August 21, 2008 1:57 PM
For his country Darijo Srna is a midfielder. For his club he is a full-back. At heart, he probably still wants to be the wing-back he was when he started his career. Tactically, the decline of 3-5-2 could have left him behind, but he has reinvented himself to become captain of Shakhtar Donetsk. Against Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League last week, he was an obvious man of the match, whipping in a free-kick after three minutes to set them on the way to a comfortable 2-0 victory.
Niko Kranjčar, admittedly his room-mate on international trips, calls Srna the most under-rated player in Europe. And yet the most improbable thing about him is that he exists at all. The series of events that go to make any life can appear dauntingly improbable in retrospect, but Srna's career would have to take some truly extraordinary turns before his life-story became half as remarkable as that of his father.
Uzeir Srna was born in Gornji Stopići, a village near Čajniče in eastern Bosnia, a year before the Second World War. As the German advance met fierce resistance, the front line swept back and forth over the village, repeatedly forcing its inhabitants to flee. In 1941, though, with the fighting seemingly done, they returned home. It proved a ghastly miscalculation.
One night, the Chetniks, the Serb nationalist paramilitaries who waged their own war within a war, raided the village and burned it to the ground. Uzeir was grabbed by his father, and they fled into the forest with his teenage brother, Safet. His mother wasn't so quick. "She was pregnant," said Uzeir. "And she and my sister were burned alive."
Uzeir, Safet and their father fled north to Bosanski Samac, but amid the chaos of refugees Uzeir became separated from his father and brother. Somehow he ended up in Sarajevo, and was taken from there to Slovenia, where he spent a few months in an orphanage before being adopted by a police officer in Murska Sobota: the boy who had been Uzeir Srna became Mirko Kelenc.
Back in Bosanski Samac, further tragedy was to strike. "It was a stupid accident," Uzeir said. "My father had found a job in a small café. One day he was sitting outside it, and he got hit by a stray bullet that killed him." Uzeir has never found the graves of either his mother or his father.
In despair, Safet joined the army, but he never forgot his brother. Everywhere he went, he asked if anybody had seen Uzeir. Two years went by without any firm leads, but then he was posted to Niš in Serbia. His commanding officer there was a Slovenian, who remembered hearing about a Bosnian orphan who had been taken in by a family in Murska Sobota.
As soon as he could, Safet went to Slovenia to continue his search. It took him a few weeks to locate the Kelenc house, but when he did, he knew he had found his brother. The Kelencs argued that Uzeir would have a better life with them in Slovenia, but Safet was insistent, and took Uzeir back to Bosanski Samac, where he enrolled in the local school.
Even in the austere world of northern Bosnia in the years immediately following the war, the Srnas were noticeably poor. "I was always hungry," he remembers. "I saw my friends from school eating fresh bread and rolls, and it annoyed me, so I decided to become a baker."
Uzeir learned the trade, but barely had he begun to work properly when relatives from Sarajevo got in touch and asked him to go and live with them in Sarajevo. Delighted by the thought of a family, Uzeir agreed. "When I got my first salary in Bosanski Samac, I bought shoes, a jacket, a suitcase and a train ticket to Sarajevo," he said. "But I didn't know where they lived. So I walked round Sarajevo for hours before I found their house."
He struggled to find work as a baker, so Uzeir took on a series of manual jobs before finally, after several months, being offered a post in a bakery. It was there that he began to play football fairly seriously, being taken on as a goalkeeper by FK Sarajevo. Wandering, though, was in his soul. He met a group of Serbian engineers who asked him to go to Belgrade with them, work for their company and play for their local club. He followed them, but didn't settle there and returned to Bosnia, following his brother into the army.
He was posted to Busovača, a small town in central Bosnia. "There I started to play for Jedinstvo, the local club," said Uzeir. "I remember we had a friendly match against Čelik from Zenica. They were a big club at the time. A few days after the game, some people from Čelik asked me to go and play for them, but it was never meant to be for me in Zenica. They had a good team and decided to send me out on loan."
Before that could happen, though, Uzeir travelled to Croatia with Čelik for a friendly against Neretva in Metković. "Just before the game, Neretva's goalkeeper was injured," Uzeir said. "So they asked me because I was Čelik's reserve to play for them. After the match, they ask me to stay, because they were pretty impressed with my goalkeeping."
There Uzeir married a local woman called Nada, and they had a son, Renato, who is now a coach at Neretva. The marriage broke up, though, and he went to France, playing and working in Paris for four years before returning to Metković, where he met and married another woman, Milka, with whom he had two children, Igor and Darijo. He worked for a time as a truck-driver, before Neretva asked him to coach their youth side. One of his charges was Darijo.
"Even though he was really small, a lot smaller than the other kids, everybody knew Darijo was a great talent," he said. "He was good at handball, table tennis and basketball. One day he even came home from school and said that his teacher had told him to quit football and focus on basketball."
Fortunately he ignored him. "When he was a kid, he had offers from Dinamo Zagreb, Zagreb and Varteks Varaždin," Uzeir said. "I knew that Varteks had a best facility for young players, so I told him that best thing for him is to play there." But then the former Hajduk Split player Ivan Gudelj came to their house in Metković, offering a trial at Hajduk.
For the Srnas, that was a big risk. They are Bosniak, and as the war rumbled on, it was soon apparent how difficult it would be for a young Muslim player to be accepted in Split. "It was a difficult time," said Uzeir. "And your name was so important. But the worst thing was that the coaches came and openly demanded money for Darijo to stay there. Luckily he was so talented that when the youth coaches saw him, they decided he had to stay."
He stayed until 2003, when he moved to Shakhtar in a transfer so lucrative that Uzeir could comfortably buy a bakery of his own. Darijo has bought him a Mercedes and a BMW, but Uzeir still lives in his small apartment in Metković. "I always tell Darijo that you have to save your money when you're earning it," Uzeir said. "There's nothing to save when you're broke. The only difference to when he first moved in with Milka is that there is now an Astroturf pitch just around the corner, Darijo's gift to his home town.
"My father and my family mean everything to me," Darijo has said. On his calf he has a tattoo of a deer ('srna' in Croatian), while on his chest he has the name of his brother, who has Down's syndrome. Every goal he scores he dedicates to Igor. "I can't forget how they suffered while they were trying to find money for me during my days at Hajduk," he said.
"I can't forget that. My father had a really, really difficult life and I am very proud he can live peacefully now, without stress. I know it's impossible to repay him for everything he has done for me. But, I have bought him a car and given him enough money to live normally now, while he is old. It's the least I can do."
Beside his father's life, adapting his game to play a little deeper doesn't seem much of a strain.
