FRANCE 98 – General Media News Template
Yugoslavia’s World Cup squad vowed to make up for six years in the international wilderness and finally give the country’s war-weary people something to cheer about, when they arrived here on Tuesday.
“We are going to play for all our people who have suffered so much over the last few years,” said Sinisa Mihailovic, the highly-rated Sampdoria defender.
“With every goal we score, we will help them to forget their problems, at least for a little while.”
Yugoslavia returned to World Cup football two years ago after the lifting of an international ban on sporting contacts with the country following the end of the war in neighbouring Bosnia, which Yugoslavia was instrumental in starting.
The sanctions, accompanied by an economic embargo that crippled the economy, meant the Yugoslavs were not allowed to play in the finals of the 1992 European championships, for which they had qualified and were one of the favourites, or the qualifying tournament for the 1994 World Cup in the United States.
“What happened to us was highway robbery,” said Milan Milanic, the former Real Madrid coach who is now President of the Yugoslav federation.
“But I have lived a lot longer than the six years that we have been robbed off and now we want to make up for lost time.” Milanic shrugged off Monday’s moves to reimpose some international economic sanctions on Belgrade over President Slobodan Milosevic’s bloody repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which has also prompted calls for the country to be kicked out of international sport again.
“Forget it. We are not here to talk about politics,” he said. The period that Yugoslavia spent in international isolation coincided with the peak playing years of Dejan Savicevic, the AC Milan midfielder many consider the most skillful player to have emerged in Europe in the last decade.
“So many of us missed out on so much that we are determined not to let this chance slip through our fingers,” said Mihailovic. Yugoslavia open their campaign against Iran in Saint-Etienne on Sunday, a match they will be expected to win comfortably. Their other group F opponents are Germany and the United States, who they meet in Nantes on June 25 in the clash expected to decide which two teams qualify for the second round.
US coach Steve Sampson has no illusions about how difficult it will be to get past the Yugoslavs. “On individual talent alone they are a match for any team in these finals. The question is whether they can perform to that level collectively.”