Monday Footballblogging

It's jagshemash from Kazakhstan to Croatia, Andorra and England in the World Cup 2010 qualifiers: half of all three teams' Euro 2008 qualifying group have been drawn against each other again for their next outing. Their new opponents include Ukraine, Belarus, and of course the reluctant homeland of Mr Sagdiyev. (With dozens of Staines Town fans dressing as Sasha Baron Cohen's other character Ali G last week to cheer their team to a shock FA Cup win over Stockport County, expect a run on the moustache market before the Kazakhs arrive at Wembley.)

It'll mean another guaranteed encounter for British comedian Russell Brand with the 'terrifyingly simplistic call-and-response mantra' that put the wind up him at Wednesday night's game - Brand thinks of it as 'a needlessly fascistic form of chanting', and the Gazette suspects it knows it better as 'U boj, u boj, za narod svoj!'.

Chances are, it'll also mean another excuse for the Croatian team to put three goals past an overrated western-European rival, and increase their chances to have another verse of the country's unofficial footballing anthem Neka pati koga smeta named after them.

Baruni's 9-year-old hit has been dusted down for every tournament since 1998, when their manager Miroslav Rus wrote the song to celebrate Croatia's World Cup run where the Vatreni (including one Slaven Bilić) knocked Germany out 3-0 in the quarter-finals. Or as they remembered it:

'Rekli su nam da smo spori, pa su Njemce poslali
A mi smo im dali tricu, pa su kući otišli'

('They said we were slow, so they sent the Germans
But we scored three against them and they went home')

Almost a decade later, the song has become a rather less self-deprecating equivalent of England's Three Lions - although the latter never had occasion to metamorphose into a handball version (Croatia took gold in the 2003 World Championships), a Davis Cup final anthem, or a tribute to skiing siblings Janica and Ivica Kostelić. As the Gazette is sure to be reminded, that's probably because England hasn't even been in a position to sing one. Indeed, if a version about 'pa su došli Englezi' ('so the English came') isn't in the works yet, it's only a matter of time.

Literally, 'Neka pati koga smeta' translates as 'Whosoever it troubles, let him suffer' - but, football being football, 'F*** you if you're bothered' might be more like it.

Musicologists could point to 'Neka pati koga smeta' as the point where Baruni (formed as a neo-tamburica band on the model of Rus's previous project Gazde) cast off the folk waistcoats and crossed whole-heartedly into electrification. For the fans, it's proof that Croatian World Cup campaigns get the anthems they deserve: '98 is legendary on both counts, but Croatia's underwhelming follow-up at World Cup 2002 was accompanied by a just as underwhelming anthem involving pop singers Claudia Beni and Ivana Banfić. 'Hrvatice vas vole' ('Croatian women love you') might have lent credence to the saying that football is a continuation of war by other means (insofar as in both cases women kiss men goodbye to go to a far-off country, pray for them, and cry until they come back), but didn't inspire anything more than an early exit in the group stage.

A new generation of players in 2006, and a new generation of music: rapper Nered was brought in to sing 'Srce vatreno' (Fiery heart) with the Zaprešić Boys collective. Croatia... well, that's where the theory falls down, since they didn't make it through the group stage then either.

Nonetheless, they'd better have a good one lined up for 2010...

Rat Savezu!

Welcome another new Balkan blog: Bosnian Football Culture shares the experiences of a Turkish anthropologist in Sarajevo researching how Bosnians make sense of the complicated politics of football.

The Votes Are Not Quite In

There's high praise for Slaven Bilić, the manager of the Croatian football team, in Jutarnji list, where Vlado Vurušić applauds him as a model of 'Croatia as it should be' - making him 'the least typical manager Croatia has ever had.'

Bilić has a law degree, has dreamed of playing guitar with Bill Wyman, 'uncompromisingly suspended three important players [...] for sneaking out before the first qualifier against Russia to go drinking with some Dara Bubamara', and 'forced a nation which has often let itself be led by laughable and small-minded racism to love a dark-skinned Brazilian, Eduardo da Silva'. Although, if his work ethic is 'part of the mentality which, he once said, he obtained precisely by living in England' (Bilić is an ex-West Ham and Everton defender)... then please can we have him back once you've finished?

And if he's a socialist who even HDZ loyalists (read: much of the Croatian footballing establishment) have rallied around, shouldn't someone tell Zoran Milanović before Sunday's election?

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new for SDP (though you'd be best advised not to mention Severina in 2003), nor for HDZ, who went as far this year as to add singer Miroslav Škoro to their party list in Slavonia (Jutarnji list's latest poll predicts that he'll get in). The leading Croatian Serb party SDSS is usually a bit more circumspect, but now that Croatia shuttles its dvanaest bodova at Eurovision across the border as often as it does, there may be hope yet - or so the party apparently thought when it signed up Eurovision winner Marija Šerifović for a secret concert at the Zagreb Velesajam during its campaign.

Ništa Kontra Seve

The Zagreb suburb of Zaprešić isn't the happiest place for Severina at the moment, according to the SeveFanClub blog: after postponing a concert there due to food poisoning, the rescheduled concert was interrupted by Dinamo Zagreb fans throwing lighters at the stage when Severina began to sing...

...Nista kontra Splita (Nothing against Split), Dino Dvornik's smash hit from 1995 which quickly became an anthem for Dinamo's biggest rivals, Hajduk Split.

That'll be the problem, then.

(The extensive Hajduk songbook also includes: Mišo Kovač's Dalmacija u mom oku, a Hajdukised version of Magazin's Tri sam ti zime šaptala ime, a certainly unsanctioned version of Novi fosili's Za dobra stara vremena, and a version of the Ustaša anthem Evo zore, evo dana rewritten for the splitski huligani.)

Readers of SFC and Jutarnji list, which picked up the story today, largely seem to be asking what Severina was doing transgressing Croatia's north-south divide in the first place, although expecting Severina not to be provocative these days is a tall order.

The Gazette wonders whether this qualifies Severina, in the footsteps of Doris Dragović (but not quite Seka Aleksić), as the new Kraljica Torcide...?

Football Ethnopolitics: The Fontana Three

After spending the summer titillated by violent incidents in crowded coastal resorts, it's back to the metropolis for the Croatian tabloids, which have been able to start September with one of their favourite stories: a fight in a nightclub which plays narodnjaci, or turbofolk, or 'Serbian narodnjaci', or 'eastern trash [istočnjački šund]', depending on how judgemental a particular journalist wants to be.

This time around, the loxus in quo was the Zagreb club Fontana, site of the first of four such incidents in January 2006. The reason why the story's still current a week later, though, is that among the club's clients that night were three footballers from the Croatian national team who were halfway through a training camp ahead of their European Championship qualifier with Russia.

Or, as Jutarnji list had it:

'Although the three national players did not directly take part in the incident, the fact that they were wildly 'whooping it up' with the help of narodnjaci only three days before the Russia match is shameful for Croatian football. According to Fontana visitors, [Darijo] Srna, [Boško] Balaban and [Ivica] Olić were the main stars among the guests of the folk club where a Serbian narodnjački band was playing that night. Certain Croatian footballers have already shown their inclination towards the eastern melos in narodnjački clubs across Croatia.'

Ivica Olić, Darijo Srna and Boško Balaban were promptly dropped from the squad by the new manager Slaven Bilić, and the team scraped a 0-0 draw against Russia. Srna, at least, was missed, although the Gazette has a minor score to settle with Srna after wasting a slot in its Fantasy World Cup squad on him this year when it could have had Andrea Pirlo instead. Meanwhile, many fans of Aston Villa - where Balaban spent an underwhelming 2001/02 season - would be wondering what Balaban was doing in the national team at all, let alone being sent home from it again.

From time to time, it's almost seemed as if the Fontana Three were more at fault for going out 'to narodnjaci' than for doing it in the middle of a training camp, even though, as Davor Butković pointed out a few days later, they 'wouldn't have been any less guilty if the police had caught them at [alternative club] Tvornica, after a Pixies concert, and if, instead of whisky, they'd been consuming some of the opiates characteristic of the Zagreb 'urban' locale' - although Butković too noted the association between football and narodnjaci going back to Severina's 1998 World Cup anthem 'Djevojka sa sela' (Village girl).

In fact, there's now even a clash-of-cultures theory, as advanced by Milan Jajčinović in Večernji list this week, suggesting that Bilić reacted so strongly to the Fontana Three because their sub/cultural backgrounds are at odds (and, in passing, that Severina's music and the typical folk-club playlist are too entirely different things):

'We've known for a long time that our footballers aren't academicians. But we found out they're crazy for narodnjaci when they went to [well-known narodnjački club] Ludnica in Zagreb to celebrate leaving for [the World Cup in] Germany. [...] The musical differences [between] Slaven Bilić and his former team-mates and current players cannot only be understood on the level of taste. Cultural levels are involved as well.'

And moreover: 'When the team went out to narodnjaci to celebrate their qualification for the World Cup, the only one to refuse was Niko Kranjčar, saying that he didnt listen to that sort of music. Maybe they even teased him that he didn't know how to have fun, but the guy with a different education, a Viennese childhood and Zagreb refinement showed that his cultural matrix was something completely different from the matrix of the Balkan south-east.'

What may or may not be the last wsord on the matter belonged to the president of the Croatian Football Federation, Vlatko Marković, who praises Bilić today as 'a moral vertical. An intellectual. An exceptional footballer', and, needless to say, is also put on the spot about the narodnjački connection:

'The team until yesterday was a 'Dinaroid' one, hard and stubborn boys, many of them gastarbeiter kids. Maybe some of those folk [narodna] melodies, which we're inclined to immediately call 'narodnjaci' in a pejorative sense, were also a particular link with the old region. Not every narodnjak is Ceca - as it's often interpreted.'

But tell that to the authors of this poem...