Drawing The Line

By: Mario | June 26th, 2009

Now you must be wondering what in the world is a picture of Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard (angry at that) is doing on this page. Well bear with me, and I promise I’ll try and make sense of it in the end. But first up, an apology. Contrary to the Dinamo rumor mill that’s been working tirelessly for the last couple of weeks, it’s been quiet around here on my behalf, in The Offside’s Dinamo’s corner. Your honor, I feel guilty.

But before they lock my lazy a** away, lets see what’s new in the blue corner of Zagreb. First up, Dinamo agreed a mutual contract termination with Mirko Hrgovic. Left back and former Hajduk Split captain who controversially signed for Dinamo last season, failed to emulate his previous seasons in HNL and was ultimately reviewed as a disappointing purchase by Dinamo’s staff. While those boo’s and whistles coming from all corners of Croatia (both Dinamo & Hajduk fans found reasons to dislike the man) certainly didn’t help him, I have to agree with the general consensus that he…well sucked. But with fair play in mind, he was a starter and our team came up on top, so thank you Mirko and good luck with the rest of your footballing career.

Moving on, Mario Mandzukic has been and probably will be the main talk of this summer’s mercato. The 23 year old has been doing his share of advertising, having been quoted on numerous occasions how he’s “won everything he could’ve won and feels it’s time for a new challenge”.

But his cries for freedom aside, there’s a bigger issue at hand here. For those of you unfamiliar with Dinamo’s habits on the transfer market, we have a bad habit of selling our finest players just before the season kicks off, only to replace those same players with relative unknowns but promising youngsters (mostly brought in from South America).

And this is a repeating pattern, one which usually ends up with us being knocked out of Europe early on and left wondering just what might’ve happened if we had held on to “that” one special player.

One year it was Eduardo, next year Modric, and this year it’s Mandzukic’s turn. While he’s obviously less influential then the former two, and his sale wouldn’t leave such a gap in our roster as was the case with Modric and Eduardo, what it would do is signal the intent to keep that irritating pattern alive & kicking. So it’s not really just a matter of selling a promising youngster to bigger and better things, it’s a matter of principle. Do we keep running in circles or do we finally stop retreating at the first sight of cashing in on our finest players. The line must be drawn here!

Okay a bit dramatic, but you get the picture. And as there have been quite a few firm indications that Dinamo has already lined up a “replacement” for Mandzukic, we should see this story unfold in a couple of days time.