How Dalic’s men are punching above their weight on big stage
ONCE the celebrations had calmed, Dejan Lovren put some humour into the discussion to go with all the other smiles.
The centre-half stopped for quite a while in the Luzhniki Stadium mixed zone after Croatia’s World Cup semi-final victory over England to discuss it all, and was inevitably asked just how his country keeps doing it.
“I would say we have good mothers and fathers,” Lovren laughed. “They are making good love.”
And yet, by football standards, they’re not making enough love — or shouldn’t be. As has now been mentioned so much, Croatia has a population of just 4.3m.
That makes them the smallest country to reach a World Cup final since Uruguay, and that was a deciding round-robin game rather than a final, when the football world was a much smaller and very different place.
To put it into better context, not since 1962 has a country even just 8m people bigger than Croatia — Czechoslovakia — made this biggest of football fixtures.
What Zlatko Dalic’s men have done should not be possible in the modern game.
The reasons for that should be obvious. It’s simple maths. The bigger the population, the greater chance any football culture has to produce quality professionals. Challenging this is becoming even more difficult in an era when all of the major western European nations are using their size and wealth to industrialise talent production.
The reasons Croatia have managed this and keep creating these sides is far from obvious. There’s nothing simple about it, especially when you consider the chaos their federation has been engulfed in, with Lovren and Luka Modric both having been accused of perjury in the corruption trial of former Dinamo Zagreb president Zdravko Mamic.
And that’s before you even get to the fact this is a country still recovering from a war that conditioned the early lives of all of the current generation.
Many might point to the sheer luck of having two of the best midfielders in the world in Modric and Ivan Rakitic (below), but there’s no luck about it if they’re part of a line of technically excellent players.
It shouldn’t follow logically. So many key figures in Croatian football say “there is no explanation” for that, the infrastructure is “faulty and frankly amateurish even at the top level”. They can’t point to any single design that is the source of all this quality.
Former international player and manager Igor Stimac said: “The Croatian coaching model is based on developing individual skills, perfect ball control and a sense for the game.” This is one point that illustrates how Croatia’s size might actually work for them in an almost unique way.
The country’s long-standing prizing of No.10 playmakers and playing the right way may have organically perpetuated a culture that just keeps creating coaches who buy into this approach, and thereby players trained by it.
Some of it may also go back to the past, and the influence of a communist system that so prized the value of sport. They constantly overachieve in other areas, especially the Olympics, as Lovren was keen to point out.
“I think it is our mentality,” the centre-half said. “We went through a lot of s***, wars, all these things, and even now the situation is not the best. But it is unbelievable how many talents we have in sports: basketball, handball, water polo, tennis.”
Such a situation, and an old-fashioned faith in instinct as well as intrinsic national traits, should really be outdated and ineffective in the modern football world. It is instead the source of something the game hasn’t seen in decades.