The good Sindelah followed the city, whose child and pride he was to its death.

He was so inextricably entwined with it that he had to die when it did.

All the evidence points to suicide, prompted by loyalty to his homeland,

for to live and play football in a downtrodden, broken, tormented city

meant to deceive in Vienna with the repulsive respecter of itself.

But how can one play football like that,

and live when a life without football is nothing?

Well, welcome back to it was what it was.

I'm Rob Draper, and I'm here with Jonathan Wilson.

And we're into part two of our fascinating, intriguing and tragic story about Mathieu Sinderla,

the great Austrian footballer, and the backdrop of the 1930s and the

Anschliss with Nazi Germany. He died in January 1939 and that was Alfred Polga, the great

writer, recording his obituary, how his death really felt like the death of an independent

Vienna, the death of independent

Austrian, the two things fused together. So Jonathan, in part one of this series, which you

go back and listen to, if you haven't already done so, we went over the early life,

Mathieu Sindler, but also touched on the intrigue surround his death. And now here

we are at a point where Austria has united with Nazi Germany under Hitler and Sindler has died

shortly after that. What's going on? What's the reaction in Austria and what's a sort of deeper backdrop to that

politically as well? Yeah, I think we should say that Polgar is writing from a particular perspective

and as we'll find out, I don't think his conclusions that we can necessarily rely on. And I think

that's something that becomes pretty apparent pretty quickly that both

...