Season Review

By: Mario | May 25th, 2009

It all started rather predictabley. Why so? Well for the past three seasons the First Croatian Division (HNL from now on) was a one horse race. Respectively, Dinamo has, for the past three seasons, finished the season with an 11 (season 05/06), 20 (06/07), and finally a 28 point gap (2007/2008) standing between us and the chasing pack. A pack of ponies.

Not exactly exciting. But let’s get back to the present. So what changed? Well we sold practically everything we could, with what was the spine of the team in Modric, Vukojevic, Pokrivac, being replaced with a relative unknown but allegedly promising South American & Croatian combination.

All in all, and I’m being serious here, Dinamo parted ways (whether transferred out or terminated contract) with at least 14 players during the off-season. That’s right, 14 players, and many of whom (by my estimation at least eight) were regulars in the starting lineup. So what changed?

Well besides us emulating Wall-Mart (successfully I might add), it looked like we were in for a repeat of the last few seasons. Six wins out of six, and while we weren’t exactly leaving the crowd breathless with fancy football, we kept on winning.

That’s till our 14 times operated on & completely torn apart and then hastily patched up horse (stay with me) got tired and eventually slew down.

So how do you change your entire 1st team roster over night and go on to win a league by an impressive margin? You don’t. We learned this (hopefully) the hard way. A 2:2 draw away at Zagreb was a signal of things to come. While we did already have a solid advantage over the 2nd placed team (19 points out of possible 21), our form was deteriorating and the bubble was ready to burst, so to speak. And it did burst, at home in week 8, as our arch-rivals from Split took full advantage of our poor shape and came away with a fully deserved 2:0 victory (more painful with the fact that we lost this one at home).

What followed was nothing less unpleasant, as we lost away to Slaven Belupo with an identical 2:0 scoreline. So for a team that won the last 3 championships with ridiculous margin, grabbing just 1 point in 3 games was a sign that either we were slopping or the competition improved. Or the disheartening combination of the two. Yeah I think it was the latter.

Either way, in the period that followed we did indeed manage some consistency in our home performances, but our away form was a mess, as we seldom brought points back to Zagreb. Something had to be done obviously, and as these things happen the coach was the first one to take the fall. Instead of Branko Ivankovic (mr. 4-2-3-1, pictured), in stepped the crowd favorite and the 2nd in command to Ivankovic at the time, Marijan Vlak. And while Vlak did get through to some of the players, and it was manifested through somewhat better performances, this love was only gonna last to the next big derby that was to be played in Split in February. But seeing as I’ve written a painful looking wall of text here, I’ll go do some arranging and post the rest of the story separately.