Euro 2024 Moment of the Day: 100 km/h Marcel Sabitzer zooms Austria to the top

Marcel Sabitzer races forward into the Netherlands half. He races, despite it being the 80th minute, despite it being a comfortable, next-round-ensuring 2-2 at the time. Because he’s at his most comfortable when going at 100 km/h. First minute or eightieth, 100 km/h.

As he progresses, he sees left back Alexander Prass bounding along next to him. So he hands it off and takes a momentary pause to see what’s happening around him.

In the meantime, Christoph Baumgartner has sprinted into the Dutch defensive third from deep inside his own half, a proper head down sprint to catch up with this Sabitzer-Prass led attack, and the latter duly cuts it back inside to him. Baumgartner is moving forward so fast he has to check himself and stretch backwards to trap the ball. He does that, but that touch is such that the ball’s bouncing forward again.

The moment Baumgartner gets his first touch in, Sabitzer peels off the back of big Jerdy Schouten and is off at 100 km/h again. Baumgartner knows this and his next touch is to stab the ball into Sabitzer’s feet.

Played onside by a hopelessly positioned Virgil Van Dijk, Sabitzer screams into the area, allows the ball to run past him, waits for Micky van de Ven to put in his slide and absolutely leathers a left footer into the roof of the net. The man supposed to be guarding it, Bart Verbruggen, barely has time to blink as it whooshes past him. Even now, his ears must be ringing.

If ever there was a moment on the field that has encapsulated Ralf Rangnick’s footballing philosophy, it was this. Sabitzer had entered the Dutch half at 79:44, the ball was a net-breaking blur at 79:54. Ten seconds and the Netherlands had been ripped to shreds by a powerful dribble, three passes and a shot that held nothing back.

That would be the winner, the match ending 3-2 and Austria would end the day atop a group table that included France and the Dutch and Robert Lewandowski’s Poland.

Austria had come into this game knowing that a draw would be enough, but at no point did they consider that an accepted outcome. The Dutch had equalised twice, but each time Austria had poured forward with renewed vigour. They played foot-to-the-pedal football from kickoff till the end, and it was fitting that it was Sabitzer who grabbed the winner.

The midfielder has had a resurgence of sorts this past season. Having lost his way at Bayern Munich and Manchester United after the promise of his RB Leipzig day, Sabitzer had become a key man at Champions-League-final-reaching Borussia Dortmund. For Austria, though, he’d been the main man from day 1. Rangnick was intimately familiar with Sabitzer’s game, and he had immediately made him the heart of the machine he wanted to build.