SKN St Pölten moved away from the relegation battle with a comfortable 3-1 victory over Liefering at the Red Bull Arena on Saturday. The visitors took all three points in the 2. Liga's sixth round, despite arriving with a poorer record. Liefering sat third with ten points while SKN occupied twelfth place with six.
And here's the thing — the match turned on its head in the twenty-first minute. Lassina Traoré received his second yellow card for Liefering and was sent off, leaving the hosts with ten men. By then SKN had already taken the lead through Gabriel Jesus David in the eighteenth minute, capitalising on a moment of opportunity.
SKN made no mistake after the dismissal. Said Nisic doubled the advantage in the seventy-seventh minute before Luis Hartwig added two goals to put the game to bed early in the closing stages. The striker finished with a brace, scoring in the eighty-second and ninetieth-plus-two minutes. Liefering never got going after losing their man.
Both managers made changes in an attempt to shift momentum. Liefering brought on three players in the sixty-third minute — Jakob Pokorny, Riquelme Reis and Miha Matjasec — while SKN introduced Marc Stendera in the sixty-ninth minute. The substitutions did little to alter the pattern of the game, which SKN controlled.
Statistics tell the story of a match where one side dominated possession and created more chances. SKN held 57 per cent of the ball and registered seventeen shots on target compared to five for Liefering. The visitors completed 431 successful passes from 491 attempts, while the hosts managed 284 from 371. Such numbers reflect a team that kept the game under control.
The result moves SKN further from trouble while Liefering's hopes of mounting a serious challenge diminish. Six defeats and losses would have followed a different outcome, but Hartwig's double ensured the visitors left with something meaningful.
