Marc Janko's 'special game' and the four goals in one half that revived his career

If there’s ever been a better time to be Marc Janko, he’s not letting on. “That’s like choosing a favourite child,” says the Austria captain and Sydney FC marquee striker, with the contented sound of a man for whom things are going quite nicely right now.

Why wouldn’t he sound that way? His country is on the brink of a history-making Euro qualification; his club heads into the finals with a schwing that has eluded them in recent years; and after a sweltering second half of the season, he has a foot in the A-League’s golden boot.

On top of all that, he’s discovered the beach. “Almost all of our spare time, we go out to the beaches,” he says. The north shore, Bondi, even those within the shelter of the heads, like the one at Shark Bay, which is where he is on this afternoon. “I’m not used to living in cities where there is beach around. So it’s not something which is very common for me, and I’m enjoying every second I can get.”

It wasn’t always this good. There have been clubs that left him to gather dust, and national coaches who overlooked him for key games. The worst time, though, came in his second year as a professional. The Euros were coming to Austria, and a young Janko was starting to make a splash at a mighty new club called Red Bull Salzburg. Then it all came tumbling down in a tackle that sent him straight to the surgeon’s table. When the anaesthetic wore off, he woke up to a downcast doctor and the news he may never walk properly again.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he would have to wait almost a year – to when he could finally get back on a treadmill again – before they would know just what the long-term damage was. It put everything into a new perspective. He had to walk again before he could even think about running, and football – the thing he’d poured his life into until that point – was no longer his priority. “That really crushed my world,” he says. As much as he tried to stay positive, it wasn’t always possible. Yet through it all, he refused to think about a life without the game.

“I didn’t want to focus too much on plan B, because I tried [with] all of my power to focus on plan A, which was to play football again. I thought to myself, if it’s not working out, if I still have pain after my first run, then I can focus on plan B, but I never spent a second on thinking about plan B.”

Evidently, he survived that first run, and his fledgling career blossomed once again. His team, the first of the energy drink manufacturer’s controversial football franchises, was dominating the Austrian league and Janko was beginning to do the same. But as good as he was, it wasn’t enough to see him picked for the Euros, in which Austria, as co-host, would be making their debut appearance. It is, so far, the only way they’ve managed to qualify.

Desperate and frustrated, Janko poured his energy into showing what he could do at club level. But even there he struggled to win the favour of his coach, in this case, the Dutchman Co Adriaanse.

That all changed one afternoon in Rheindorf. Janko calls it “that special game”. Understandably so, though it was actually just a single half. “From the first day we came together, [Adriaanse] always wanted to push the striker he got from Holland into the first XI. And he used every excuse to let him play instead of me,” Janko says. “At that time, I had a remarkable amount of goals on my side, but I was coming out of a international game break, and he said, ‘Oh, you look tired. You don’t look sharp enough. So I will start the other guy’, his favourite player.”

Trailing 2-0 at the break, the coach went to his bench. By the game’s end, Janko had four goals to his name, turning the deficit around off his own boot. “From that moment on, I always played, no matter what. That was a fantastic season. I really smashed so many goals into the net and it was really amazing, actually one of my best seasons ever. It was really crazy.”

If the goals were coming regularly beforehand, they were unstoppable now. In 7.5 games, he found the net a stunning 19 times. He finished the season with 39, the highest tally in Europe that season and a near record for the Austrian Bundesliga. Golden Boot? League title? Player of the season? He got them all.

He produced a similar burst of goals for Sydney FC after the Asian Cup break. This time though, it wasn’t anger driving him. After two seasons rotting on the vine at Trabzonspor in the Turkish league, Janko says it took him until the break to get match fit and rediscover his rhythm. He also needed to recalibrate his radar, having hit the woodwork at least half a dozen times early on.

Then there’s the key ingredients of time and stability. “The foundation of success is consistency. [In the Austrian team] we are together now for almost four years, almost the same team, we have the same coach, we have the same squad, everyone is knowing what the guy next to him is doing, what he can expect from him. In Sydney, we have that as well now. The club installed Graham Arnold to build up a whole new team spirit. I don’t know how it was before, but I just can say at the moment, it’s a great feel in the dressing room; great characters, great players.”

Janko is yet to announce where he’ll be next season. Having been a key part of Arnold’s detoxification of the Sky Blues, it may very well be in Sydney. If so, don’t go looking for him on the beach. Look to the waves instead. He’s interested in learning to surf, though the potential for injury and fatigue has held him back from doing it during the season. There’s one other issue too: sharks.

“That’s also something that is nagging me. I really have a deep respect of sharks, and I don’t want to challenge my fate. I don’t want to be that unlucky bastard.”