The battle for the European title has started with a year delay. In the near future, Voetbalzone will highlight various players who you should pay attention to during EURO 2020 or who have a special story. In the ninth episode, attention is paid to Sasa Kalajdzic, the tall Austrian striker who had his big breakthrough in the German Bundesliga and with the national team last season. He has scored 16 goals and, thanks to his striking stature, he already has a whole host of nicknames, of which ‘new Peter Crouch’ and ‘Ibrahimovic machine’ are the most revealing of his character and qualities.
By Thijs Verhaar
It is Tuesday, December 15, when the normally always smiling face of Sasa Kalajdzic is on a thunderstorm. The 23-year-old striker is in the press room of VfB Stuttgart, which has just finished a game against the much higher ranked Union Berlin. The game ended in 2-2 and the Austrian has scored both goals for his club. And that while he was only allowed to come in for ten minutes because he has only just recovered from a minor hip injury. Yet the look remains furious and he presses his fingers so hard on his mobile that it seems as if he is fighting a huge argument via WhatsApp. Why? A German journalist decides to ask and gets – as is often the case with Kalajdzic – an answer that he did not see coming at all. “I forgot to list myself in my Fantasy League Team. What a loser you are then.”
Since then, he himself was the first player to be included in his team and that has earned him quite a few points. The Austrian, who is exactly two meters tall, was good for 16 goals and 6 assists in his first season in the Bundesliga in 33 games, with which he had a large share in the creditable ninth place for PhD student Stuttgart. Exactly half of those goals came from headers, because Kalajdzic knows how to use his length excellently. “I am the tallest footballer in the whole Bundesliga and we do a lot with crosses from the side. So I get a lot of header chances and I’m good at that. I think I scored the most headers of everyone in Austria (with Admira Wacker, ed.), although I still missed half my chances! So it goes without saying that I benefit from my height and I’m still getting better at it,” the striker analyzed after scoring in his first three games at the highest level in Germany.
With his height, Sasa Kalajdzic dominates in the opponent’s penalty area.
Kalajdzic was picked up in 2019 for just 1.75 million euros by Stuttgart, who took him over from the Admira Wacker. He only got the chance at a professional club for the first time at the age of nineteen with the Austrian middle engine, after having previously spent time with teams from the lower and increasingly higher amateur classes around Vienna. The target man with Serbian roots grew up there because his parents fled that way before his birth during the Yugoslavia war. “My parents are my heroes because they managed to provide my brother and me with a good life when they themselves had nothing when they fled their country,” Kalajdzic said at the start of the season in an interview with Bundesliga.com. Thanks to their hard work, he lacked for nothing and was delivered to Stuttgart without any major setbacks, where he tore his cruciate ligament almost immediately and was sidelined for almost his first season.
He would only play six games in his first year in German service and had a very marginal role in the promotion to the Bundesliga with 1 goal and 1 assist. All the greater was his own surprise that he could immediately make a difference at the highest level. He scored in his first game as a substitute and then had a chance in the starting line-up. “I didn’t see that coming because I hadn’t really been able to prove myself yet because of my injury. I am not the type to underestimate myself, but I also guard against too much optimism. I’m realistic,” said the striker, who after his lightning start with three goals in the first three games in the next series of fifteen games only managed to score twice, both against Union Berlin.
Thanks to his kickstart in the Bundesliga, Kalajdzic was allowed to make his debut in the Austrian national team in October. He now has three goals in eight international matches.
However, this was followed by a magnificent streak of eight goals in seven consecutive games, establishing him in the sub-top of the top scorer standings. He ended the season with an excellent number of sixteen hits, with which he could almost compete with his Dutch counterpart Wout Weghorst, who scored twenty goals at VfL Wolfsburg. The similarities are legion. Weghorst is also tall, lanky and for that reason has always had to guard against prejudice. Because of their appearance, both strikers are not or hardly considered to be able to play decent football with the general public, but both of them adapt effortlessly to an increasingly higher level time and time again. Weghorst also only got a chance at the age of eighteen at a professional club (Willem II) and had to work his way up to the Dutch national team via FC Emmen, Heracles Almelo, AZ and now Wolfsburg, where Kalajdzic after a similar trajectory since October of last year. the first striker is from Austria.
The Alpine country has been looking for an easy-scoring finisher for years and now seems to have finally found it, because the giant from Vienna has three goals after eight international matches. Still, he doesn’t consider himself a real number nine. He has not always been a long beanstalk and therefore has much more footballing ability than you would expect when you see him walking. “In my youth I was trained by a football school that cooperated with Austria Wien, so many of my opponents from then are now playing in the Austrian Bundesliga. At the time I still played as a defensive midfielder and received a lot of technique training. That helped me a lot. I didn’t get my growth spurt until I was 17, so I already had good technique. Then it was only a matter of using my height, but my coordination was dramatic”, Kalajdzic chuckles. “It didn’t look like it! I have videos on my phone that make you completely double.”
Kalajdzic did not score on his European Championship debut. He was relieved after 59 minutes by Marko Arnautovic, who scored once.
Today he can rightly say that he is just as good with his head as he is with his feet. He is regarded as the coat rack of the Austrian team and is also increasingly better in the combination at Stuttgart. “So I’m more of a ‘9.5’ than a ‘9’. That’s how you should see it.” Still, his striking posture has earned him a whole host of nicknames, ranging from the new Peter Crouch to Zlatan the second. “Actually, I’ve heard everything pass by,” Kalajdzic agrees. “Everything in between long lanky and Ibrahimovic-Machine”, laughs the 23-year-old. He can appreciate the creativity and the comparison with the Swedish star of AC Milan betrays that fans also recognize his technical prowess. “I think it’s all fine, dude. I’m just glad people are having fun with it. I don’t have a preference myself, because I’m just Sasa and I want to play as well as possible. No more. I also find it difficult to say what I like best, because what have I achieved to deserve such comparisons? On the other hand, it is also nice to be mentioned in the same breath with such names.”
He also finds the comparison with Peter Crouch more than fine. The former England international is, of course, always remembered for his famous online players, but as a ‘long lanky with usable legs’ also had a fine career with clubs like Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, as Kalajdzic rightly emphasizes. “I know a lot of people are joking when they compare me to him, but he does have 40 caps for England to his name. Those are things that few people can repeat after him, so for that reason he is definitely an example for me.” Crouch also scored 22 international goals in those matches for the national team and is now a welcome guest on talk shows, but he is rarely asked about his performance on the field. Much more often it is his statement that made him world famous in one fell swoop. “What would I be if I hadn’t become a rich professional footballer? Virgin.”
That statement was made in 2010. Subway voted the best one-liner ever in the sport category and it could just be that Kalajdzic will one day compete in that area with the Englishman with whom he is so often compared. He is also full of self-mockery and is averse to media training. He simply says what he thinks and once described it himself as follows. “I’m not the smartest, but I’m not the dumbest either. I’m just open and honest. I am someone who sees the fun in everything and always try to see the positive. I want to make sure that people are comfortable with me and I think that is going well for me,” said the striker, who does not like to talk about himself. “I find that very difficult. I’m just a normal guy who likes to play football, enjoys it and doesn’t do too bad despite his height. I leave the rest to others.”
He prefers to focus entirely on football, because the European Championship is just another stage on which he can prove his critics wrong. He did not score in the first game against North Macedonia, but again a base place for the striker beckons against the Netherlands, which is emphatically associated with a summer top transfer. Tottenham Hotspur, Everton and West Ham United were already mentioned in April and now AC Milan has also been added as a very serious candidate. Kalajdzic is by Transfermarkt estimated at a value of 22 million euros and a few million more could be added if he can also assert himself at the European final tournament. The Austrian national coach Franco Foda certainly believes in it wholeheartedly. “He has really progressed by leaps and bounds this season. He is on fire.”
Episode 1: The Man’s Dilemma Who Once Got His Gambling Grandfather £125,000
Episode 2: The heir of the ‘clown in the sweatpants’ who mirrors Van der Sar
Episode 3: ‘Koziolek’ can play Dutchman from the books 1.5 years after car crash at the European Championship
Episode 4: The street kid who reached the Premier League and European Championship from the seventh level
Episode 5: Italy has its own Jurriën-Timber scenario due to Mancini .’s striking decision
Episode 6: the Dutch opponent is amazed: ‘Those are three great players alone’
Episode 7: Teen of 70 million new eye-catcher from Sporting and Portugal
Episode 8: Quarrels, Masturbation Video and Deadpool: The ‘Russian Mario Balotelli’
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