‘One second is like an hour in a shoot-out’
Croatia’s Ivan Rakitic tells James Ducker in Sochi about handling the pressure before his decisive penalty against Denmark, and how his team produced the best performance of the World Cup so far
‘In that moment, one second feels like one hour, so you have a lot of time to think about what might happen. In that moment, you want to turn the lights off so nobody can see you or what is happening and think that you’re taking the penalty alone.” Ivan Rakitic is reliving the moment at the Nizhny Novgorod Stadium last Sunday when Croatia’s hopes of a place in the World Cup quarter-finals hinged on the Barcelona midfielder’s right foot and the reflexes of the Denmark goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel.
The quiet corner of a hotel bar overlooking the meditative Black Sea in Sochi yesterday morning feels far removed from the deafening whistles and almost unhealthy tension of that pressurecooker evening in Russia’s Volga region. But, as Rakitic recounts the long, lonely walk from the centre circle to the penalty spot and the brief, but excruciating, wait for the referee to blow his whistle as Schmeichel flapped his arms around manically in front of him, it is possible to get a sense of two things.
One, just how heavily the weight of responsibility sits with players in such mentally trying moments; and, two, an insight into how Rakitic, like his fellow Croatian midfield maestro, Luka Modric, is able to operate in a state of near perpetual serenity on the pitch, an island of calm amid what is sometimes a sea of haste.
“I had a good feeling before the game,” Rakitic says. “I was speaking with my wife and she told me, ‘The game will go to penalties and you will score the last one’. The whole of that morning, I was watching [footage] of Schmeichel to see what he does on free-kicks, penalties, studying his movements.
I spoke to Andrej Kramaric, who played with him at Leicester, to learn a bit more about him. So, I had a lot of confidence.” Was that confidence not shaken, though, by the knowledge that Schmeichel had already denied his team-mates, Milan Badelj and Josip Pivaric, in the shoot-out and, most memorably, Modric, five minutes from the end of extra time to take the game to penalties?
“You have to forget that he had already saved three penalties and say, ‘This is my moment’,” Rakitic explains in flawless English. “One of our defenders, [Domagoj] Vida had said to me before I took the penalty, ‘Please score it, please, please, please’. But I felt really strong and was sure that he was going to have to make the best save of his life to stop it.” Whether Rakitic would have felt quite so self-confident taking the penalty so soon after missing a first, as Modric did, is a situation he would rather not experience. Modric recovered from his initial despair to score in the shoot-out, a hero alongside goalkeeper Danijel Subasic, who made three saves, and Rakitic himself.
Rakitic said the players wanted to win it for Modric, although, when Badelj and Pivaric missed, he is not afraid to admit that his mind did briefly drift to Croatia’s elimination by Turkey on penalties at Euro 2008. “Before the shoot-out, I had the guys together for a moment and said to them, ‘Luka has saved us so many times, now we have to give something back to him’. And I told Subasic, ‘Enjoy this because it will be your moment’.
“OK, for a time I felt like I was back in Vienna in 2008 again but you have to forget that and say this will be different.”
Rakitic blows out his cheeks as he reflects on Modric’s strength of mind. “The first thing we said to him was, ‘Wow, incredible, you have such big balls’.”
Half an hour in the company of Rakitic really is a pleasure. He chooses his words as imaginatively and intelligently as he circulates the ball and, having emerged from that trial against Denmark, Croatia’s reward is a quarter-final against hosts Russia in Sochi on Saturday evening and, beyond that, just possibly a meeting in the last four with England.
“We know that it will be a full stadium with a lot of Russian fans and they will feel it’s a special moment, so we have to deliver our best game,” Rakitic said. “If you said to me before the start of the tournament, you can play the quarter-finals against Russia, you’d say, ‘OK, I would have to sign for that’.”
Russia eliminated Spain in the previous round and, in doing so, ensured there would be no triumphant international farewell for Rakitic’s recently departed Barcelona colleague, Andres Iniesta. It was not the way Iniesta