Ćiro master, Ćiro derpe
However, you have to walk that way to the bench, and I wasn't sure if I would succeed or if I would collapse in front of them from weakness as if mowed down...
"In the spring of '82, between thirty and fifty thousand people would regularly come to the matches and chant my name in unison, as if someone were conducting them. I can't even describe to you what kind of orchestra it was! The Vienna Philharmonic was Mika, Pera, Laza against that...
If I could see so many of our fans in the stands before the game, and that didn't happen only at derbies but at every game, there would be no need to motivate my players at all. He would just point to the audience that had come to watch them, and they would run out of the dressing room as if they had been released from a chain. Under such a rush of euphoria, games would usually be decided in the first twenty minutes of the game. That's why, after all, I often point out that the audience is the most important. If they are not satisfied, our fans for whom all this is played, then none of it really makes sense.
I would come out of the dressing room that season, walk to the benches under the west stand and energetically wave my hand to my fans to lead them into a knightly battle. "We're going to fuck their mother!", I would exclaim, and the roar that would be heard then - I get goosebumps as I remember it - would echo all the way to Trešnjevka. We became, I felt it, more than a club - we were a real movement!
And then, in that period of my greatest popularity, Veselko Tenžera wrote: "Will the city's fire eat Ćira as well?". I thought he had lost his mind when I read it in the Vjesnik of that time. What will eat me, man of God, so don't you see how much people love me? I was surprised that he, who normally knew how to diagnose people's mood so well and had a fantastic sense of how this city breathes, would now make such a wrong assessment.
It turned out - admittedly many years later, but it turned out that way - that he was right. Overnight I became: "Ćiro - fag". I remember it all too well when it started, in Zagreb, the national team played a qualifying match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and sixty thousand people chanted in unison that I was a derpe!
My legs are cut off, believe me.
However, I have to walk that way to the bench, and I wasn't sure if I would succeed or if I would collapse in front of them from weakness as if mowed down.
I remembered Tenžera at that moment, and his question. I don't know if it was just that bad luck, or if I had to bear my share of the general dissatisfaction of people at that moment, but - as Tenžera had predicted - it ate me up! (Even though we won that game, and I made a decisive tactical move by moving Šuker back to the back so that Boban could remain unguarded, it was still Pir's victory because it took me a long time, I swear by mother Kata, to recover from of that shock)."
