Criminal training at 5 a.m.: Professionals have to toil on a building site!
Vienna (Austria) - The Vienna Capitals have fallen short of their own expectations so far this season. As a result, the Austrian ice hockey team is suffering from the fall blues in the absence of success.
The bitter 1:4 defeat last Saturday against bottom of the table Feldkirch was obviously too much for the nerves of the club officials - and so they decided to draw the consequences from the sporting misery and call the team to an extremely unusual training session.
As the Kurier reported, the players had to gather in the early hours of last Monday morning in front of the home ground in Vienna's Kagran district.
At 5 a.m., however, as part of a special training session, they did not go onto the ice to work extra shifts - but to a building site, where ice hockey sticks were swapped for shovels and wheelbarrows.
With this action, those responsible wanted the players to realize "how hard some people who visit us in the Steffl Arena have to work to be able to afford to go to the arena," said Capitals president Martin Reiss, explaining the decision in an interview with the Austrian daily newspaper.
Punitive training of a very special kind! Club management reacts to sporting downturn
The successor to long-term president Hans Schmid also explained: "It's our job not to disappoint these people, which inevitably happened, especially with the performance on Saturday. We want to build something here that our fans can be proud of. That includes fighting spirit, will, commitment and passion, which the team unfortunately lacked on Saturday."
In addition to Reiss, the action is also said to have been agreed with Head Coach Gerry Fleming and Sports Director Christian Dolezal.
Incidentally, it was not the only penalty imposed as a result of the eighth defeat in ten home games. The Sunday off has been canceled and two training sessions are now scheduled every day. This was reported by the news platform Heute.at.