Croatia

Even before the guns stopped firing, and the new country had fully emerged, a Croatian rugby team had formed. A few years later, led by a man who would become a priest, they faced Italy in an incredible World Cup qualifying run. The biggest star on the pitch wasn’t Italian however, it was a Croatian rugby rock star by the name of Frano Botica.

Croatia shouldn’t have been a problem for Italy, but when they took to the field in the town of Makarska, heavy cotton shirts already drenched in sweat due to the hot Dalmatian coast sun, the nerves were obvious for everyone to see. 

Through onlookers’ eyes, the Rugby World Cup 1999 qualifier should have required little more than turning up. By June 1998, when the game took place, Italy’s case for joining Europe’s big guns in the Six Nations was almost complete, confirming them as one of the continent’s top six. Meanwhile Croatia had only been playing Test rugby six years, and only been a country at all for a few years more [since 1991]. The Azzurri had players such as Massimo Cuttitta, Cristian Stoica and Paolo Vaccari who would go on to win over fifty caps for their country and become household names. Yet even so, none would ever match the reputation of one of their Croatian opponents: Frano Botica.

In near 40-degree midsummer heat, Italy had to contend with a Croatian side bolstered by not only Botica but also hardened by a tortuous journey and run of fixtures to even get to the qualifier.

Even on his own though, Frano’s credentials were impeccable. A World Cup-winning All Black, he had switched to the professional world of rugby league for a five-year stint with Wigan and broken records: the fastest player to reach 1,000 points [93 games], most goals in a season (186), most points in a season (423). He was the pivot for Wigan in a dominant era, no mean feat given the players around him: Martin Offiah, Jason Robinson, Andy Farrell and Shaun Edwards.  “I was an okay goalkicker before I got there, but nothing brilliant,” Frano tells Rugby Journal. “They had twelve internationals in the team but they didn’t have a kicker, so I figured I needed to be one if I was going to make the team. I decided to do some intensive practice for two months prior to the season starting. By the third game I got the kicking duties handed over to me. Once I started that was it, they kept going over.”

Frano returned to union when the game went professional and big money offers were on the table, playing first for Llanelli and then Biarritz. Playing in red and white had become a theme but no one could have predicted the trend would continue with Croatia, who had made their international debut while he was at Wigan.

The Croatian community in New Zealand dates back more than 150 years, but there was a big influx from the 1890s to the First World War. Living mostly in the north of New Zealand, they had close contacts with the local Māori population, which led them to rugby. Those bonds have remained strong to this day, and in Auckland, for example, Croat-Māori rugby matches take place annually.

From the 1970s, a New Zealand-based Croat team began to tour the motherland (then part of Soviet-run Yugoslavia) every four years. Frano, whose grandfather comes from the beautiful island of Korčula, just off the coast from Split, went on one of those tours, while still a schoolboy. “When I was sixteen or seventeen, I used to play for what was, back then, the Yugoslav team in New Zealand, in Northland,” he explains. “My grandfather was Croatian and could barely speak English so it was always in and around me.”

However, it was another tourist of Croatian descent that would bring the two worlds together and eventually produce a rugby team that would make everyone sit up and take notice. Antony Sumich was a hooker with Auckland Marist, a rugby club littered with All Blacks past and present. His contemporaries included the likes of John Kirwan, the Brooke brothers – Zinzan and Robin – and Pat Lam. All would go on to make a lasting impression on the Rugby World Cup and Antony was no exception, as he became the mastermind behind Croatia’s greatest qualifying campaign.

The inaugural World Cup, in 1987, inspired many. While his Marist team-mate, Kirwan, was plotting his way through the Italian defence on a seventy-metre run to the line in the first-ever Rugby World Cup match, Antony was planning to create something equally magical – but with Croatia. “I went there (to Croatia) in 1986 and 1990 as part of the New Zealand-based Croat team,” he explains, “and between those two trips was the first-ever Rugby World Cup, which was the first attempt to globalise our sport. 

“The very small countries all had pipe dreams,” he continues. “There was Zimbabwe and Tonga in 1987 and by 1991 there were other countries knocking on the door.” Bar chat had led him to assess the chances of a Croatia side. “We had 30 New Zealand rugby players and about ten to fifteen were probably playing senior level and four to five probably playing provincial level. We jokingly said, ‘imagine if we put together a team representing the best of Croatia out of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa?’. 

“It was a pipe dream I didn’t really let go of,” he says. “And after the 1990 tour I stayed in Europe and my plan was to go back to Croatia and spend the summer there in 1991 and learn some of the language, which no one in my family spoke, and maybe use rugby as a springboard for my travels around Europe. That was my plan but then the war came and the move to Croatia was put on the back burner for four to five years.”

Following the break-up of Yugoslavia, thousands of Croats, Serbs and Bosnians were killed and many more displaced or expelled from their lands in a bloody war fanned by the flames of nationalism and religious intolerance, that lasted until 1995. Whereas Serbs, Croats and Muslims had happily intermingled with each other in the past, now they were at war.  “In the spring, before the war started in June, I was based in Ljubljana in Slovenia, which at that time was still part of Yugoslavia and I played in the final of what was the last Yugoslav League – Ljubljana v RK Čelik, Zenica,” says Antony. “During the war I was in and out
of both countries so I got to know a lot of the guys that played rugby. 

“A large number of the Croatian players just signed up and volunteered and spent time on the frontline because there was no work,” he continues. “One day they were going to the gym, going to work, going to the beach and the next day there were bombs flying overhead and they were at war. Rugby was obviously not big on their radar, but they kept playing whenever they could.”

Croatia even managed to make their international debut as a country in the midst of the fighting, against Hungary in May 1993. Antony remembers a game against Ukraine that took place in circumstances that would be unthinkable now. The host city, Sisak, was not only divided by three rivers but also by a raging war.

“The game was live on TV and the actual stadium was about, as the crow flies, 3-4kms from the Serbian frontlines. Had they been watching the game on TV and been aware the match was on, they could’ve put a mortar onto the grandstand. It was a kind of risky venture,” he recalls. 

“People just tried to get on with their lives, rugby kept going despite a war going on. But getting the team together was hard, transport between the Dalmatian south and the north was difficult. You had to drive a lot of the roads at night with the lights turned off. In reality you were still in a war zone and the local rugby players showed a lot of resilience amongst all of that.”

By 1994, there was a stalemate in the fighting, and the front line hadn’t really moved forwards or back until Operation Storm in August 1995 led to a decisive victory for the Croatian independence fighters, with a lot of the land taken from Serbia-occupied Croatia reclaimed in a matter of days. For Antony, it was still a case of ‘have boots will travel’ during this period and his wanderlust took him to France and Austria, where he topped up his meagre salary as a rugby development officer for the fledgling Croatian RU (circa £250/month) by working as a ski instructor. “I was playing for Versailles in France (when the war ended) and as soon as the season finished in the spring of ’96, I took the train back to Croatia,” he recalls. “I arrived in Split on the Tuesday and they roped me into practice because they had a Test against Israel that Saturday and before you knew it, I was in the starting team (as a makeshift centre). 

“I played that first game and then I moved down to Makarska, next to the village my grandparents are from, and started playing and coaching for them. Not long after, the U19s were going to Chile for a FIRA U19 tournament and the Croatia RU asked me to coach that team and then the sevens as well as they were going for Sevens World Cup qualification in Lisbon. There weren’t that many coaches around so it was a case of just doing the best you can.”

By the end of 1996, he was coaching the senior team for the 1999 Rugby World Cup qualifiers. “I sat down with Drago Lulic, who had played top-flight pro rugby in France for a few years, all under the table of course, and we conversed about how far we could take this,” recalls Antony. 

“I felt if we were able to pull a team together by getting the interest of enough guys down under and lifting the socks up of what was already in Croatia, and five or six guys in Croatia really buying into it, we could really scare some teams. Drago said if I used my player contacts he would take care of the logistics.”

The union was virtually non-existent, with just one volunteer. “There were four active senior clubs who were very, very amateur,” explains Antony. “Schoolboy teams in the UK and New Zealand would’ve run rings around them, but there were some guys who had some natural talent, who were big, strong and keen but their game was pretty rudimentary.”

The New Zealand-Croat tours had also given him insight into the playing pool which did have some, albeit raw, talent. “I thought if we got good results to begin with the interest would grow and maybe we’d draw more guys in from down under. My thinking was that if we are going to be in it, we might as well try and aim for the World Cup.

“An underdog is a dangerous animal,” he continues, “especially if you’ve got a little bit more beneath the surface than the opposition know about and I thought with a bit of luck we could possibly get as far as the 1999 World Cup.

“In my mind, the timing was good,” adds Antony. “World rugby wasn’t that organised (in Europe) apart from the Five Nations and the next couple of teams under them, Italy and Romania, who used to be strong, but weren’t that strong anymore.”

Before Croatia could think about pulling off such giant-killing acts, they had some serious miles to clock up in the early throes of qualifying. “We had a pre-season international against Slovenia in Zagreb and we played really badly, it was our first game of World Cup prep,” says Antony. “I sat the players down after that game, pretty much all of them were Croatia-based, and I said, ‘this level today was minor level, if we want to go into the World Cup qualifiers, either you do it my way or we give up now’. 

“Several of the Croatia-based guys said, ‘okay, you set the bar and we’ll go for it’, while there were other guys who said indirectly, ‘this isn’t for me, you are biting off more than you can chew’. So, I dropped a few guys out of that squad and set the bar really high.”

The first qualifying game was away against Norway, in Bergen. “Goodness me, we were almost at the Arctic Circle,” recalls Antony. “It was in October 1996, at a naval base in Stavanger, and the game was up on top of this hill above the harbour with a north-westerly blowing in – there was snow and sleet blowing horizontal across the field. A Croatian fishing vessel’s crew came and cheered us on, they were all drunk. It was hilarious.”

There were three Kiwis based in Croatia at the time – Anthony Posa (full-back and the current Croatia head coach), Mike Nola (blindside flanker) and Antony (again, at centre). “And we had Damir Uzunovic, who’d played rugby in France and was a bit of a force to be reckoned with, at No.8,” says Antony. 

“Norway were game but we were more organised and played fairly well, it was the real throes of the amateur game in that both teams were doing their best, and when we finished the game, it was dark and I was shuddering, it was cold, even though I had a thermal vest on. We stood in the showers with our gear still on, to try and get heat back into our bodies.”

They won 43-7 to get the 1999 Rugby World Cup campaign going. But if Norway was a challenge, it was nothing compared to Bulgaria away. “I am a hardened traveller,” says Antony. “I have backpacked the world so for me nothing was too crazy, and even for all the local guys they knew getting on a bus and travelling for twelve hours was not that weird.”

But the impact of war was still being felt, meaning the border with what had been Yugoslavia was closed. “So, for us guys in Dalmatia,” begins Sumich, “we had to take a bus up to Zagreb which is seven or eight hours, wait for a few hours, pick up the Zagreb guys and then take a bus from Zagreb east through Croatia and then north into Hungary. 

“Then we had to cross the Pannonian Plain (a vast expanse of land that includes all of Hungary, parts of Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania, stretching out of the EU into Serbia, Croatia and Ukraine), and go down to the border with Transylvania in Romania and cross Romania through the night.”

It was 1996, so Romania had only been a free country for a handful of years. “We got stopped a number of times during the night and we had to bribe police officers with cigarettes and alcohol,” recalls Antony. “We arrived at the Danube and you could see the other side of the river. The ferry we needed was there, but we had to wait five hours before it arrived on our side of river. We were just sat there, occasionally passing a rugby ball around, and there were black marketeers everywhere. Once we’d taken the ferry across, we had to cross Bulgaria and eventually we arrived in Sofia at 6pm on the Friday night before we played Bulgaria the next day.”

It was the beginning of November, cold, and the players had been on the road for 42 hours. Not ideal preparation for a World Cup qualifier the next day. “The hotel we were staying in was minus two stars and the meat smelt bad, we had our suspicions it was dog,” says Antony. “There was no way the guys would touch it even though they hadn’t eaten for 24-36 hours so we jumped in two-dollar taxis and I said, ‘right, here’s some Bulgarian money, go into town and get whatever you can’.”

But again, Croatia won, 46-31. “At the banquet afterwards, it was the same food,” continues Antony. “It was terrible. You couldn’t make this stuff up. We got back in the bus that night and got to the border at 4 o’clock in the morning and did the whole 42 hours back again. We had half a dozen VHSs and we watched them 24 times, the guys were going stir crazy. We did something like 90 hours travelling both ways for that game.”

With the two away ties out of the way, things looked easier. Moldova at home was next, and Antony expected a weak side. They despatched Moldova, 65-0, and then it was Latvia. “A military team, so we knew that was going to be the big game,” he says. “We had spring camp with the players, 45 of them, and I promised to bring in one big-name player. Bringing in Frano was the main part.”

Croatia went into their Latvia litmus test with a not-so-secret weapon. Llanelli agreed to release Frano for the crunch clash but there was one other hurdle that Antony had to negotiate before securing his prized asset. “I know Frano really well, he is one year older than me and we played together at school and I played with him in the Croatian games we had in Auckland once a year – Croatia versus Māori or something like that. So, I gave him a ring and his wife answered the phone. I knew his wife, too, so I thought the best way to get him was to get his wife on board. So, I said, ‘listen, I’ll get both of you tickets to come to Croatia in May when the weather is really nice and there’s nobody here, no tourists, and I’ll put you guys up in a really nice hotel and we’ll fly you out’. He and his wife flew down and had a great time.

“It was big news in Croatia, really big news. The country was coming out of the war, we had a guy who was an All Black, and had a Croatian name, and we had TV and a huge crowd, considering rugby is a very small sport, and he turned it on. He had a blinder, scoring something like 26 points. I think he kicked nine out of ten, he was really good.

“Drago Lulic played that game, too, it was his last game and he was captain. He was 39/40 at the time, but he caused the Latvians a lot of problems, he was like a block of concrete.”

As international debuts go, Botica’s wasn’t bad. “We played them in June, mainly because it was so hot and it would slow them down because they were so big,” Frano recalls. “They had no idea about rugby but if you ran straight into them, it hurt because they were big and tough. We had a reasonable team. Drago Lulic was controlling the forwards and I was controlling the backs.”

Botica’s arrival to play for the land of his grandfather helped to stir the interest of Kiwi-Croats back home, as Sumich had hoped, as well as get more local sponsors on board. 

A buzz around Croatian rugby had begun. However, the next game, a friendly against Bosnia – if you could call it that after what had happened only a couple of years before – rekindled memories that many in the squad, who’d been called into active service during the war, would rather forget. “We’d won our qualifying group and we needed a practice match before the autumn Internationals,” explains Antony. “By now I knew the guys who were taking it really seriously and had bought into the idea that we could go all the way. So, we had this really great training camp in Makarska along with about five or six guys from New Zealand, guys like (Andrew) Matijasevic, (Anthony) Zivkovich, (Michael) Lunjevic, (Paul) Vujcic ... they were all fair dinkum Croatians. But they were coming from New Zealand, they were coming from a rugby background, and they had to eat a lot of humble pie themselves because they realised they couldn’t just walk in, take over and tell people what to do; you have to buy into the whole thing. 

“My job was more man-management than rugby coaching,” he continues. “None of the New Zealand guys spoke Croatian so I had to coach in two languages. My aim was to get basics so good that we’d beat teams by getting the basic things right.”

They beat the Bosnians 74-5. “We were streets ahead,” says Antony. “But it was a good match to have because it gave Bosnia a sense of normality. The war had been raging up there, we drove through bombed-out towns and I overheard some of the guys on the bus, saying ‘we were up on that hill shelling this town’. I thought ‘crikey’. The reality was these rugby players were going to play against guys they could have fought against, it was poignant, it was real life.”

The win set Croatia up for bigger Tests – two in October against Georgia and Russia and two the following spring/summer against Denmark and Italy, which formed the second round of European RWC 1999 qualifiers. 

For Antony, faith was growing, in Croatia’s ability to see their Rugby World Cup adventure through to the end, and also in his own religious beliefs. 

Antony had a gun pointed at him during the war years, and was also involved in a major car accident, with the car he was driving totally crushed. Two massive, life-changing jolts that set him on the path to becoming a Catholic priest in 2000. “I should have been crushed, too, but literally walked away unscathed,” he says. “I knew, standing next to the wreckage, that it resembled my soul. If I had died, I would have been in hell.” 

Very soon, Antony's travelling would be as a priest, to the USA, Canada, Germany and Africa. But his next destination as head coach of Croatia was Georgia. Nowadays nobody would give them a prayer but it was only a ‘coach-killing’ moment near the end that prevented them getting something from the fixture.  “The Georgia game was the biggest disappointment because I planned on us beating them,” he admits. “I thought Russia would be harder because their record was better than Georgia’s. 

“Although I knew Georgia had some history, I just thought it would be full-on, eight-man rugby, and everyone in the backs would just be forwards, and if we were able to compete and get enough ball then we could unlock them.”

But the Croats froze in the limelight, losing 29-15. “It was in a big stadium, the Dinamo Stadium in Tbilisi which seats 75,000 and there were probably about 20,000 at the game, all sitting on one side of the stadium. 

“We had our opportunities,” he concedes. “With eight minutes to go we were only trailing by four points and we had a lineout on their 10-metre line. I was among the subs – but never planned to come on – because one of the guys had left his passport behind, and I called for a back-of-the-lineout drive.

“We threw long, it was a perfect throw, and it was caught with two hands, and we were all set for the move. There was no defence in place to stop the drive, and we would have been in, but the half-back called ‘give it’ and the guy who caught the ball gave it from the top of the lineout and the guys running around didn’t see it and knocked it on. We were penalised at the [next two] scrums, it was kicked to the corner and they scored.” And there was no Botica. “Frano was supposed to come but couldn’t make it because of a bicep injury so we went into the game without a kicker, and we left about twenty points out on the field,” explains Antony. “That was the one I wanted to win. If we’d have won that, we’d have got second in the group. Realistically I knew we wouldn’t beat Italy, but if we’d have got second we’d have moved on to the next stage against Ireland and Romania and the chances are we’d have been able to go up another level.”

Croatia then beat Russia in Makarska with Scott Keith making an outstanding debut and war veteran Marinko Klaric landing all his kicks. After that,  back-to-back wins against Denmark and Italy would have been enough to send Croatia through to the final round of qualifiers. Denmark were thrashed 40-6 in Aalborg which set up the do-or-die clash with Italy.

Frano returned for Italy, joined by another Kiwi points-machine, Waikato’s Matthew Cooper. “I knew the Cooper brothers really well, I played with Greg (an All Black) at Auckland Marist and their mum, Patricia, spoke beautiful Croatian even though she had never been there and was born in New Zealand, so, as a family, they were very proud of their roots," says Antony.

“I made a real point for every player that came out I would bend over backwards to find their family connections, and to take them to their home village and introduce them to one another. Matthew was touched by the whole thing, it was quite emotional for him. This wasn’t like going overseas and playing for another country after residency, he was playing for a country that was in his blood. 

“Frano loved it, too, because he’d been out there before. He and his dad loved going out to the islands, they are from the island of Korcula, and they’d come back three or four days later looking a lot worse for wear because the whole village would’ve entertained them. It changed many of them, and really opened up a door that had been closed for half a century.”

The World Cup run was a manifestation of a bond between New Zealand and Croatia, one that already ran through the blood of the All Blacks, quite literally. “In the 1986 All Blacks team, the Baby Blacks, who played against France in Christchurch while the Cavaliers were banned, five of the starters had Croatian blood – Greg Cooper, Kevin Boroevich, Sean Fitzpatrick, Frano Botica and Michael Brewer – all those five guys could have played for Croatia. 

“Sean is the same age as Frano and one year ahead of me,” continues Antony. “I never asked him to play for Croatia. He was asked to play for the New Zealand-Croatian team, when we were organising those odd games, but he was very much taken with Auckland and the All Blacks.”

Boosted by the return of Botica, the inclusion of Cooper and enjoying home advantage in Makarska, Croatia had a fighting chance against Italy. It was Split or twist in the Rugby World Cup stakes. Had Croatia won, they’d have been grouped with Ireland and Romania or England and the Netherlands, depending on the standings, in the final qualification raound, which would see two of the teams from each group qualify for the tournament. Ireland and England, of course, virtually had their ticket to Wales booked, given their status in the game, but as for Romania, they were a rapidly declining rugby force following the collapse of Communism and would lose 134-zip against England a few years down the line, while Netherlands may well also have been beatable for Croatia.

Frano had tasted victory against Italy before, as a replacement for New Zealand in the 70-6 Rugby World Cup match made famous by Kirwan, and sensed achieving the double with Croatia was not impossible. 

“Makarska, where we were playing, is not far from Korčula, so all the cousies came out of the woodwork, which was nice,” says Frano. “If we’d have had one or two more forwards, we would probably have beaten them. Our backs were okay, we had myself, Coops, Scotty (Keith), who played provincial rugby in Wellington. The rest of the boys were club players, or some lower than that. So, under the circumstances, we did pretty well.”

On this occasion, Cooper outshone Botica by scoring both Croatia’s tries, one which he converted, and also out-kicked him four penalties to one for a personal haul of 24 points in the 39-27 defeat. “We wanted it live on TV,” says Antony, “so it had to be in the afternoon because the football World Cup was on at the same time in France and all the evening slots were taken up.

“It was so hot the game was played in four quarters and the scrums in the second half were pretty much depowered because of exhaustion. The Italians had winter jerseys on, thick blue jerseys. 

“We went close. In the final quarter, the Italian full-back (Paolo) Vaccari cut us up and scored a magnificent solo try; he was really skilled. 

“I was hoping the Italians would take us lightly but they told me afterwards that they were really worried, they took it really seriously, they thought that we were a danger and trained and went into it with the mindset that this was a fully-fledged international and the danger of losing to us was real. 

“It was a great performance on our part but the gap between professionals and amateurs showed itself at that level.”

While their Rugby World Cup dream was over, Antony and Croatia remained together and, on his watch, the Croatian sevens team – again with a heavy Kiwi influence – came within seconds of pulling off the biggest shock in Hong Kong Sevens history, when they played New Zealand during their debut at the event. 

“The full-time siren went and we were leading by two points,” he explains. “New Zealand, who had never lost in the first round in the history of the Hong Kong Sevens, had a scrum five yards out from their own line, they got possession, ran it and we caught them man and ball behind their own line, and it was game over. But Eric Rush was screaming at the ref and he put the whistle to his mouth and penalised us for offside. They took a quick tap and went the length of the field and won it. We were absolutely shattered; it would have been the biggest upset in the history of the Hong Kong Sevens. 

"We went okay after that, without winning a heck of a lot, but in 2000 we went back [to Hong Kong] and ended up in the Bowl against France and lost (10-7) in overtime in another thrilling match.”

Croatian fortunes waned once Antony left to spread God’s word but, two decades down the line, they are on the up again, fittingly under the watchful eye of Posa, full-back when Croatia took on Italy. 

Yorkshire-based Posa led Croatia to promotion in 2022 and next season they will play in the third tier of European rugby, the Rugby Europe Trophy. “I can’t give enough superlatives for what the guys have achieved,” says Posa, another proud Kiwi-Croat. “They are not even semi-pro, they give up so much to play and we are going to play against established teams now that are fully pro. As long as we go and learn something, I’ll be more than happy.”

Story by Jon Newcombe

Pictures by Berislav Rožman

This extract was taken from issue 19 of Rugby.
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