Free Lifetime Supply of Beer = Motivation

Nearly everyone expected Austria to go down without a fight in this tournament. As we’ve said before, FIFA ranks them 92nd in the world — 48 spots beneath the next-lowest team, fellow co-hosts Switzerland.

And yet Austria put in a surprisingly credible performance against a weaker-than-expected Croatia on Sunday, going down 0-1 only due to an early penalty.

We at World Cup Blog genuinely believe that Austria always had it in them. They just needed the right motivation:

Free beer.

A Vienna brewery is promising a lifelong supply of free beer to any Austria player who scores a goal for the co-hosts in their remaining Euro 2008 group matches against Poland and Germany.

‘Maybe this is the kind of motivation that will give them the last kick our team needs to be successful,’ Ottakringer Brauerei AG chief executive Sigi Menz said in a statement, adding he would personally deliver the brewers’s supply for the first year.

We believe that with this kind of motivation, we’ll see eleven goals in the next game for Austria: One by each player, including the goalkeeper.

Of course, the final score will be Austria 11, Poland 175. (Or maybe Austria 14, when we take the substitutions into account.)

And think of the party the two teams would have afterwards.

(P.S. According to a German friend of Daryl’s, the literal translation for this ad is: “Why is “The Ottakringer” refreshing me just so much?” Which seems somehow appropriate here.)