Posted on 07/14/2018 6:37:38 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
How is it that four million Croats could build a team good enough to make it to the World Cup final, beating Argentina (43 million), England (53 million) and hosts Russia (144 million) along the way?
The country famously didn’t even exist the last time England made it to a World Cup semi-final in 1990.
The country declared independence in 1991, but was embroiled in the war in the Balkans as Yugoslavia split for several years. Most Croats were living in what is now Croatia, but a large minority existed in what are now Serbia and Bosnia especially. What ensued involved ethnic cleansing and bitter enmity between the nations which speak almost identical languages and had been part of same country for most of a century.
Star player Luka Modric, who was born in 1985, himself lived through some horrifying childhood events. He fled his hometown of Modrici at the age of six in the face of conflict. His father then joined the Croatian army – and his grandfather was shot, along with other elderly civilians, by a band of Croatian Serb rebels. His house was burned down.
“These were tough times,” Modric later recalled. “I remember them vividly, but it’s not something you want to think about. The war made me stronger.”
The war affected many of this generation of Croatian players directly. Mario Mandzukic grew up partly in Germany, where he began playing before returning to Croatia at the age of 10, while Ivan Rakitic was born and grew up in Switzerland, where he started his career with Basel. Vedran Corluka was born in Bosnia but fled for Croatia in 1992 amid the war.
The collective memory of a such a recent upheaval may have gone some way to motivate and unify the national team...
(Excerpt) Read more at inews.co.uk ...
Obviously you don’t know many persons!
That was a fun read...my church has a sister church in Split...so this really has been a fun ride.
Now, those uniforms are disturbing!
If the University of Tennessee had a soccer team, they would be orange squares instead of red.
“Kick ball is a foreign game of little interest to Americans”
Baloney-—check out the sports bars in the USA when the World Cup is on.
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And Sabonis was exactly the player I was thinking about! He was amazing in his prime.
I assure you that it is of no interest here. See ball, kick ball is for girls.
Purina should be one of their sponsors.
I hope Croatia wins although I care nothing for soccer.
I did work with a vascular surgeon who referred to himself as the “Croatian Sensation”! LOL!
:-)
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It is just my impression from watching Tennis, Soccer, Basketball etc. that Slavic people tend to be very athletic.
Fine examples of lean, fit Slavic men.
As a Polish-American, I wish my Slavic brothers all good fortune.
“I assure you that it is of no interest here.”
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Are you in a girls’ reformatory?
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Me too. Although I wish it could have been Poland in the final instead.
I have a few good friends from Croatia originally, so I’ve been on the Croatia bandwagon since Poland bowed out.
And *ahem* all of the players are Croatians.
"Why is Croatia, with a population of only 4 million, so good at Soccer?
Well, just as Puerto Rico provides such stellar ball players...they got nothin' better to do.
First of all, Soccer is a LOW SCORING GAME.
Most matches average 2 goals for the winning team.
In other words it is basically a defensive game, and it takes luck to score goals.
Observe the 2nd goal scored by Croatia against England. It was a head deflection which went 30+ feet right at the kicking foot of a team mate who kicked in a close distance goal.
And then again if you have no NFL Football, No golf courses, No Pizza joints on every corner, No movie industry, few TV sitcoms, No Baseball stadiums, few bowling alleys, not many singers who are popular world wide (Beatles, ABBA, Karen Carpenter class), No cruise industry, what can young men do except play a cheap sport like soccer?
I was thinking more of the Dominican Republic for baseball players.
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