Rangnick lauds Austria substitutes’ impact in win over Jordan

Syndicated reporting provided by Stats Perform and reviewed by the SoccerNews editorial team.

Ralf Rangnick hailed the impact of Austria’s substitutes, particularly the physical presence of Marko Arnautovic, after they beat Jordan 3-1 in their World Cup opener.

Romano Schmid put Austria in front in the first half, but after Ali Olwan pulled one back for Jordan within five minutes of the break, Austria had to turn things around.

They had a goal disallowed before Yazan Al Arab put the ball into the back of his own net to restore Austria’s lead, and Marko Arnautovic then made sure of the victory in the 12th minute of stoppage time after coming off the bench.

With this 3-1 win over Jordan, Austria have now won each of their first-ever World Cup meetings against teams from different continents.

Aged 37 years and 59 days, Marko Arnautovic has become the fourth-oldest European player to score at a World Cup, with only Pepe (39y 283d), Cristiano Ronaldo (37y 292d) and Gunnar Gren (37y 236d) netting at an older age.

He also became the oldest Austrian player to have played in the tournament at the age of 37y 59d, surpassing the record of Michael Konsel (36y 109d) vs Italy on 23 June 1998.

And while Rangnick acknowledged his team struggled at times in San Francisco, he was pleased with how Arnautovic influenced the game after coming on at half-time.

“It was an extremely difficult match. Jordan truly made life complicated for us,” Rangnick said.

“The substitutions helped us immensely today as well — they brought more quality to our play. Looking at the match as a whole, I think we picked up several important cues once again.

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“I expected Jordan to be strong, but they played even more powerfully than we had anticipated.

“[Sasa] Kalajdzic did very well in the training sessions for the last two weeks, and so it was just logical to have him start.

“He struggled ​a little bit when ⁠it came to the intensity and the physical need of this tournament, so that’s when I brought in Marko at half-time.

“Marko also was very important, and ​his physical presence was very important to us.”

Teams playing their first-ever World Cup match have failed to win in their last 17 such matches (D4 L13) since Senegal’s victory over France in 2002.

Jordan certainly gave their opponents a game, matching Austria for shots (11) and efforts on target (four), while they also hit the woodwork, though they accumulated just 0.5 expected goals (xG).

And head coach Jamal Sellami believes the scoreline does not accurately reflect Jordan’s performance, and he is optimistic going forward.

“I think that the result doesn’t reflect the effort made by the Jordanian team, but personally I’m very happy and proud of their performance,” Sellami told reporters.

“No one was expecting us to be that bold, that proactive, and to be that capable of benefiting from the available opportunities.

“But we’ve not been able to win against Austria because it has players at Real Madrid [David Alaba] and Bayern Munich [Konrad Laimer].”

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