AUSTRIA WIEN AND SPARTA PRAHA IN THE FINAL OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CONTINENTAL EVENT
Jean Eskenazi | 03/09/1936

Sunday will be played in Vienna the first round of the most interesting test that takes place perhaps on the continent: the Central European Cup.

Austria Vienna, prototype of the Cup team, which does not care about the championship, will start as favorites.

We have already reported that there is no more brilliant team, when it smiles. The star of the defense is the famous Sesta, the current best defender on the continent. He is a character who is far from indifferent. Wrestling champion, Sesta to improve his ordinary meager football professional is forced to sing in Viennese cabarets!

The centre-half is also an artist, since he is a violinist by profession. Mock brilliantly replaced Smistik in the Austrian team, and he is now its indisputable mainstay. At his side, we find Adamek who played at Le Havre A.C. and who replaced Gall, who left for Mulhouse and Nausch, a true gentleman footballer.

Nausch is secretary of Austria. He is a cultivated boy, of high moral value. He is for his comrades a respected leader, who knows how to pay with his person.

The star of the attack is always the incomparable Sindelar. With his profile of a bird of prey, his long bony body, his unbridled allure of a poet watched by romantic evil, Sindelar is the most intelligent centre-forward — we would even dare to say the most cerebral — who has ever walked a football pitch and at his side the eaglet Stroh is made in his image. This tandem, of a rare subtlety, all Viennese by training, is the pearl of the team completed by two determined and robust wingers: Riegler and Viertl, a youngster who comes, Jerusalem and the goalkeeper Zöhrer who ranks almost on the map of Raftl and Platzer.

BRAINE AND CO.

The host of Sparta Praha, the Belgian Raymond Braine is also a footballer who owes his intelligence to be the talented centre-forward that he is. Having unfortunately started in Czechoslovakia, breaking the leg of a national team full-back, Novák of Slavia, Braine struggled to establish himself. But real talent always manages to overcome the most serious obstacles, and Braine is now Czechoslovakia's most popular footballer. He is the great man of Sparta, and we can say that it was he who won the Central European Cup for his club last year. What is most curious in the history of Sparta is that it is enormously indebted to the Western trace which is in it. With the Belgian Raymond Braine, Bouček, trained in the harsh school said French football is the big star.

The cure that this player made in Rennes was beneficial to him, and he returned transformed to the country of President Bénès.

Klenovec who played in Rennes, Zajíček, the last Czech revelation, Burgr, Srbek are all names known to us, despite the difficulty we have in pronouncing them. They are among the best elements of a team less elegant, less artistic than Austria, but undoubtedly more orthodox from a football point of view.