At 53, the longtime FB junior team owner stopped dreaming. “I live in the here and now. Football is my life, but it’s also a roundabout sport. For the time being I am allowed to ride, but there will come a time when I will be told I have to run again.” If he had been in New Zealand three years ago. After this, they defeated him by Ringel game.

bullying in new zealand

In April 2017, Herf broke his tent in Austria, quit his job at OFB and moved out to change football in New Zealand as a sports director. Less than a year later, she found herself coaching the women’s team, which she also took over, in a bullying case that ruled the pages of the game for weeks. “The allegations against me were the worst I have ever faced. I was compared to Adolf Hitler in the newspaper! That day I knew I had to go.” He resigned from all his duties on 31 July 2018.

Andy Herraf says, “I never heard from people who did this to me. And hopefully I never hear anything again.” And his calm voice becomes a little more energetic. But with others who were in his favor, “I wrote again just a few days ago. After coming well back home from Olympia after three losses and a 2:10 goal.” Heraf should have been completely cured of this mentality problem.

He has returned to Austria. “I had given up on everything and had to start over from scratch. And I have to admit, I was horribly psychologically too. I had to leave it all behind me.” Heraf set out on the Camino de Santiago. “1,600 kilometers in 51 days. It ground me again. Then I saw that other things were much worse. I’ve met people with cancer, people who’ve lost their kids. My pain was nothing compared to that.” Wasn’t.”

return to floridsdorf

After returning, he took a back foot in the domestic football business at the FAC. In May 2019, he was dismissed again after just eleven games. “I’m a complete professional. If I can’t work professionally, it doesn’t make any sense.” He kept it like this always and everywhere. Even at the risk of gaining the reputation of being stubborn. “Wherever you trusted me, I succeeded. In Lustenau, in Schwanenstadt, in the OFB. Wherever you did not trust me, in Pasching, in Parndorf, in the FAC, they have to see for themselves how they proceed I will do that because of my ability as a coach. If you still want to tell me who to play and where to play, I am not available.”

Next stop is Ringelsspill in Reid. Two months after leaving Floridsdorf, Andy Herf became Gerald Baumgartner’s assistant trainer. Together they earned the promotion they desired, with Haraf again dropping out at the end of the season. The chemistry was wrong again.

adventure brazil

Because twitching his thumb is not the strength of the former national player, he went on a friendship service in Brazil for three months in October 2020, which did not go unnoticed by the sporting public. For the agency of his ex-Lustenau hero Thiago, he was to scout players for Europe in the north-east of the country and also coached CS Marouinance. So the next adventure. It almost got worse than New Zealand. “I was surfing the Atlantic and almost drowned. I was thrown out so far that I almost couldn’t get in.”

Apart from Paul Gludowitz, who finished third at the U20 World Cup in Canada, I can say that I was the most successful youth coach in FB.

Nonetheless, he would have repeated the Brazilian adventure in April (“The 1,000-euro ticket still lying at home.”) had SV Reid not called again. Previously he was Miron Muslik’s co-star for One Game. When the ten-match series without a win did not end even by this measure, Heraf took over as head coach. And since then, in addition to his reputation as an inconvenient, he has also had a “king killer.”

reed and concrete soccer ball

The charge leaves Heraf as cold as the criticism that his success story was built on solid football. “I know what my team can do. And that’s compact,” he shrugs his shoulders. This is not the first time they have faced each other. When he won the 2015 U20 World Cup in Argentina in Argentina 0–0 with a double five-man chain and thus knocked it out of the competition, “It was interpreted very negatively. We took the six-time world champion out.” Did it, and then I have to justify myself! It was born out of necessity. We had the system in our repertoire, but really only planned to unpack it when it came to saving the results for a few minutes But the Argentines played against us on the wall, that in the end we would have made five pieces. So we had to practice it for about 60 minutes, “Heraf can already laugh about today. Giovanni Simeone and ngel Correa probably still aren’t.

That’s why he doesn’t let his time in FB be a bad discussion. “Apart from perhaps Paul Gludowitz, who finished third at the U20 World Cup in Canada, I can say that I was the most successful junior coach in FB. I managed five out of six qualifications, and went through the group stage three times No one made it to the finals. I do my job the best I can. Everyone else should do their job as best as they can, I’ll never talk to them.”

Herf has no players in his rank today from his 2015 squad, but three from his first U20 World Cup in 2011: Samuel Sahin-Redlinger, Marcel Ziegl and Daniel Offenbacher. “Coincidentally,” says Andy Herf, “in my ten years as a junior team boss I’ve had so many players that you almost inevitably revisit one or the other.” This tin is different with Plavotik. “With him, I already knew in the FAC that I would bring him back at some point. There aren’t that many left-footed guys in the central defence. He’s really doing a great job at that.” Football is also a roundabout game.