Implosion

By: Mario | November 6th, 2009

Well, if there was a glimmer of hope of Dinamo qualifying from the group stages of Europa League, that glimmer was squashed and extinguished yesterday evening. Having been stripped of 3 points just prior to the match, Dinamo needed a home win against Ajax to bounce back and show the rest of the competitors that they’re still in this competition. But before I go on about the match, a few words about the atmosphere on the night. We were of course, punished by UEFA to host the next two matches behind closed doors. But. Apparently, Ajax had sold around 200 tickets before getting informed that UEFA had banned Dinamo, so UEFA, seeing the injustice, made a compromise with the Dutch club. Thus the match was played with no spectators & 200 Ajax fans enjoying the comforts of Maksimir’s VIP seats. Awesome.

Back to the match. Now the cynical part (a.k.a. large majority) of Dinamo’s fan base probably saw their hair turn more grey due to the fact that, yet again, Jurcic decided to play it safe. That’s in a (yet another) match we simply had to win. Marvelous. That aside, and I’ll be direct here, Dinamo sucks. Lately, we can’t score, we can’t create, we can’t defend. Yesterday’s match only confirmed this. And as if the obvious difference in attacking quality wasn’t enough, we went on to concede an early goal and have a player sent off relatively early in the match (Cufre got caught elbowing the opposition, though arguably a yellow might’ve been a more appropriate sanction). We did threaten a few times in the half, but it was mostly due to an inexperienced Ajax center back pairing, who went on and gifted our strikers (using plural to comfort myself here) with a few misplaced passes.

Ajax saw the more of possession, and had a clear idea on how to attack and continually threaten our goal. Deservedly, we conceded the second goal and went to halftime with two goals down and a player sent off. Frustrated Calello picked up a second yellow later on in second half (not the most convincing of cases either, but we can’t blame anyone but ourselves really), and it was only a handful of awesome Butina saves that kept Ajax from giving us a clear thumping as far as the score is concerned. Now reading all this, someone might get the impression that UEFA is doing its best to get us knocked out of Europe. But anyone who’s even remotely attached to this club will confirm that no outside help is needed on this, we’re doing a good job at knocking ourselves out. It takes years of practice though, so don’t think just any club is capable of this.

kjura I believe there’s two kind’s of coaches. There’s those who learn on their (or even better someone else’s) mistakes, and there’s those who don’t. And it seems to me Krunoslav Jurcic is trying his best to fit in that latter group. How else could you explain the fact that time and time again he persistently makes the same mistakes while (and this is the tragic part) stubbornly refusing to question his own judgment, despite the results and team’s overall performance suffering. We’ve got central attacking midfielders (Sammir and Morales) playing wide while there’s obvious wide talent (Tomecak) waiting on the bench. We’ve got central midfielders (Vrdoljak for one) who’ve never heard of a thing called “short passing” or “keeping it simple”, and instead persist with futile attempts to dribble pass 3 players only to lose the ball and fail to track back. Bring Calello in, the kid is obviously tactically more adept. We’ve got players on crap form (Papadopoulos & Mandzukic) playing instead of players in at least decent form (Slepicka & Kramaric) rotting on the bench. Ladies and gentleman, we have a problem.

And I’m not gonna suggest that sacking Jurcic will fix this mess right up, cause it won’t. The roots go way deeper then that. But I don’t see Jurcic turning anything around here. I don’t see a pattern to our play (one that’s not s*** anyway), and I don’t see any kind of progress being made. But hell, it doesn’t matter what I see or don’t, does it? The call is on Zdravko Mamic, the alpha & omega of all that’s pretty & ugly at Dinamo today. And if for something, Mamic ain’t known for his patience.