Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  In the stadium more than two-thirds of the crowd are pro-Albanian. In one stand, behind the goal where some of the Albanian fans sit, they unfurl a banner that reads in English: ‘Proud to be Albanian’. The referee’s whistle could barely be heard over the roar of the crowd. As predicted, of the twenty-two players on the pitch, nine had either been born in Kosovo or raised by Kosovar parents, three for Switzerland and six for Albania, over half of their team. As Shaqiri had feared, he was in for a ferocious night, but not from the Swiss. Every time he, or Behrami, or Xhaka, touched the ball they were met with a wall of boos and screams. ‘Traitor!’ the ‘away’ fans chanted in Albanian. Shaqiri was unaffected by the hostility. He had walked out on to the pitch with the Swiss, Albanian and Kosovo flags stitched on to his boots for the occasion. When they played the national anthems he stayed silent through both of them. When the first goal came, it was scored by Shaqiri for Switzerland. He dummied, sent Albania’s Kosovo-born goalkeeper Samir Ujkani the wrong way and scored in the left-hand corner. He did not celebrate either.

  Granit Xhaka – the youngest of the players to sign Fadil and Eroll’s pledge who had also appeared to be the most likely to want to switch his allegiance to a Kosovo national team – seems to be struggling with the vitriol that is raining down on him. He is having a bad game. The boos and the chants only get worse when Gorkan Inler scores a second from the penalty spot. The biggest noise of the night comes from the Albanian fans when Xhaka is substituted. He had missed an open goal which would have made it 3-0 shortly before, but Switzerland have done their job and won the game, making it two World Cup qualification victories out of two. They are top of their group. The Swiss-Kosovar players meet with their Albanian opponents in the centre circle and embrace. Shaqiri swaps his jersey and leaves the field with an Albanian shirt on his chest.

  Fadil and Eroll watched the match from the stands with a mixture of pride and uneasiness at the negative chanting from the Albanian section. Shaqiri, though, had led by example. ‘We are proud,’ Eroll says, still sitting in his seat, as Fadil is again mobbed by fans. ‘We must learn that Albanians can play for other national teams.’ The big decision, though, takes place a few hours’ drive down the road, in Zurich, at FIFA’s HQ. ‘We are waiting for the decision of the executive committee,’ Eroll says. It is surely only a matter of time, he believes, given Sepp Blatter’s staunch support for the campaign. He sounds excited rather than nervous. It will be, he reasons, another important move towards recognition. ‘After that, step by step, more countries will recognise us. Maybe we could play with a symbol, under a UN or UEFA flag? It is unbelievable how we can have such talented players without a national team.’

  The controversy that surrounded the match doesn’t end at the final whistle. A Swiss TV commentator has to apologise after accusing Granit Xhaka of missing his chance on purpose because he felt more Albanian than Swiss. A few hours after the game it is also reported that Xhaka has taken to Facebook to apologise to the Albanian nation, insisting that he isn’t a traitor as had been suggested because he had, in fact, missed the chance on purpose. The post ended: ‘Proud to be ALBANIAN’. The comments were picked up by the Swiss press and went around the world. None of it was true. It was a fake account. Xhaka had written no such words, but the speed with which it was believed and spread across the world told its own story.

  Fadil and Eroll took their petition and handed it to Sepp Blatter before the FIFA executive committee meeting a few weeks later. They were hopeful. And why not? They had a unique, high-profile collection of signatures and the support of the most powerful man in football. True, the issue of Kosovo had been taken off the meeting’s actual agenda, and replaced by an ‘XXX’. But they had been made promises. What could go wrong?

  The executive committee held their meeting and Kosovo was not discussed. The next day Sepp Blatter flew to Russia, to announce the host cities for the 2018 World Cup finals. There Blatter embraced the man who was, more than any other, preventing Kosovo’s recognition as a sovereign state: Russian president Vladimir Putin. The issue of Kosovo’s national football team had been postponed for another, less embarrassing day.

  9

  CROATIA, SERBIA

  Belgrade, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. May 1991.

  It was 8 May 1991 and 7,000 people had gathered at the Partizan Stadium in Belgrade for the final of the Marshal Tito Cup. The match was between Hajduk Split, a team from the Croatian city on the Adriatic Sea, and Red Star Belgrade, a team that had once embodied the Yugoslav ideal by featuring players from each of its constituent socialist republics, but which would later become steeped in Serbian ultra-nationalism.

  The cup was named after the communist dictator who had held together Yugoslavia’s ethnically and religiously diverse republics after the Second World War. It had been something of a success, too. Compared to the communist repression in, say, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavs had enjoyed greater personal and economic freedom. Tito had been revered by many Yugoslavs, too, something that couldn’t be said of General Jaruzelski in Poland, or the egregious Ceauseşcu in Romania. But after Tito’s death in 1980, the ancient enmities that had been buried under his banner of state federalism began to rise to the surface. In 1991 those enmities were about to explode into a vicious conflict, the like of which hadn’t been seen in Europe for nearly five decades. Civil war was breathing down their necks.

  The two teams lined up for the national anthem. The Hajduk Split players didn’t sing it. They wore black armbands in that game, to honour twelve Croatian policemen killed in Borovo Selo, a suburb of Vukovar, itself on the Croatian/Serbian border. It was a Croatian city, but with a large Serbian minority. The two communities had co-existed under Tito, living next to each other, working together, inter-marrying, as always happens with proximity in times of peace. But Vukovar was a city where the opening fault lines of the coming civil war were to swallow it whole. The Serb and Croat communities had turned on each other. The Borovo Selo incident was sparked when the local Croatian police force tried to replace a Yugoslav flag with a Croatian one. A local Serb militia intervened and arrested them. When more Croatian police were sent to free them, fighting broke out and the twelve were killed, alongside three Serbs. Temporary calm was only restored when the army intervened. It was just the start, and more was to follow: tit-for-tat murders, provocations and massacres. In Vukovar in 1991 you were either a Serb or a Croat, and nothing in between.

  Yet Siniša Mihajlović did stand between both, even as he stood with his Red Star Belgrade team-mates. His perm was fashioned short at the sides and long at the back. It bounced as he walked as if attached by springs. Even the miserable downpour that had doused the Partizan Stadium couldn’t dampen its enthusiasm. Mihajlović was one of the most promising players to emerge from Yugoslavia’s impressive conveyor belt of talent. He’d starred for FK Vojvodina, a small, unfancied team from the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad which had broken the monopoly of the ‘big four’ clubs in Yugoslav football and managed to win the league title two seasons before. To put it into some kind of comparison it would be similar to Norwich City building a team that beat Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea before clinching the league title. That success had brought Mihajlović to the notice of a team that was rightly heralded as one of the finest in Europe. In a few weeks’ time Red Star Belgrade would play in the final of the European Cup against Marseille. Hajduk Split hadn’t won the Yugoslav league since the 1970s, but it, too, had a young team of talented players who would emerge to achieve greater things, players like Slaven Bilić, Robert Jarni, Alen Bokšić and their young captain Igor Štimac. Still, the Marshal Tito Cup final was against a Hajduk Split side that was a shadow of the great team of the 1970s and would clearly be a whitewash.

  Mihajlović already had a reputation as a hothead who had thrown himself into Red Star Belgrade’s Serb nationalist identity. But he wasn’t fully accepted at first. He was was born in Vukovar to a Croatian mother and a Serbian f
ather. Much like a born-again Christian, he was eager to prove beyond doubt his dedication to the cause. He knew many of the Croatian players on the pitch that day, having played with them in local clubs in and around Vukovar. They had all once even considered each other friends. But not any more.

  That cup final was a remarkable match for several reasons. For one, Hajduk won the game 1-0 thanks to a solitary goal from Bokšić, the future Croatia international striker who would go on to star for Marseille and win the Champions League with them. Exactly three weeks later, Red Star Belgrade would win the European Cup, after beating Marseille in the final. Red Star had been a revelation in the competition, defeating Bayern Munich in the semi-finals. Mihajlović scored in a sensational second leg in Belgrade. A comical injury-time own goal saw Red Star qualify for the final. A pitch invasion followed and the turf was torn to pieces for souvenirs. The final itself, though, would turn out to be one of the worst in living memory, something that even Mihajlović would later admit. After playing expansive football en route to the final, Red Star seemed content to wait for penalties, grinding out a 0-0 draw. They won the shoot-out 5-3 and Mihajlović was one of the five trusted to take a spot-kick.

  Yet the Hajduk−Red Star match is remembered for other reasons: a battle on the pitch between Mihajlović and Štimac that is today still wrapped in the myths and half-truths of war propaganda. While Mihajlović had embraced Red Star and everything that it stood for, Štimac was an avowed Croatian nationalist who would later lament that he didn’t get the chance to fight in the civil war. Mihajlović careered around the pitch on that dreadful wet May afternoon like a man possessed, launching into tackles that today would almost certainly have resulted in red cards. Štimac was on the receiving end of almost all of them, but he gave as good as he got. One Hajduk Split player had to be substituted as a result of a Mihajlović tackle and a brawl broke out between the players as he lay on the turf. Štimac was in the middle of it and the referee eventually sent off both men. Words were spoken between the two, words that to this day still engender speculation in the Serbian and Croatian press. Some say death threats were exchanged. Others, promises that home towns would be destroyed in the coming war. Either way, it was the start of a two-decade feud between the two men, a feud that embodied something of Yugoslavia’s own bloody demise.

  The Marshal Tito Cup final would also be one of the last matches that any Croatian or Slovenian team would play in Yugoslav football. Full, open war descended and Croatian and Slovenian independence was declared soon after, although the league limped on for one more season without them. Vukovar was destroyed. The 7,000 fans watching in the Partizan Stadium didn’t know it yet but they were witnessing the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia.

  **

  Zagreb, Croatia. March 2013.

  Igor Štimac is in a private, sound-proof dining room. He closes the door behind him, sits down and leans forward, talking in a low and powerful growl. ‘It doesn’t need lots of explanation,’ he says with an intense, quiet violence. ‘Everyone in the world knows what was going on twenty years ago.’ Štimac looks disarmingly similar to the young man who had captained Hajduk Split on that afternoon in 1991. His hair is a little thinner, but he has always looked like a heavyweight boxer one fight away from his last, even in his twenties when he was captain of the newly independent Croatia national team. He is now its coach and is preparing for a World Cup qualification match that needs little introduction. Croatia have been drawn against Serbia and will play in Zagreb in a few days’ time.

  On paper Croatia are the favourites. Outside the door the Croatian national team is having lunch. I spotted Real Madrid’s Luka Modrić perusing the buffet alongside Bayern Munich striker Mario Mandžukić. Croatia are currently ranked ninth by FIFA and can lay claim to being one of the best teams in the world. Serbia, however, isn’t an opponent to be judged by form or rank. Instead, a clash between the two revives memories of the recent past. It brings the war and everything that was won, as well as everything that was lost, into sharp focus. ‘We are trying to isolate my team from the surrounding euphoria,’ Štimac says of the intense media pressure his players have been put under since the draw was made. No one wants to be part of the team that lost to Serbia and it’s not just the unrealistic expectations of Croatia’s tabloid journalists. It is also, as Štimac points out, the expectations of ‘the supporters and all those people that lost their families and homes in the war’. It is just eighteen years since the end of the Yugoslav civil war, recent enough in the collective memory to remember a time before, during and after. Štimac lived through all three and had his own demons of that time to take care of in the lead-up to this match. While he takes charge of Croatia, Serbia is being coached by Siniša Mihajlović, Štimac’s old enemy, a man he hasn’t spoken to for twenty years, since that day in Belgrade in May 1991 when they were both sent off in the Marshal Tito Cup final.

  Štimac grimaces when I ask about that match. Of course, his memories of that game in 1991 are happier. He was sent off, but, as captain, he lifted the cup after the final whistle. He still feels injustice for being sent off and especially for being accused, falsely he claims, of pulling Mihajlović’s hair. ‘You have to take the game and watch it,’ he urges me. I have done, and it appears that, on this point at least, Štimac is telling the truth: he did not indecently assault Mihajlović’s magnificent mullet. ‘That was one of the best leagues in Europe,’ Štimac recalls. ‘We had the European champions, and we beat them in the final.’ The reason for its strength, according to Štimac, was a rule that prevented any player from leaving to play abroad until he was twenty-eight. ‘You can imagine how big the quality was. Compare to now, six countries out of that one. Now we have to work with young talented players for ten years, they play one season and go to a big club,’ he says, sounding almost rueful for the league that was lost. ‘Now it is corporate football.’ Yet, in 1991, the spectre of war was there and everyone knew life would change for ever. ‘It was at the door,’ Štimac remembers. ‘It was knocking on the door.’

  The Marshal Tito Cup final was Hajduk Split’s only chance of silverware that season. They were lagging behind Red Star in the league, but Red Star had one eye on the European Cup final. Yet the match attained much more importance for both sides because of the rising tensions. It was decided by a single Alen Bokšić goal. Bokšić is here in Zagreb, too, as Štimac’s assistant. But Štimac still maintains he did little to deserve his sending off. ‘We had a few tackles on each other and then the second tackle he got sent off,’ Štimac recalls. ‘In the mess caused by his tackle I was staying in the middle keeping the players aside. The referee decided to send me off!’ The red card wasn’t controversial. But what was said between the two that sparked such a violent confrontation was. ‘There are lots and lots of false stores that were created,’ he says. ‘That I was fighting him, that I said something to him, he said something to me, that I pulled his hair.’ A few years after the incident Mihajlović remembered it differently. ‘In one moment we were face to face,’ he said in an interview. ‘He leaned to me and said, his voice full of hatred: “I pray to God your whole family in Borovo gets murdered!” At that moment I could have killed him with my teeth.’

  Štimac denies he said anything at all. ‘Siniša was very young then,’ he says of his memories of Mihajlović at that time. ‘But Siniša’s problem was that he obviously had to prove something to others because his mother was, and still is, Croatian. His father Serb. So you have to put that question to him. What was there to prove? To whom? And why?’ Mihajlović’s mixed parentage had certainly been a problem at his new club, where Red Star’s officials and the club’s notorious ultras, the Delije, had been uncomfortable with his Croatian heritage. The Delije were led by Željko Ražnatović, better known as Arkan. Arkan would rise to become a powerful Serb warlord and his bloodthirsty paramilitary group – Arkan’s Tigers – was, in an early incarnation at least, drawn from the ranks of the Delije. They would become one of the most feared f
ighting forces during the civil war. Mihajlović was a close friend of Arkan, who had taken him under his wing and offered him protection while he was in Belgrade. Arkan even informed Mihajlović when Serb forces had captured his uncle, an officer in the Croatian army. The tip-off allowed Mihajlović to arrange his release before he was executed.

  When the Yugoslavia that Tito built was breathing its last in 1992, both players moved to Europe. Štimac would end up in England playing for Derby County and West Ham United. Mihajlović thrived in Italy and became one of the most feared midfielders in the world. The Yugoslavia team continued on in various guises – from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to Serbia and Montenegro to, finally, just Serbia. As that team was morphing to fit the changing political world, the Croatia team had taken a leading role in moulding its fledgling nation, which declared independence in 1991. ‘We were lucky to be promoters of a young country. It was a special pride,’ says Štimac of those early years. ‘We were singing the Croatian national anthem and flying our flag around the world.’ Praise came from higher quarters, too. ‘Our first president Franjo Tudjman said that the Croatian football team had done much more than all politicians together will ever do for Croatia.’

  Before they were drawn in the same group for 2014 World Cup qualification, Croatia and Serbia had never played each other before, at least not in Serbia’s current form. In 1999, with Croatia flush from finishing third at the 1998 World Cup, Štimac and Mihajlović faced each other when Croatia and what was then called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – essentially Serbia and Montenegro – were drawn in the same qualification group for the 2000 European Championships in Holland and Belgium. It was only four years since the end of the fighting and a few months after Belgrade had been under NATO attack to punish Slobodan Milošović’s new war against the Kosovars in the south of the country. ‘The wounds were still fresh then,’ Štimac remembers of the atmosphere that surrounded that game. The Croatia team travelled to Belgrade under army escort. ‘There was lots of pressure, the NATO attacks on Belgrade, it was difficult to go there and play that game.’