CROATIA’S GOLDEN GENERATION HIT GROUND RUNNING AT LAST

MAYBE the golden generation of Croatian football will be worth more than its weight in mud this time. Even if it isn’t, they succeeded with this win in breaking their curious streak of openingmatch defeats and offered a glimmer of optimism that they might finally get it right. It wasn’t overly pretty in how it was done — one own goal by Oghenekaro Etebo after a corner and then a Luka Modric penalty. So no great nuance or subtlety there, no

great triumph of creative thinking from such a talented front line that has been given licence to attack by their manager Zlatko Dalic. But a win is a win in any language and especially so in Croatian, given their defeats in the first matches of their past three campaigns, in 2002, 2006 and 2014. At each of those competitions they then failed to get out of the group stages, so the bottom line of their clash with Nigeria was always going to count more than the message. The fact they now sit top of Group D, which by pre-tournament consensus was the toughest pool, is encouraging, as is the prospect that we might, at long last, see the best of a crop that includes Modric, Barcelona midfielder Ivan Rakitic, Juventus striker Mario Mandzukic and Ivan Perisic, the Inter Milan winger. The sad reality is that such brilliant parts have failed as an international collective until now and the general feeling is this is the last hurrah. Modric, that little genius of Real Madrid, is 32, Rakitic is 30, Mandzukic is 32 and Perisic is 30 in February. If those four start properly to fire — and Modric showed promising signs against a woeful Nigerian side — then they have enough stability in Dejan Lovren’s back line to justify being a dark-horse pick in Russia. On that front, a far truer test of where they stand will come against Argentina. Modric said: ‘Argentina is going to be a very difficult match — they are maybe the favourites in our group. It will be tough but they have to play for a win because they didn’t expect the scoreline from the Iceland game.’