Porthos -
Firstly, let's get things straight. In my previous post, I wasn't even remotely besmirching Croatia or Croatians. I was merely airing an opinion - as an Australian - about Josip Simunic and his family in the context of his "ban". Nothing more, nothing less. You have chosen to widen the discussion to include the apparently crucial role of Croatians in Australian soccer and - by thinly-veiled implication - the great demographic services such renowned "traditionalists" have rendered my country just by bestowing upon us the honour of their very presence. Very well, here are a few words about the points You raised.
Well, I presume his parents are also Australian taxpayers, unless they enjoy some sort of tax-exempt status...
Come now, such a statement is somewhat unbecoming for we both know what I was getting at, don't we...
Porthos said:
As for him choosing Croatia instead of Australia - I don't justify that, but it requires a bit of explaining. Most of the Croats in Australia come from regions in southern Croatia where people are turbulent, traditional, fiercelly nationalistic, church going, anti-multikulti, anti-marxist, anti-modern... Heck, they were sending
anti-Communist guerillas to Yugoslavia as recently as the 1970s , so I can see large numbers of them having troubles "integrating" into Australian society (which, as any western society today, is just too liberal for them)... so they cling desperately to the old country.
Yes, and despite being hard-bitten proponents of ultra-nationalism (which, of course, I'm all for - with the salient provision that such sentiments are reserved for the country one is actually living in, of course...) and screaming
U boj, u boj loud enough to be heard back in Medimurje, "Croatian Australians" have always been among the most ardent advocates of "multiculturalism" and the "natural" right of migrants to retain their "cultural identities" within that apparently irrelevant vacuum of "Anglo-Australia".
As I've said in a couple of previous threads, "Australians" of Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Greek "background" tend to be fiercely "retro-nationalistic" but -
when it suits them - are equally enthusiastic about informing everyone that they are all Australian
citizens and possess their "legal rights" just like everyone else. They also delight in insisting that Abos are the only "true Australians" and therefore the much-disparaged "Aussies" are also merely migrants (I heard such crap all through school and university...). Their consequent gloating inference is that Anglo-Celtic culture has no claim to precedence in Australia over the cultures of post-war Balkan migrants. Does this school of "logic" sound vaguely familiar?
The aforementioned groups are dead keen to maintain their own ethnically-based organisations and clubs yet simultaneously demand that Anglo-Celtic Australians unquestioningly "accept" everyone - or otherwise run the risk of being labelled "intolerant" or...wait for it, wait for it..."racist". "Croatian Australians" abhor the mere thought of a multicultural
Croatia (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that) - yet have themselves conveniently taken full advantage of "multiculturalism" in
Australia for well over 60 years. Funnily enough, this little fact always "mysteriously" seems to escape them...
Porthos said:
I agree that if they love Croatia so much, they should go back. It would be better for them, for Australia (which these days will easily fill the void with immigrants from India and China) and for Croatia too (which is in a terrible demographic shape and could make good use of a hundred thousand traditionalists).
Given their highly vocal, flag-waving, teeth-gnashing, hip-thrusting, tennis-match-disrupting nationalistic fanaticism, the seemingly inevitable mass exodus of red-and-white-chequered-shirt clad Croatians returning to the welcoming bosom of the mystical homeland has so far failed to come to pass. Who would have thought? Well, I guess the only possible explanation for such a reason-warping aberration is that "Croatian Australian patriotism" must be so hieratically multi-planar that its comprehension lies far beyond the ken of a "culture-challenged" Australian like me...
Who needs Indians and Chinese? Australia could replace any "traditionalist" Croatians who would - notionally, of course - flock back to Croatia by accepting non-Balkan European migrants, whose children and grandchildren might actually identify as Australians.
Porthos said:
That said (and I think we already had a discussion about this), for every one Simunic that plays for Croatia you have at least 4-5 Vidukas and Bosnichs who play for Australia. The Australian national team is traditionally packed with Croatians. A quick glance over the names of the current Australian players on Wikipedia reveals that 5 out of 22 (23%) are of clear Croatian origin... that out of an ethnic group that makes less than 1% of the population.
Truth be told, I'm glad that Simunic didn't turn out for Australia when his heart wasn't in it. After all, who wants players like that in the national team? Not me. What really rankles is that he was born in Australia, resided here for the first 20 years of his life,
and benefitted from that AIS scholarship when he had no intention of representing the country of his birth (he would have been about 13 or 14 years old when Croatia was granted FIFA / UEFA membership).
Now, I'll wager that the thought of posing the following question (which many people have actually asked me down the years) has crossed Your mind, namely: "Right, 'Rebajlo' - you nobly opine about loyalty but, let's face it, under FIFA rules you yourself would be eligible to represent three nations: Australia, England, and Poland. So, you high and mighty know-it-all, which of those three nations would
you represent if you were an international-class footballer? Come on, be honest. Odds on you'd opt for England or Poland, just so you could compete in both the World Cup
and European Championship competitions, ha ha..."
Well, my answer has always been: "I was born in Australia and have lived here for the entire course of my formative years therefore Australia is the only team for me. Anything else would be unnatural and thoroughly irrational. It's all quite straightforward really. If I had been born in England (or Poland) and spent my formative years there, then I'd obviously opt for England (or Poland)."
'Tis not my intention to sound conceited but that's precisely how things should be.
Sure, many "Croatian Australians" have featured in the Australian national team over the years. In fact, there has been an overrepresentation of Croatians and other "ex-Yugoslavs" in Australian soccer for decades. Such an overrepresentation partly stems from these groups' startlingly high (and very commendable) participation rate in the sport. I have an additional theory, which is largely based on my experiences growing up during the 1970s and 1980s in an area with a very high "ex-Yugoslav" (overwhelmingly Macedonian but with a significant Croatian component) population.
Most (but not all) of the Croatians, Macedonians, and Greeks of both sexes would only mix socially among themselves and with other southern Europeans (the Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, et cetera were far less "isolationist"). The "ex-Yugoslavs" (or, back then,
Yugoslavs) initiated and maintained a distance between themselves and "us" - "us" being "the Aussies". Now, the "Aussies" included the old-stock Anglo-Celts, first generation British and Irish, and other first-generation northern Europeans such as Poles, Dutch, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Swedes, Latvians, et cetera. All of this was
usually friendly enough but a definite rivalry between the two broad groups was always present and violence was not exactly unknown (I shan't bother to digress upon the latter point as doing so would be completely unproductive).
When it came to football, particularly trials, the Macedonians and Croatians almost magically became even more clannish than usual - which is
really saying something. Due to their enthusiasm for the sport, they invariably formed the majority in any team. They'd exclusively speak their
lingua franca to blatantly exclude "outsiders" (as I spoke a Slavic language myself, I never had any problems working out what they were saying, especially once I became familiar with the phrases which were constantly being repeated...), wouldn't pass to an "Aussie" unless it was absolutely necessary, and aggressively laid the ultimate blame for anything that went wrong on "the Aussies". This last behaviour occasionally reached astonishingly surreal heights of absurdity when, for instance, a striker would accuse some entirely innocent and capable Australain defender (to whom his Balkan "teammates" had assiduously avoided passing the ball anyway...) of somehow indirectly ruining an attack when the forward had simply botched his shot and was therefore entirely at fault himself. Needless to say, amidst such an environment most non-Balkan kids were put right off soccer. Enlarge my local experiences to a far wider scale and You have my theory explaining the Croatian (and "other ex-Yugoslav") overrepresentation in Australian soccer...
PORTHOS said:
Simunic is a tough and temperamental player. As a curiosity, he is the only player that got 3 yellow cards in a World Cup game (against Australia, if I'm not wrong). I dont justify his tackle against Suleimani and I think he deservedly got sent off and disqualified for 3 games... However, you should have put the youtube clip in perspective. It was a WC qualification match with Serbia, which is still more than a normal football match. Suleimani was going to score the Serbian victory goal, and Joe simply would not allow that to happen, so he sacrificed himself for the team. This is similar to the situation in the game where Suarez did that famous handball against Ghana. He paid the price for that.
Yes, I'm fully aware of the significance of any sporting contest between Croatia and Serbia. But where does one draw the line in a football match? Does even a semblance of sportsmanship - even in the form of vaguely adhering to the rules within the "spirit" of the game - matter at all? What happens if Simunic or any other last line butcher fails to cynically scythe a Serbian forward bearing down on the Croatian goal to score a (potential) winner? Since relying on one's goalkeeper obviously isn't acceptable, what's the contingency plan to preserve Croatian national honour? Do You resort to having a sniper positioned in the front row of the crowd on a level with the 18 yard box, ready to blast a hollow-point into the enemy striker's arse?
As You may recall, I was critical of Luis Suarez's calculated (sorry, "instinctive") handball in that 2010 World Cup quarter-final against Ghana. I guess that makes me a bit of an "outdated" sporting idealist but I guarantee that Your opinion of Suarez's "heroic" act of "self-sacrifice" would be rather different if the aggrieved party had been Croatia. Who knows? Perhaps You'd even describe him as a "cheat"... :icon_wink:
