by Chris Bowers
It was a bit of initiative-seizing that allowed Djokovic to turn the match round. In the seventh game of the second set, a scorching backhand return allowed him to break and, a few minutes later, he served out the second set. Throughout the third, Tsonga tried to serve and volley more, a tactic that had served him well against Nadal three days earlier, but Djokovic’s returns were well grooved by then and the Serb broke twice to take a two-sets-to-one lead. Djokovic had to have treatment on his thigh after five games of the fourth set, and with Tsonga’s buccaneering style having claimed the hearts of most of the neutrals in the Rod Laver Arena, a fifth set was a distinct possibility. When Tsonga had a break point on the Djokovic serve at 5–5, the atmosphere was electric. But Djokovic guessed right after playing a short volley, saved the break point with an angled volley and sealed the title on a 7–2 tie-break to win 4–6, 6–4, 6–3, 7–6.
As Tsonga’s in-to-out forehand landed in the tramlines, Djokovic fell to the ground and, in his moment of victory, lay sprawled across the word ‘Melbourne’ at the back of the court. It was a mildly symbolic image – Melbourne had been the scene of his first main-draw Grand Slam match; it was now the scene of his first major title. And it was to become his fortress, the tournament at which he has had more success than at any other. Serbia had its first Grand Slam singles champion, and of either gender, given that Monica Seles had played under the name Yugoslavia and was ethnically Hungarian and Ana Ivanovic’s French Open title was still four months away. As Srdjan, Dijana, Marko and Djordje hugged each other in the players’ enclosure while Djokovic and Tsonga hugged each other at the net, they had the ultimate confirmation that all the sacrifices they had made to give Novak a chance of getting to the top had been worth it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MODERN-DAY SERBIA
In 1989 Europe had 27 countries, if you don’t count Iceland, the two Mediterranean island states of Malta and Cyprus, and the handful of tiny states such as Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, etc. On the territory of those 27, there are now 42, thanks to independence from the old Soviet Union for Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the break-up of Yugoslavia into six independent republics (Czechoslovakia broke into two but West and East Germany reunited so, numerically, they cancel each other out). People can be forgiven for having difficulty keeping up with the new countries and it’s often only through sporting events – like European championships and World Cup football qualifying matches – that the new states get the chance to wave their flag across a wide geographic area.
Serbia still counts as one of the smaller countries in Europe but one of the larger of the ‘new’ states. Its population of just over 7 million is comparable to that of Sweden and Switzerland but the average in the European Union is 18.5 million. And its GDP is barely a seventh of the EU average. Since the privatisation of the largely state-controlled economy over the last 25 years (in reality, over the past 15 years since the wars of the 1990s were such a disincentive to investment by outside firms), Serbia has done reasonably well, attracting a lot of investment and a reasonable level of economic growth in the 2000s. However, the country slipped back into recession in 2012 and its largely service-based economy remains fragile. The EU is Serbia’s biggest trading partner but that isn’t all good news for the Serbs, especially with the euro-zone countries having been in turmoil since 2011.
Serbia has applied to join the EU and if accession negotiations go well, it is likely to be part of the Union by the end of the decade. But the biggest obstacles to a smooth integration appear to be less economic and more an adaptation to some of the human character norms that are taken for granted across the bulk of Europe. There are specific issues, like smoking: not that joining the EU would force Serbia to ban smoking in public places, but that is generally the norm in western Europe these days, and a day sampling Belgrade’s cafes and restaurants testifies to how far Serbia is from that. On a general and more important level, do the Serbs have the national mentality to be at home in an economic community dominated by the Germanic peoples of northern and western Europe (Germans, Britons, Danes, Dutch), with the southern European peoples providing the economic problem cases? That question has certainly caused its fair share of angst for the Greeks and the Iberians in recent years.
If Serbia is to become integrated into the EU, it will have to put aside residual anger towards the Croats and ethnic Albanian Kosovans. On a personal level, this won’t be a problem, as Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and even Kosovans have lived side by side for generations and many are good friends today. But the still-simmering tensions between Serbs and Albanians, especially in the Kosovan capital Pristina, are evidence of a conflict in which closure has still not been achieved.
And when the Serbian and Croatian football teams play each other, it always seems like war by another set of rules.
In 1999 the two nations played each other in Belgrade for the first time (Serbia still under the name ‘Yugoslavia’ but by then only in conjuction with Montenegro, and the team was largely Serbian). The match took place in an atmosphere described by all who were there as incredibly hostile. Serbian fans shouted ‘Ustase’ at the Croatian fans – not entirely inaccurately, in the sense that Croatia’s red-and-white Sahovnica chessboard motif, which forms a big part of the design of their team kit, was originally the Ustase’s emblem when its members set about slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Serbs in the early 1940s. Amid the already heightened tension, the floodlights went off during the second half, creating near-panic in the stands and on the pitch. They eventually came back on and the match finished 0–0, much to the relief of the security forces. The two teams played again in Zagreb two months later, with both sides needing to win to keep alive their chances of qualifying for the 2000 European championships. The home fans unfurled a massive banner saying ‘Vukovar 91’, as a warning to the Serbs that this was an atrocity to be avenged, and there was a parade of Croatian war heroes on the field before the match. The match was characterised by the sending-off of Zoran Mirkovic of Serbia, who grabbed the testicles of Croatia’s Robert Jarni after Jarni shouted an insult at Mirkovic. In most countries Mirkovic would have been castigated by his fans for letting the national team down in a vital qualifier, but Mirkovic was hailed as a hero, especially after giving Serbia’s three-fingered salute as he left the field. He had been insulted and had sought revenge, and that was fine by his compatriots, regardless of the state of the qualifying campaign.
One could argue that those matches took place in 1999, the year the Kosovo war ended, and things have moved on since. Yet when Serbia and Croatia met twice in World Cup qualifiers in 2013, little had changed. In the first match in Zagreb in March, Serbian fans had been barred from the Maksimir Stadium to prevent clashes between home and away supporters. The Serbian national anthem was greeted with cries of ‘Vukovar, Vukovar’, and in an orchestrated piece of chanting, fans in one stand screamed ‘Kill, kill’ while those in another chanted ‘the Serbs’. If that was all unofficial, the Croatian authorities must have sanctioned – or at least turned a blind eye to – the massive banner that read, ‘Through the rough times and through angry fighting, we defended our homes with honour. Those who defended our land did not die in vain – here in our land, our flag flies.’ Croatia won that one 2–0, which probably limited the post-match fallout. Six months later in the return match, both sides ended a bad-tempered affair with 10 men, Croatia’s Josip Simunic being sent off for a particularly brutal and premeditated foul on Serbia’s Miralem Sulejmani late in the game. Serbian fans, who had chanted insults at the Croats throughout the match, threw missiles at Simunic as he left the field. That match, which did involve some away fans, ended goalless: another good result for the security forces.
It would be wrong to imply that such intense rivalries don’t happen elsewhere in Europe – they clearly do – but the founding fathers behind what is now the EU were motivated, at least in part, by creating a culture of econ
omic interdependence, so that rivalries like that between the Serbs and Croats would become secondary to both countries’ self-interest. This is perhaps another area where Djokovic can help by setting an example that the odd painful defeat can still be suffered with dignity, as opposed to a need for revenge.
It’s also important to point out that football has a different status in Serbian culture than other sports, and there is nowhere near the same tension when Serbs compete internationally in other sports. Only once since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have Serbia and Croatia played each other in the Davis Cup: that was in Split in July 2010, when Serbia won in the fourth rubber, Djokovic beating his good friend Marin Cilic in straight sets to give Serbia a 3–1 lead. There was plenty of passionate support for both teams but it never got remotely out of hand. Serbia’s veteran doubles specialist Nenad Zimonjic says, ‘Nole never had a problem playing in Croatia. He played the tournaments in Zagreb and Umag, so although the Davis Cup tie against Croatia was a high-risk match, there was security from both Serbia and Croatia, and we all got along really well. All the athletes were true athletes through fair play and sportsmanship. The crowd was not happy that we won but they acknowledged us. It’s a different crowd than football. It’s always going to be a rivalry but I think it’s all about respect and sportsmanship.’
Tennis is often accused of being something of a genteel sport, yet in this case, the gentility of the tennis supporters allowed for a dignified sporting spectacle to emerge from a fiercely contested rivalry. This is perhaps another reason why Djokovic is a different type of national hero than his equivalents in Serbian football, not just because his character is so different from, say, that of Sinisa Mihajlovic (the former Serbian footballer and now national team coach) but because Djokovic plies his trade in a sport where losing with good grace is part of the deal.
Having said that, it would be wrong to gloss over the violence that has erupted between Serbian and Croatian fans at the Australian Open in recent years. In 2007, 150 people were thrown out of Melbourne Park after clashes in the garden area of the grounds, including some glass bottles being thrown in an area popular with families and tourists. The only trigger was that Marin Cilic of Croatia was playing Ilija Bozoljac of Serbia that day. And there were further clashes in 2009 and 2010; one on the day Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia played Cilic, the other by the court on which the Serb Viktor Troicki was playing Spain’s Alberto Martin. ‘Serbian’ and ‘Croatian’ participants in the 2007 brawl interviewed on Australian television that night all spoke with well-entrenched Australian accents, which rather suggests that the violence had little to do with modern-day Serbia and more to do with tribal clashes among ex-patriots. But they may reflect the tribal undercurrents that still exist in Serbia.
The subject of racism is one that frequently crops up with Serbia but needs to be tackled sensitively.
Serbia was heavily censured by Uefa after its Under-21 football team lost to England in Krusevac in October 2012, a match that featured persistent racist chanting and a mass brawl involving players and coaching staff at the final whistle. The England player Danny Rose was subjected to monkey chants throughout the match and screams of ‘Kill him, kill him’ whenever he got the ball, and there were several other less directed incidents. Uefa issued punishments to four Serbian players (and two English ones), fined the Serbian football association €85,000 and ordered the Serbs to play their next Under-21 match behind closed doors. Some in western Europe (particularly England) chose to see that as a very lenient punishment, which it might be, but some context is called for.
The sports writer Jonathan Wilson, who has made eastern European football his area of specialisation, says false distinctions are sometimes drawn between anti-black racism and anti-Roma (anti-gipsy) racism. He says that Serbia, as a nation that never had an empire or was involved in the slave trade, has never had much exposure to black people but has a long history of discrimination against gipsies, travellers and Romany, both as victims and aggressors. ‘Western European nations can’t understand the casual attitude to anti-black racism,’ Wilson says, ‘but they are as guilty of underestimating anti-Roma racism as the Serbs are of turning a blind eye to anti-black sentiments. Neither ought to be acceptable. All racism, surely, is equally deplorable: the racisms to which western Europeans are more attuned cannot be given precedence and nor can the FSS use what it perceives as lack of action on anti-Roma racism to justify not pursuing anti-black racism.’
This is backed up by the BBC’s correspondent in Belgrade, Guy De Launey. Shortly after the infamous Serbia v England Under-21 international, he concluded, ‘There can be a different attitude towards racism here. After the Krusevac match, I talked to well-travelled, English-speaking journalists who said, “Oh, come on, a few monkey chants towards a black player isn’t really racism – they’re just trying to put the player off.” I found that astonishing but maybe that’s from a British perspective.’
Although the role of sport in Serbia is dealt with in a later chapter of this book, it’s another sporting example – the case of Sinisa Mihajlovic and Patrick Viera – that best illustrates the complexity of the racism issue in Serbia, even if this very public row happened in a highly charged situation outside Serbian territory.
The rumpus came during a Champions League football match in 2000 when Lazio of Rome played the London club Chelsea. Lazio’s team featured Mihajlovic, a volatile and controversial Serb nationalist, who these days is coach of the Serbia national team. After the match, Chelsea’s black French midfielder Patrick Vieira accused Mihajlovic of calling him ‘a black shit’ during play. Mihajlovic who, like Djokovic, has a Serb father and Croatian mother, has made some highly inflammatory comments and is something of a Serb hero, having escaped from his home in Vukovar thanks to assistance from the Serbian gangland hero-cum-warlord Arkan (see page 201) after Croats retook the town in 1995. As such, there is always the risk that Mihajlovic could be tried by reputation rather than on the evidence, but his defence is interesting.
Mihajlovic said the insult Vieira had used was ‘zingaro’, a word meaning gipsy but used in Italy as a general term of derision to mean both gipsies and those emanating from southern Slav nations. He told Jonathan Wilson,
Yes, I insulted Vieira, but only as an answer to his insults. He called me a ‘gipsy shit’, so I answered back with ‘black shit’. I am proud of being a gipsy, so I wasn’t offended and I don’t see how he could be offended because I called him black. Vieira provoked me from the first minute, and whatever colour his skin is, I’m not going to let him treat me like that. I am who I am and I would have reacted the same way even on the street. I’ve played football since I was 15 years old and in that time I have been kicked, spat upon and insulted. In football, these things happen. If I am a racist, so is Vieira.
Interestingly, Vieira was never charged over the incident, despite ‘zingaro’ or ‘zingara’ being unquestionably racist, whereas Mihajlovic was banned for two games by Uefa. This contrast in treatment backs up Wilson’s point about anti-black racism being considered more of a sin than anti-gipsy racism, at least in the corridors of power of European football. Although it in no way excuses his behaviour, it’s hard not to agree with Mihajlovic’s basic logic that one form of racism is as bad as another. Mihajlovic went on to make a statement from the centre circle of the pitch during Lazio’s next home game, saying he had been wrong, expressing regret and saying he didn’t hold racist views. The statement was prompted by an extreme right-wing Italian group welcoming his racist views and he was keen to dissociate himself from them, but under Italian law he could have gone to prison for three years, so it may have been a partially tactical disavowal of racism.
Other remarks Mihajlovic made about the Vieira incident suggested his biggest beef with Vieira was that he brought a matter that should have been left on the field into the public domain by talking about it in a press conference. It seems to suggest Mihajlovic is working to a medieval, or perhaps gangland, code of ethics, in whic
h honour has to be salvaged and insults avenged. Given the love, affection and esteem his fellow Serbs have for Mihajlovic, you wonder whether this undercurrent of tribalism is still working against the interests of a country that aspires to be a member of Europe’s modern-day economic community.
But there’s a wider point that Jonathan Wilson makes, which needs to be taken into account. Racism is still a problem in European football, and no doubt it is on the list of tasks for the Serbian football association FSS to deal with. But Wilson says the FSS can be forgiven for having its attention grabbed by bigger fish.
There was a European championship qualifier in October 2010 between Italy and Serbia in Genoa. It had to be abandoned after a few minutes after a delayed start because Serbian hooligans were running riot, but if you look at the context, you see a lot of what’s going on in the background. There was a banner ‘Kosovo is Serbian’ and the match took place as Hillary Clinton [the then US Secretary of State, or foreign minister] flew to Belgrade to discuss Kosovo. There was also anger that the Serbian goalkeeper Vladimir Stojkovic had joined Partizan, having previously been with Red Star – that was seen as a major betrayal by many Serb nationalists. And there was fury over the arrest of a drug smuggler. Piece it all together and you see that, just to keep football in Serbia running, the FSS has to tackle hooliganism, organised crime, match-fixing, corruption and endemic violence – some of it against a nationalistic background that it can’t control. It doesn’t excuse racism, but it does explain why the FSS may have more immediate priorities.