good read. not sure when it was published but for sure a few years old.
Sinister Sinisa's moment of truth
Given that Red Star recently became the first Serbian side to win the double in successive seasons you might have thought that their coach, Bosko Djurovski, would be safe. But no. The indications from Belgrade are that he will be replaced this summer - quite possibly by former Red Star hero Sinisa Mihajlovic. Mihajlovic has been serving as an assistant to Roberto Mancini at Internazionale, but his appointment would still represent a considerable risk. It is not just that he has no managerial experience, it is that he is, well, Sinisa Mihajlovic.
Roy Keane has shown at Sunderland that tempestuousness as a player is no hindrance to being a good manager, but at least Keane's destructiveness tended to be directed at the opposition. They shared an unfortunate predilection for pursuing individual vendettas, but a display like Mihajlovic's for Yugoslavia against Slovenia in Euro 2000 would have been anathema to Keane. So petulant was Mihajlovic that when he was eventually sent off after an hour, it improved his side so much that they came from 3-0 down to draw 3-3. It is hard to see how Mihajlovic could ever accuse a player of not giving his all without laying himself open to accusations of hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, he has a certain charisma, a sinister charm that in the right circumstances could inspire a team. I find him, I confess, a fascinating character, which is not to say I wish to defend him. It is true that a racist with a gorgeous left foot is still a racist, but to look no further than his deplorable abuse of Patrick Vieira in that Champions League game in 2000 seems a crazily reductive way of treating a turbulent genius. And as a player he was a genius, as his Serie A record 27 goals from free-kicks attests.
I don't dispute that he fully deserved his punishment in the Vieira case - in fact, I think a two-game ban was lenient - but if Uefa really is committed to stamping out racism rather than following public opinion like a lap-dog, why was Mihajlovic's claim that he was responding to being insulted as a "gypsy" never followed up? In fact, come to that, how, after Anderlecht's Nenad Jestrovic had been sent off for racially abusing Momo Sissoko last season, was a leading British journalist able to say, without irony, "Oh, he's a Serb, they're all racist"? Not that that mitigates Mihajlovic's offence; it just indicates that racism is a rather more complex issue than it is sometimes presented.
In the Vieira incident, he seems to have been lashing out at a perceived slight: as he saw it, when his honour was besmirched, he had to redeem it. That was also the case when he spat in Adrian Mutu's ear while playing for Lazio against Chelsea in a Champions League game in 2003. "I want to make clear that I reacted in that way, because I was provoked in a dishonourable way - as I was with Vieira," he said. "That, for better or for worse, is the way I am."
His temper has always been prone to let him down. "As a kid I got into a lot of fights," he said. "I got beaten up and I beat people up. I fought with older children. I didn't get frightened. I remember there was a teacher who lived on our street who didn't want me in her class because she thought I would cause trouble. However, I was always an excellent student, one of the best. Later, that teacher told me she regretted not having me in her class because I was a very different person in school to how I was on the street."
Yet as that instinctive recourse to his childhood suggests, for all the snarls, there is a curious vulnerability about Mihajlovic. He admits to dreams in which he is attacked by snakes, and his memory of Red Star's 1991 European Cup quarter-final against Dinamo Dresden is of feeling the concrete of the tunnel shaking with the noise of the crowd as he leant against it to stretch before kick-off, and wishing he were back home in Novi Sad.
It is impossible to consider Mihajlovic and not think of his background, son of a Croatian mother and a Serbian father, born in Vukovar, a town on the Danube in the far east of Croatia near the Serbian border. Mihajlovic remembers it as a peaceful place with a population of 50,000 - some Croatian, some Serb, many, like him, of mixed ethnicity. He was brought up in Borovo Selo, a village on the outskirts of the town, an area rural enough that when he made the short move to Novi Sad he became known as 'Tractorman'. It was in Borovo Selo that there was the first use of ordnance in the war, as three Ambrust missiles were fired by Croat extremists in April 1991 - between the two legs of Red Star's European Cup semi-final victory over Bayern Munich.
As a child, Mihajlovic would annoy the neighbours by practising his free-kicks until late into the night, thumping his ball against the metal yard gates. "I soon realised," he said, "that the ball didn't want me to dribble it. So I just kicked it." By the time he was in his early teens his shot was powerful enough that his father had to replace the gate every few weeks. "I always wanted to be a footballer," he went on. "In Borovo there was a local newspaper that gave information about the factory and other things that were happening in the village. Once they did a survey and asked pupils at the school what they wanted to do when they grew up. I was only seven or eight, but even then I wrote 'professional footballer'."
Not that it was all about football. "I remember my friend Zlatko had a birthday party, and I went behind the curtain in the living room with a girl called Ancica. We looked through the window and then we kissed. It was my first kiss, but I wasn't uninformed. I had watched movies to see how it was done. I was afraid I might get it wrong, but everything happened spontaneously."
Mihajlovic clearly has fond memories of growing up in Vukovar, but by autumn 1991 it was under siege from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army (JNA). For weeks thousands were reduced to living in cellars without water or electricity, and snipers picked off civilians as they tried to flee. On November 19 the city, reduced to rubble, finally fell, and, despite the international community's efforts to organise an evacuation, several hundred Croats were massacred.
Four years later, as the war came to an end, the Croats returned. To what extent revenge was taken against the Serbs who remained is unclear, but what is certainly true is that the Vukovar Serbs, mindful - and constantly reminded by propaganda from Belgrade - of the atrocities committed against Serbs by the pro-Nazi Ustase Croat government in 1941, were terrified. Given their son's status as a hero of the local Serb community, Mihajlovic's parents had more to fear than most.
A few hours before the Croatian army arrived in Borovo Selo, Mihajlovic's parents were smuggled away. It is not known by whom, but the strong suspicion in Serbia is that it was by Arkan and his paramilitaries, the Tigers, who were certainly active in the region at the time. Mihajlovic returned to Borovo Selo six years ago. "It was wiped out - something like Hiroshima," he said.
"Our house was reduced to rubble. I stopped the car near my old school because I wanted to walk along the path I used to take every day. But the school wasn't there any more. When I went though the ruins of our house, I found an old poster of the Yugoslavia national team. There was a bullet hole where my heart should have been." When German television showed footage of the house shortly after the region was handed back to Croatia, several photos of Mihajlovic could be seen amid the stones. In each of them, the eyes had been cut out, a clear reference to Ante Pavelic, the Ustase leader who demanded a bowl of eyes be brought to him every morning so he could be sure the massacres of Serbs were progressing at a suitable pace.
A fortnight after Arkan's assassination in January 2000, for a Serie A game against Bari, Lazio fans decorated the Stadio Olimpico with banners dedicated to his memory. That may be coincidence - Arkan's right-wing militarism, after all, is just the sort of thing to appeal to Lazio's Ultras - but it seems likely it was Mihajlovic's tribute to the man who saved his parents.
Given all that, the knee-jerk dismissal of Mihajlovic as a loathsome Serb nationalist seems grotesquely simplistic. None of that makes him a nice man, but he probably does deserve a more sympathetic hearing than he often gets. Whether he will be a good manager or not, though, is another question entirely.
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2007/may/31/onsecondthoughtssinisamiha