Former Slavic goalkeeper René Twardzik was a fan of Austrian Linz. My son plays there, explains

As a seventeen-year-old boy, René Twardzik tried his hand at Slavia Prague. He got to know the highest competition in the goal of Brno, Vítkovice and especially Opava. At the end of his active career he moved to Germany, where his three sons grew up. As a player of Austrian LASK Linz, Filip watched a Confederation League match in Eden. “I was rooting for LASK because my son is kicking for them,” Twardzik revealed, whom he was rooting for during the emotional battle between them.

His son was proactive enough to get his father tickets to the game, and together with his wife and granddaughter, he went to places he knew well. “I immediately thought of the old Eden as I remembered it, the wooden stand and the whole area around it,” René Twardzik said, not hiding his excitement.

“Everything came back to me,” he admits. “On the billboards, the legends Ivo Knoflicek or Luboš Kubík, with whom I had the honour of coaching,” he recalls the biggest personalities of the Red and Whites, whom he met in the 1987/1988 season, when he was at Slavia.

They were not the only participants in the 1990 World Championship in Italy. “I came to Slavia at the age of seventeen as a young boy, catching for a B team that played in the second league,” Twarduzik develops his story.

“I also trained with the A team, so I got to know other players like Míra Siva, Robert Žák, Míra Janů, Marián Takáč, Milan Veselý in goal and even Juraj Šimurka. I’m just sorry that I haven’t met anyone now,” he lamented.

However, he didn’t get a single league start for Slavia and didn’t join the ranks of such names as Plánička, Bokšay, Jonák, Dolejší, Stárek, Zlámal, Černý or Vaniak.

“I’m a bit sorry,” Twardzik says, “It would have been nice to catch at least one league game. But as I said, I came from Trinec at 17, a boy from the village. But I learned a lot in that short time and I have only good memories,” he says.

However, during the game against Linz he was cheering for the opponent. “Family comes first,” he puts his offspring first. “When the Czech national team or Czech clubs play against foreign clubs in European cups, I root for them,” he continues to show his patriotism. “But where the boys play, I cheer for those clubs,” he is clear on this point.

Otherwise, he is happy for Slavia and can appreciate its quality. “The difference in performance was clear, LASK played fearfully, Slavia won deservedly,” declares their former goalkeeper René Twardzik.