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Timesonline - To find the heart of Croatian
football, its past glories, you need not stray far from the centre of
Zagreb. In bookshops, a new hardback chronicle of the sport, post-war —
that’s the 1990s war — sits prominently in window displays. In sportswear
boutiques are the distinctive red-and-white tablecloth shirts. On a chic
street corner there’s the Boban Restaurant, set up by one of the country’s
most decorated footballers of the past decade. And in a cafe on the
principal square, a 69-year-old is giving a history lesson. He is Miroslav
Blazevic. For his gregariousness, you could describe him as a sort of
Adriatic Terry Venables. For his smoking — he lights up a long, thin
Davidoff about every 10 minutes — you’d rechristen him Nicotinovic.
In the short history of independent Croatia, his achievements make him a
deity. Blazevic led his country’s first expedition to a World Cup finals
eight years ago and his team finished with a bronze medal, a startling debut
for a small country fresh out of war. He recounts details of the campaign
like they were yesterday and between eccentric discourses on patriotism,
theorising about how oppressors, from Austrians to Hungarians to Serbs, have
made Croatian sportsmen genetically the most skilful on earth, he makes a
studied assessment of his latest successor, Slaven Bilic. “A hero,” says
Blazevic, “popular with everybody. He’s intelligent. He’s incredibly brave.
And a super gentleman.” This is the sort of reference that Croatia’s young
coach draws from most. Bilic is not in the business of cultivating flattery,
but nor is he ready to turn away any positives thrust in the direction of
his squad.
“Look, it’s good that the media and the fans like me, and so far it’s a
great job,” Bilic says. So far it is: Bilic’s Croatia have beaten the world
champions in Italy, 2-0, in his first match, an August friendly, and drawn
0-0 in Russia and overrun Andorra 7-0 at home in Group E of European
Championship qualifying. Before England’ s visit to Zagreb on Wednesday,
he’s all too aware that Croatia have never lost at home in 12 years of
competitive football. Bilic played for Croatia in the halcyon days, lining
up next to Zvonimir Boban, Robert Prosinecki and Davor Suker in the Blazevic
team at France 98, and made himself a good club career in the Premiership at
a time when an Eastern European arrival would still be thought a curiosity.
The more English football learn t about Bilic, first with West Ham United,
then with Everton, the more it discovered he really was a curiosity. He has
a degree in law, and his father had a strong political voice in the shaping
of Croatian identity in the old Yugoslav federation. Bilic played
centre-half with a flinty resolve; he also played guitar in a band and liked
heavy rock. Then he became globally notorious for one moment, reacting
theatrically when the France defender Laurent Blanc struck him in a World
Cup semi-final. Blanc’s action led to the Frenchman being banned from the
final, and Bilic being vilified.
“Yeah, and the whole of Europe, and England, especially, were like
puritans,” Bilic recalls. “Everybody acts. I only wanted to protect myself.
And in the end France won the final 3-0. It couldn’t have been better for
them. Maybe Chirac should give me a medal.” Croatians never judged Bilic for
one incident. Nor did his friends in England, where he left good
impressions, especially on younger colleagues, such as a 14-year-old kid
whom he used to meet in the Everton canteen in the late 1990s and gave his
jersey to, a boy named Rooney. And a lad who was understudying his position
at West Ham who, Bilic remembers, “used to stay behind often after training,
practicising and talking”. His name was Rio Ferdinand.
Bilic tells these stories to illustrate an instinct he has always had, to
engage with younger professionals. “I go back to when I started in Hajduk
Split and when older players hug you, talk to you, it means a lot,” he says.
“I tried to be the same when I was like a ‘star’ at West Ham; it cost
nothing and I enjoyed it.” He’d like to think he brings the same generosity
and encouragement to his Croatia players, a group who have lately learnt the
sharp distinction between Slaven the approachable head coach and Bilic The
Boss. During preparation for the match in Russia, three players slipped away
from camp in southern Slovenia and spent the evening in a Zagreb nightclub,
The Fontana. Bosko Balaban, Ivica Olic and Darijo Srna would have known they
were never likely to sneak in and out incognito. What they weren’t to know
is how Bilic would respond. He suspended the players, and promoted younger
men. He had made an important statement about his governorship. The Fontana
Three are back in the squad for Wednesday, pending Srna’s fitness, and Bilic
feels wiser about a task for which his own education had been two years in
charge of the under-21s. He understands he is considered young, at 38, for
an international manager, but notes he’s not unique — “look at Marco van
Basten (41) in Holland, Hristo Stoichkov (40) in Bulgaria” — and that
yesterday’s idols now find themselves international football’s readiest
candidates as coaches.
He has not called on Blazevic as a guru,
preferring to surround himself with contemporaries. Prosinecki, after a
playing career providing passes of beauty to strikers at Red Star Belgrade,
Real Madrid, Barcelona and latterly Portsmouth, has a role as assistant. So
does Aljosa Asanovic, whom Steve McClaren would remember as a midfield
sophisticate when he coached at Derby County. “The situation between us and
the players is unusual,” says Bilic. “I retired young but played with a few
of my players, Prosinecki with a lot of them. We’re friends but it’s not
difficult to take hard decisions as long as there’s always respect.” Might
respect not stray into awe? This Croatia have no brilliant Boban or
playmaking Prosinecki, and if the forward line had a Suker or an Alen Boksic
there wouldn’t be such wide regret that the Rangers striker Dado Prso had
elected to preserve his aching knees by retiring from national service.
“People always compare our team with this one,” sighs Bilic, “and it can
only leave a chip on the shoulder. Yes, we set a standard and now the nation
expects us every time to get to the semis. That’s not impossible, but you
must be realistic.” The realistic par for this tranche of the old Yugoslavia
is this: Croatia usually reach World Cup and European Championship finals,
but in the new millennium they always depart at the group phase.
I asked Blazevic if he detected a pattern, and wondered if Croatia’s
footballers of the 1990s, newly independent, had a fiercer sense of
patriotism. “That’s the real question,” says Blazevic, launching into a
diatribe about the Croatian government and their flaccid idea of what
constituted national pride. Bilic was more circumspect: “The players of our
generation knew each other from the age of 10, 11, 12. We were friends and
started to play for our country after we couldn’t play for three or four
years because of the war. We made careers abroad, so when we played for
Croatia, we had no other interest but in playing for a country that had just
come out of the war. We were a bigger thing for the people.”
He’s not exaggerating. Visitors to Zagreb’s Maksimir stadium quickly get
signposted to an intimate relationship between national sport and national
identity. Beneath a statue of soldiers outside the arena is a tablet that
reads: “Dedicated to fans of this club, Dinamo Zagreb, sometime Croatia
Zagreb, who began the fight against Serbia here on May 13, 1990.” The
national side’s record at the Maksimir speaks for itself.
“We’ve not lost at home in five qualification tournaments,” says Bilic.
“It’s not especially hostile, but the fans help us believe. England will be
our toughest opposition here, maybe ever. No team in the world is better
than England on paper. I watched England’s matches at the World Cup and they
were bad for a team of such potential. They have players that are the top in
the world in their positions: John Terry, Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley
Cole, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney.”
What’s Bilic got? The ageing Kovac brothers, Bundesliga journeymen. Niko
Kranjcar, of Portsmouth. Instead of Prso, a naturalised Brazilian, Eduardo.
“I wouldn’t swap Josip Simunic and Robert Kovac for Terry and Ferdinand,”
claims Bilic. “And I tell them that. It means a lot to them. Not only do I
say it to them, I say it in public. I love that side of the job, the
psychology, being a shrink.”
He absorbs a lot from American sports science, says he owes a good deal of
his management learning to ‘H’, as he calls Harry Redknapp, his coach at
West Ham, and picked up techniques from Blazevic. Back in Zagreb, Blazevic
tells how he saw a potential manager in the making, how the bumptious young
Bilic, long before the 1998 World Cup, advised Blazevic to change the team’s
formation in a qualifying game in Denmark. Blazevic then lights up another
Davidoff and relates the tale of the X-ray of Bilic’s troublesome hip that
doctors showed him just before France 98. “They told me, ‘This guy can’t
play, send him home’,” Blazevic recalls. “For the first time in my life, I
said to a player, ‘You decide’. Bilic played on, in pain, and was impeccable
the whole tournament. Boban was a king, Suker an ambassador, but without
Bilic we wouldn’t have finished as high as we did. And, remember, it was
Blanc who hit him, not the other way round.”
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