goal for Linz. “Yeah, that’s cool,” he says with a smile. “It’s going well, I want to keep it going so that it continues like this and I can help the team with goals.” And he also points out the reasons: “Well, on the one hand, there’s also luck when you’re there at the right moment “We’re in the right place, but if we take part in every run offensively as side players, you’ll be rewarded every now and then.”
Pirkl was also able to record four assists, but like the entire team, he also had to get used to the Bundesliga. “The beginning was difficult for us, we paid the lesson. However, we learned quickly and our trainer invested a lot of time in finding the right conclusions for the adjustment. Then things went better,” says Pirkl. But it wasn’t just the Linz fans who were hungry for more Bundesliga in autumn. “I have to be honest, I really enjoy football in the Bundesliga. Even if there are games where we feel like we’re just running after Salzburg for 90 minutes. At least we still beat them away,” says Pirkl, speaking about the sensational victory against the series champions on matchday 8. The declared goal of the Scheiblehner team is of course to stay in the league. Almost ten years after Simon Pirkl was in Wacker Innsbruck’s Bundesliga squad for the first time, the main thing for him is: He came to stay, right? “Yes,” he says humbly. “It would be really wonderful to play at the top for as long as possible, I will work hard for that.”
Editor: Peter K. Wagner
2024-02-27 11:08:01
#Bundesliga.at #Simon #Pirkl #stay
