Get ready to turn up the volume at West Ham
Bilic can rock the Premier League
SLAVEN BILIC played 54 games fo r We st Ha m between February 1996 and March the following year.
He was a fine player and a highly popular member of Harry Redknapp’s team — but by any serious criteria, some way short of a legend.
However, that could change over the next three seasons.
The 46-year-old qualified lawyer and West Ham look to be a good fit as both enter a crucial period in their histories.
For the articulate, intelligent, charming Croatian, it is an opportunity to take the club he says he still loves, onto a different level. After his appointment was announced yesterday, Bilic said he was impressed by the ambition shown by the board during their talks.
For West Ham, their owners and their supporters, Bilic represents an exciting gamble — a manager who can not only carry on the solidly good work of Sam Allardyce but also lead them, full of confidence and ambition, a few miles to their new home in the Olympic Stadium 14 months from now.
The two words you hear most when Bilic’s name is mentioned are charis- matic and intelligent. That i s how former team-mates at Upton Park, shrewd judges like Frank Lampard, Tony Cottee, Steve Potts, Rio Ferdinand and Iain Dowie, describe him.
Off the pitch he was popular with his peers — on it he was committed and highly competent.
He came in for criticism when he agreed to move to Everton for £4.5million in March 1997 but apparently insisted on remaining at the club until the end of that season, to help them clear of relegation. West Ham finally finished 14th. There was more, much more, criticism heading his way after a blatant piece of play-acting in the semi-final of the 1998 World Cup got France’s Laurent Blanc sent off.
Later he admitted: “I swear if I could change that so Blanc could play in the final, I would.”
His managerial career began with his home-town club of Hajduk Split and has moved, through six seasons in charge of Croatia’s international team and then back to club management with Lokomotiv Moscow and then Turkish side Besiktas. One of the high points of his management career was beating England in both their meetings during the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign.
I was with a party of English football journalists who visited the Croatian headquarters before the match in Zagreb and I was struck with the relaxed and convivial atmosphere in their camp, a striking contrast to England.
Bilic will be passionate and occasionally volatile on the Upton Park and Olympic Stadium touchlines. He was once sent from the bench in Turkey for what was afterwards described as his “over-expostulations.”
He is a man of the people who likes a cigarette and was given a hero’s sendoff by Besiktas fans when he left last week. He is fluent in four languages and plays a mean rhythm guitar. He was in a group which recorded a song prior to the 2008 Euros which, when translated, means Fiery Madness. West Ham, under Bilic, are about to turn up the volume but he is under no illusions about the challenge ahead. As well as building on four years of diligent work by Allardyce, Bilic will endeavour to further improve the squad in time for the big move to Stratford — mindful there will be almost 20,000 more seats to fill.
He says his team will play attacking football but Bilic was a resolute centrehalf and will ensure his team endeavour to play winning football.
Unfortunately, he will have no time to ease his way in. Assuming he is swiftly granted his work permit, Bilic will have to hit the ground running.
His first match as West Ham manager will be on July 2 when they play a Europa League qualifier — and juggling his squad to compete in that tournament and prepare for another vital season in the Premier League, will be no walk in the park.
He will have to assess the squad and suggest ways of strengthening it, with the midfield and striking departments the priorities.
Bilic says he is realistically optimistic. West Ham fans will settle for that.
Off the pitch he was popular with his peers — on it he was committed and highly competent