I spoke to former Hearts player Allan Johnston last season to get a grip on Sturm Graz after his son, Max, spent two seasons with the Austrians.<\/p>\n
And the man nicknamed Magic reckons Jambos are in for a treat in the Merkur Arena. He said:<\/p>\n
\u201cSturm Graz are a brilliant club. Max absolutely loved his time there – and I loved going out to watch him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have brilliant supporters, there\u2019s a real connection between the stands and the players.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not the biggest arena, I think it\u2019s 16,000 capacity, but the atmosphere is incredible and the fans have a good relationship with the club.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat took me back was how long the players would spend with the supporters immediately after the full-time whistle.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see teams go and clap their fans at the end, that is normal now, but with them it goes on for 10-15 minutes at least.<\/p>\n
\u201cMax would tell me how fans turn up before training too – sometimes thousands of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve got a lot of technical players. One of the them Rangers were interested in actually, the Georgia midfielder Otar Kiteishvili, he\u2019s the top player, very talented.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe can create something out of nothing and score goals out of nothing as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe can play as a number 10 or as a six aswell. They mix it up and a lot of the time they play a diamond in the middle of the pitch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey like to go forward but they like to counter attack too, they don’t mind not having possession sometimes and looking to break at pace.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I spoke to former Hearts player Allan Johnston last season to get a grip on Sturm Graz after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1032434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[1614,12765,12568,13,47959,21843,78418,12,1638,14,21838],"class_list":["post-1032433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-champions-league","tag-europa-conference-league","tag-footballblog","tag-headlines","tag-hearts-fc","tag-hibernian-fc","tag-motherwell-fc","tag-news","tag-scottish-premiership","tag-top-stories","tag-william-hill-scottish-cup"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116765660715107784","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1032434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}