Bilic family happy to sample the quieter life
SLAVEN Bilic and his family have settled quickly in the West Midlands – and the Albion boss is enjoying the quieter side of things in this corner of the world.
Bilic and his family have spent time in major European capitals, such as London and Moscow, in recent years.
Two of his children recently started school here and the head coach has spoken highly of the area.
“I have got a big family so we are very busy,’’ said Bilic, who arrived at The Hawthorns during the summer. “They like it here. It’s a good area, the people are very friendly.
“So far we have lived in big cities like Moscow or London, where they are massive. Here, you are in the car and everything is 15 minutes, which is an unbelievable feeling, to be fair.
“So far they like their new school. It’s still early days. A couple of my girls – I have four girls and a boy – a couple of them started school, for the first time in their life.
“They liked it, but maybe they liked it because they thought it was a one-off! It was like, ‘yay, we’ve done it!’ But it went really good.”
It isn’t only Bilic who has had to move his family to new surroundings.
While football fans the length and breadth of the country will remember former West Ham and Birmingham City defender Julian Dicks, even those with a passion for European football won’t likely recognise the names of fellow assistants Dean Racunica and Danilo Butorovic.
After the departures of Jimmy Shan, Jamie Smith, Steven Reid and – in a first-team sense, at least – Michael Appleton, Bilic was permitted to make a number of additions to his backroom staff and has provided an insight to the workings of the two new faces at the Albion training ground – one of them for whom Bilic was best man the day he married.
“Dean played with me, we’ve been together since we were 19 or 20,” he explained. “First time I went on loan from Hadjuk Split to the Championship – ex Yugoslavia – to his place (Sibenik) and then when Croatia got independence he came to play for Hadjuk Split.
He also played for the national team, he was a proper No.10. I was best man at his wedding. We are friends and all that, but he’s here for football – not only for me. It’s a big bonus, of course, but he loves football. The players like him.
“Danilo is younger, I got to know him when I was at West Ham. I got to know him because he was the best student of that generation from the Croatian FA academy.
“He did the badges and he asked me if he could watch the training. I said, ‘okay, no problem’. He stayed for one week.
“Even then, he stayed after training to talk football and he had good ideas. He was very hungry, so I made a few phone calls to people in Croatia, because those people I knew for being team-mates or my time in Croatia as national team manager.
“They said the best things about him. When I had the opportunity to make a new-ish staff, I asked him and he wanted to come. Both of them are good. Julian, too.”