FAI could learn from impressive Croatia system
WHY should Irish football fans carry a torch for Croatia in the World Cup semi-final tonight apart from the rather weary, and increasingly irrelevant, anti-England bias?
After all, this is a country who speared us 3-1 in the opening game of Euro 2012. Before that, the Croats broke Irish hearts in Zagreb with a late Davor Suker winner in the Euro 2000 qualifiers.
I watched brief highlights of that game last night and it revived memories of strong local beer, a sweaty Maksimir Stadium and a bizarre selection from Mick McCarthy, who rested Robbie Keane, Kevin Kilbane and Niall Quinn to keep them fresh for the next qualifier against Malta a few days later. Had McCarthy gone on the offensive, Ireland might well have won, and we’d have been spared the events in Skopje a month later.
For many, Euro 2000 will always remain the qualification that slipped through Ireland’s fingers.
With the likes of the Keanes, Roy and Robbie, Damien Duff, Denis Irwin, Steve Staunton, Kilbane, Quinn and Shay Given in the team, Ireland were classy enough to separate Yugoslavia and Croatia in the group.
Back then, we could look the Croats in the eye without blinking. Now? Consider how the respective nations have fared since that Euro 2000 campaign.
Ireland have reached three finals out of nine, the 2002 World Cup, Euro 2012 and Euro 2016.
In contrast, Croatia have qualified for eight. They have done so with a country four-fifths the size of the Republic of Ireland, and a smaller population, 4.1million to 4.8m. Their squad in Russia has players at such elite clubs as Real Madrid (Luka Modric), Barcelona (Ivan Ratikic), Juventus (Mario Mandzukic), Inter (Ivan Perisic and Marcelo Brozovic) and Liverpool (Dejan Lovren). In contrast, Martin O’Neill selects players for his first XI from the likes of Brighton, Burnley, and Bournemouth. How have two paths so diverged in 20 years? At Lansdowne Road in 1998, a Croatia team that contained world-class talent such as Igor Stimac, Slaven Bilic, Zvonomir Boban and Suker lost 2-0 to a hard-working and resourceful Ireland team.
Why can’t it be like that now? If a small nation in the Balkans can continually kick sand in the faces of the world’s elite, can Ireland not have such aspirations?
It is not just in football where the Croats are punching above their weight. They are successful at international level in tennis, handball, basketball, rowing and athletics, among others.
Clearly, the programmes they are pushing are delivering too. In the 2000 Olympics, Croatian athletes won two medals. In London, they won six, and in Rio they recorded a 10-medal haul, five of them gold. All this from a country which only declared independence in 1991.
In football, the smallest nation to win the World Cup so far has been Uruguay (1930 and 1950), despite having a population that has never surpassed four million. In many way, the Croats are an even greater sporting miracle.
They have emerged from the oppression of post-War communist rule and a subsequent bloody conflict with their neighbouring Serbs and Bosnians, to stand on their own two feet.
Argubly, there has been no more compelling success story of the past 25 years.
For all that Harry Kane has Irish grandparents, there will be a red and white chequered flag close to hand tonight.