ST PETERSBURG: As Croatia were playing hosts Russia in the quarterfinal of the World Cup in Sochi, a woman dressed in their national team jersey celebrated every one of their highs in the VIP box, even as FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Russia PM Dimitry Medvedev looked on in stoic silence.
After the game was won on penalties, that woman, Croatia President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, proceeded to make her way into the dressing room and celebrated with the players, still drenched in sweat.
While optimists would have looked at Grabar-Kitarovic’s antics and seen only her unbounded love for the sport, a lot of others saw it as a rather cringe-worthy attempt to earn political brownie points, with the presidential election just eighteen months away.
If that was the case, Grabar-Kitarovic could not have picked a better stage to try and earn those points; football in Croatia has always been more than just twenty-two players running behind a ball. Is there a country that was born out of a football match? For many Croatians, the Yugoslav Wars — that ended with the formation of their country — started with one.
In 1990, a riot broke out at Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, during a match between Croatian club Dinamo Zagreb and Serbian outfit Red Star Belgrade.
The enduring image from that is of Zvonimir Boban — future Croatia captain and one of their 1998 World Cup semifinal heroes — kicking a policeman while trying to save a Zagreb fan from being assaulted. Today, a plaque outside Maksimir Stadium depicts policemen dressed in riot gear. Its inscription reads: ‘To all Dinamo fans, for whom the war started on May 13, 1990”.
Of course, that is not entirely true. The Yugoslav Wars started a full year later, and both Red Star and Dinamo played out the entire season of the Yugoslav First League.
But many from Dinamo ultras Bad Blue Boys and Delije — their Red Star counterparts — who fought that night would go on to fight for opposite sides in the Yugoslav conflict, including the infamous Serbian war-criminal Arkan.
The 1998 team’s semifinal run was another unifying exercise for a nation which then was barely half-a-decade old. Like Grabar-Kitarovic on Saturday, Croatia’s first president Franjo Tudjman had lunch with the players in the buildup to their clash against France and visited them in their dressing room before the game.
Tudjman saw football as central to the exercise of nation-building; he frequently referred to Croatia’s athletes as their greatest ambassadors. Fast forward twenty years, and Boban and Davor Suker’s semifinal run has been matched by Luka Modric and Ivan Rakitic. Once again, football has turned out to be so much more than just a game for Croatians.
Before the World Cup started, Croatian football was in the grip of a corruption scandal that saw both Modric and fellow player Dejan Lovren being charged with perjury. If the reaction of the fans in Belgrade to Rakitic’s winning penalty was anything to go by, they have already been forgiven. The team’s run also comes at a time when Croatian nationalism is on the rise again; their 2014 World Cup qualifier against Serbia saw a return to the dark days of the Yugoslav Wars, with “kill the Serbs” being shouted from the stands.
“The images that we are currently seeing from all parts of Croatia suggest that the nationalist frenzy has begun, and everyday life is being subordinated to football,” says Dario Brentin, a researcher at the University of Graz, who is currently working on a thesis titled “Sport and Nationalism in Post-Socialist Croatia”.
“It reminds me personally of 1998, the first World Cup I really consciously followed. I cannot remember the last time national euphoria over football was so palpable.”It is perhaps no wonder that the loudest cheerleader of their World Cup run is their President, who is up for re-election in just over a year.
That ploy might just help her retain her office. After all, this is Croatia; a country born out of a war that was started by a football game.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com