There are easier ways to become hardened, but Croatia’s soccer players, who came of age during a civil war, had no choice in the matter.
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Five men on the team that will meet France in the World Cup semifinals helped win a youth world championship for Yugoslavia in 1987. Just four years later, Croatia would secede and then battle fiercely to keep its freedom, enduring a destructive six-month siege and years of sporadic hostilities.
Most of the current national team players were in their late teens or early 20s when the war began. One, reserve forward Petar Krpan, served in the military. Others lost dear friends. But amid the shelling and the casualties, Croatia was determined to demonstrate that its sporting spirit was literally kicking and well.
“We are a football nation, and it was very important for us to tell them that football was still alive, that we still existed,” defender Igor Stimac said. “The people who were leading our country thought it was the best way for us to fight. I feel privileged to have had a chance to fight with my job.”
Stimac can recall club matches and team bus trips interrupted by bombing raids. Between games, he would wait anxiously for news of his brother, a 17-year-old medic. When Stimac first signed with the English club Derby County, which he now captains, he got a written death threat from a Serbian fan in London who took offense at his politics.
“I think there is nothing to be afraid of now on the green pitch,” Stimac said.
It has been an impossibly long voyage from those frightening times to the courtyard of the 12th-Century Chateau de Pizay, where the tranquility is broken only by an occasional rooster’s cry.
Two other teams with opposite destinies previously bunked in here: the last-place-bound United States, whose players complained about the deafening quiet of the surrounding vineyards, and France, which will face Croatia Wednesday.
This spot already has brought luck to the Croatians, whose biggest competitive challenge this week may be to aspire to something higher when they have already surpassed expectations.
Croatian President Franjo Tudjman told the players as much when he lunched with them the afternoon of their 3-0 victory over Germany Saturday. “He said we are already knights of Croatia, and that everyone is proud of us,” defender Slaven Bilic said.
“He was like a little child after the match,” Bilic confided. “He is crazy about soccer.”
Croatia has seen more than its share of athletes sprout tall in the 1990s: basketball’s Toni Kukoc and Dino Radja, French Open winner Iva Majoli and three-time Wimbledon finalist Goran Ivanisevic. Current Croatian captain Zvonimir Boban and Ivanisevic are hitting buddies whose games always start at 30-0 in Boban’s favor.
The country won its first Olympic gold medal in 1996, in team handball.
“We are not just producing the great sportsmen, but also great scientists,” said Bilic, who has an undergraduate pre-law degree to go along with his 40 international appearances. “But we don’t have the money or the computers like you do.”
To a rumor that Croatian fans had chartered a fleet of planes to come see their team, he said, “We don’t have 20 planes.”
The country does have a long soccer history under different incarnations, however. Croatians have played the sport for 120 years and dominated many past Yugoslavian national teams. Seven players on Croatia’s roster actually appeared for Yugoslavia at one time or another; and two, Robert Prosinecki and Robert Jarni, played in the 1990 World Cup.
Boban was left off the team for an incident that made him an underground hero. In May 1990, during an altercation between Croatian and Yugoslavian fans at a club match, Boban punched a Yugoslavian police officer whom he thought was being abusive.
After Croatia gained its independence in 1991, there was a year’s delay before FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, recognized its federation. That was too late for the Croats to enter qualifying rounds for the 1994 World Cup.
In the meantime, however, the United States scheduled a friendly match against the team, called the Croatian All-Stars in the absence of FIFA’s formal blessing. That gesture is still remembered and appreciated by the Croatian team, according to midfielder Aljosa Asanovic, who scored the historic first goal in the U.S. match.
“It was a start–it is coming, a new flag, a new people who really love this country,” said Asanovic, who once played alongside France’s playmaker Zinedine Zidane at the French club Cannes.
The Croatian team asserted itself on the world stage for the first time in the 1996 European championships, but was eliminated by Germany in the quarterfinals after Jarni was ejected with two yellow cards.
The helmsman then, as now, was 63-year-old Miroslav Blazevic, an eccentric former club coach in Switzerland and France. Blazevic regularly consults an astrologer–his seer in Zagreb sent him a fax Saturday afternoon predicting a win–and used to wear a jaunty white scarf around his neck on the sidelines even in the dead of summer.
Blazevic’s favorite fashion accessory during this tournament has been a stiff-brimmed French gendarme’s hat. This has been interpreted, alternately, as a tribute to the gendarme beaten into a comatose state by German hooligans last month or a darkly humorous reference to an interlude in late 1995 when Blazevic was implicated and briefly jailed but never formally charged in a French game-fixing scandal.
The coach has remained mum on his choice of headgear but not on his pride in his players. They say he is a nonpareil orator and motivator who, because he shares their culture, has been able to help them develop their own style.
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“We have found the balance between technique and physical play,” Bilic said. “Four or five years ago we were very skillful, but against very physical sides, we were struggling.”
Croatia has given up just two goals in five matches in this World Cup. Bilic, asked whether the team’s new toughness is mental or muscular, pointed to his head.
As the match came to a close Saturday night, the Croatian fans in the north end zone at Gerland Stadium unfurled enormous flags that covered entire sections of seats and lit highway flares that doused them in an unearthly red neon glow. “Auf Wiedersehen, Auf Wiedersehen,” they sang lustily to the dispirited Germans.
The players, who grew up unsure if they would ever compete under their sovereign colors, understand this demonstrativeness.
“We knew the whole world was watching,” Bilic said. “The whole world knows about Croatia now, and before the tournament, they didn’t.”
Stimac said he hopes his country’s fortunes mirror the team’s. “If anyone tries to come and stop this happiness, we will fight them,” he said.