Dinamo coach Mario Kovačević ended a turbulent year at the head of the Croatian league with a real chance to pass the first round of the Europa League.
After great moments on the bench of Slaven Belupa, this summer he experienced the great honor of being him Zvonimir Boban called and enthroned on the Maksimir bench, and during October came a crisis when some called for his departure. And the boycott of media conferences.
Kovačević spoke about all this in the festive environment, and apart from emphasizing that Boban does not agree with his team, how Dinamo would have done better with Lille and Betis if they had played now than in the moments when his team was in crisis, in an interview with Večernji list it was detailed described his upbringing in wartime Sarajevo, write Sportske novosti.
I was born in a modest family in Doljania village 10 kilometers from Jablanica. It was my first club Turbine from Jablanica, I played there with the later legend of Bayern Hasan Salihamidzic, and his father was our coach.
The two of us bounced around in terms of quality in those first days of playing football. When I was 11 years old, the family moved to Sarajevo. Father got a job there, he was a mason, a stone cutter. The parents decided on moving to Sarajevo so that they could educate us more easily.
It was not easy for meneither to me, nor to my older sister, nor to my younger brother. We had to leave the society in our village and come to a big, unknown city. I remember that for the first month we just cried. But now I am grateful to my parents that we moved and that they made things possible for us. When we you In 1986, they came to SarajevoI continued to train football there, i.e. there I realized that football would be my life.
It is in Sarajevo lived through the war.
I went through everything there, from pioneer to senior. I was 16 years old when I started training with the first team. In Sarajevo, I played with Boris Živković, who later made a great career, was also the captain of Croatia… Now I train his son as well. It was the most beautiful period of my life.
Unfortunately, I was still finishing high school and one morning, I think he was April 6, 1992, the barricades and the war started, everything somehow suddenly became gloomy… It was two and a half very difficult years, but we did not give up. As much as we fought for our lives, I never gave up on football.
In Sarajevo, we trained in halls, in schools, and later in Skenderija. We also held war tournaments. For the first two or three months as Sarajevo players, we were in the Holiday Inn hotel, together with UNPROFOR. We thought that the war would pass quickly and that we would continue to play.
But no matter how hard it was, those are the days of greatest pride for me. They stayed forever and that one the most beautiful wartime friendships. We somehow managed to survive it all. I don’t like to remember those days, it was hard, but thank God I managed to survive.
After leaving Sarajevo I came to Varaždin and later started playing big football. I wanted to stay in Sarajevo after the war, but then I couldn’t continue to play big football there. Fate wanted me to end up in Varaždin.
He rarely talks about war times and finds it difficult.
The five of us, father, mother, older sister, younger brother and I, we lived in a 35 square meter apartmentand in that time of war we are every morning counted the bullets in the room. We lived in Briješće, a part of Sarajevo that was very exposed to the position from which the Serbs were shooting at us. We slept in the corridor, because that’s how the wall protected us from bullets.
Well, there were many situations in which we are almost killed. Once a shell hit the apartment, exactly where I was standing a minute before… The wall collapsed, my mother and brother were also wounded. But even then I went to training in Skenderi, which was the most protected gym in the city. Every day I traveled 11-12 kilometers from my apartment on foot or on my friend’s bicycle to the gym.
I’m literally alone could die on that road any daybut I didn’t think about it. Five of us go, one gets hit. All those deaths have become normal to us. On the way to training, I often saw people killed by sniper bullets. Yes, I lost a lot of friends. I don’t even know how many places snipers shot when I went to training.
Thank God, I was faster, that is, I was lucky. There were situations where I ran, a they would hit the man behind me. It’s hard to convey that we went through everything as a family together in the war. At one time, the situation was really hopeless, we had neither electricity, water nor firewood…
The war hardened me, I realized that there is nothing that a man cannot endure. I don’t like to remember that period, but it built my character the most. After surviving that, I can look at everything in life positively. Although, sometimes I think that Dinamo might be trickier than that, he said with a laugh.
(www.jabuka.tv | Photo: Vjeran Zganec Rogulja/PIXSELL)
