Times Online - Newspaper Edition
The big interview: Mark Viduka
Leeds won’t be relegated — not if their top striker has anything to do with it, he tells Jonathan Northcroft
February 2, 2004. The transfer window is slamming shut. It is deadline day, and, in the northeast, a day of deals and wheels. On the A1, Mark Viduka is speeding towards the turnoff for Teesside in a desperate attempt to reach the Riverside and complete a medical for Middlesbrough before close of business at 5pm. If ever haste is indecent, it is now. Leeds United are out of hope, yet the Australian’ s only worry is that he will be out of time. There he goes. Tara, teammates, g’day signing-on fee. A rat racing away from a sinking ship in a silver Mercedes-Benz.
Nice story, except for one detail. None of it happened. Although Viduka’s dash was reported in newspapers and radio bulletins, the truth was different. The only travelling he did was on an aircraft returning to the UK from Melbourne, where he had just left his father strapped to a life-support machine, recovering from a brain haemorrhage. He spent three weeks at his dad’s bedside, and only left to help save Leeds from relegation.
“Middlesbrough made a late bid, but to be honest, I wasn’t in a position to give them a decision. I had a lot to think about with my dad, and I want to see if I can put things right with Leeds,” he says. “I don’t want to see Leeds go down and I didn’t want to just leave them like that.”
Viduka is more resigned to the press coverage than hurt. “I hope Leeds fans know me, but a lot of people get led by the press. They influence people.”
We have been here before, me and Mark. Or rather me and Marko, as he was called in December 1998, when Celtic signed him from Croatia Zagreb. He lasted two days in Glasgow before disappearing back to Melbourne via Zagreb. His old and new clubs rowed about the transfer, and having bottled up the pressures of three years playing in what was still a warzone in Croatia, he suddenly found it all too much.
Three months later, having finally returned to Celtic, Viduka explained himself to The Sunday Times. Then, as now, there was a record to put straight. The stories were wild. Some papers claimed he left Scotland because of a drug test, others that the issue was money, others that he had been sent to a mental institution. There were even hints about Aids. Viduka can laugh now, but at the time it caused him great distress.
“Do you remember that other story? When I ‘walked out’ before a game when Kenny Dalglish was manager?” he says with a shake of the head. “I was sent home by the Celtic doctor with a high temperature and a virus, but they wrote that I’d chucked in a transfer request.”
Viduka has found that, like a virus, misinformation spreads. To this day, the media give him a rough deal.
“Mark’s more shy and sensitive than he looks, but he’s basically a down-to-earth, straightforward guy,” confided one of his friends. “So why the bad rep?”
JANUARY 1, 2002. Viduka scores twice as Leeds defeat West Ham 3-0. As the team knocks passes about, the crowd at Elland Road shout: “Ole!” With this victory, Leeds move top of the Premiership. Five days later, they go out of the FA Cup to Cardiff. Five months later, David O’Leary is out of work. Since then, the crises have not stopped. “If I could explain exactly when things started to go wrong,” Viduka says with a smile, “I’d be doing your job, mate.”
We are on a balcony overlooking an indoor pitch at Leeds’s training ground at Thorp Arch. Viduka, in shorts and club top, is relaxed and open to any questions. But although he joins in politely as I trawl through the glories that have gone (“three seasons ago we were in the Champions League semi-final and on cloud nine — amazing”) and the colleagues who have departed (“I could understand selling Rio because of the money, but letting Ollie (Olivier Dacourt) go so cheaply was a disgrace”) he is not really interested in looking back. “What’s the point?” he asks. “You can’t change the past. What this team needs to change is the future.”
In midweek, Viduka, playing for the second time since returning from Australia, spearheaded a 4-1 victory over Wolves. Leeds leapt off the bottom of the table and suddenly are just four points away from escaping the relegation zone.
“If we’d lost to Wolves we’d have been six points adrift at the bottom and would have found it very difficult to come back. But the win’s given us confidence again. As we came off, I thought, ‘We haven’t played a game like that all season’. We went one up, they pulled one back, but we didn’t stop going. It was like the old Leeds was back. All week, you felt a change. Training ’s been very, very fiery. Everybody’s up for it. The situation we’ve been in is difficult, but the key now is to shut all that out. Ultimately what happens between now and the end of the season is up to the players — us. If you look at the whole picture, how are we going to get out of this shit? It’s us.”
Viduka’s belief could be pivotal for the club. When Leeds scrambled to safety last season from a similarly dire position, their big man was their big player, scoring 14 times in their final 10 games, including the goal that ultimately secured their survival, a gorgeous strike in the 88th minute of a 3-2 win at Highbury. He looked particularly pleased against Wolves to be back in tandem with Alan Smith, who has spent so long stranded in midfield. “I like Smithy. He’s a good lad and a great partner to have. He’s Leeds through and through, and he doesn’t want to go down either. If key players here start promoting a different attitude, the whole thing can change, and people like me and Smithy have to take a lead. It starts at every training session, you know.”
In training, Viduka’s recent fierceness has surprised some colleagues, and he has confronted one teammate for not taking things seriously. “When I was at home I had a lot of time to think. Basically, I reckon, what are my options? Either I sit on my backside and go down, or I do everything I can to turn this around.”
Cynics might ask: why the determination now? Viduka’s response would be that his desire to battle is not new, it just has renewed focus. Commitment to Leeds? It’s worth remembering the circumstances in which he left to fly home to his father, Joseph.
It was a Friday night, January 9, when the call came from Melbourne to say Joseph was in intensive care. He had come home with a headache, gone to hospital and was found to have bleeding in the brain. Within half-an-hour he was operated on and put on a life-support machine. “The people at the hospital were particularly good, and I’d like to thank them,” Viduka says. “Their speed saved my father’s life.”
He had the permission of manager Eddie Gray to go home immediately, yet stayed to play against Spurs the next day. “They weren’t going to wake Dad for a couple of days, so I thought, ‘If I’m here, I should play. We’ve got a chance of beating Tottenham’. So I played. But in the first half I was so full of emotions, I couldn’t carry on. I was thinking, ‘What am I doing chasing this bloody ball around when my dad’s lying there halfway across the world?’ Some things are more important than this game. I’d give up football tomorrow if it meant my dad was going to be okay.”
Substituted at half-time, Viduka went straight to the airport. “The flight was a nightmare. Australia’s so far, and you’re sitting on the plane thinking, ‘What’s going to happen? Is Dad going to wake up?’ He was in a coma for 15 days. He’s awake now, but can’t speak. The doctors think he can make a full recovery. Let’s hope so. My dad’s my hero. He’s a self-made man, a builder, who came to Melbourne from Croatia with nothing and raised five kids. He was under stress all the time with loans, and a couple of times we could have been bankrupt. But he always worked harder and pulled us through. He loves his football, and he’d drop everything so I could play. I had my Holy Communion, you know. They made us wear this bloody robe . . . when it was finished, I got straight out of it, and me and my old man went off, because I had a tournament that night.”
JULY 5, 2001. Viduka signs a new five-year contract. Peter Risdale and two other Leeds directors fly to Dubrovnik, where the striker is holidaying with Ivana, his wife. The day is spent on Viduka’s boat. The group talk until sundown about Croatian history and the pleasures of sailing. When the directors leave, Viduka gives them presents. In a money-driven game, the actual contract is agreed in just 20 minutes.
So why the bad rep? One answer might be that, from the era of cigarette cards to this age of Premiership poster boys, we prefer our football heroes to come in just two dimensions. Viduka is more complicated. What you see is not always what you get. Take his playing style. He is a huge man, with ox-like shoulders and great hams for limbs, yet he does not crash about like a target man. His gait is casual. He is not a striker who chases balls to the corner flags when there is little chance of keeping them in. A section of the Leeds support has barracked him for being “lazy”. An old chestnut. In a recent Prozone test, Viduka was found to have done the third most running of his team in a game. “Maybe I look that way (lazy), but that’s my style, know what I mean? Some players run around and it might look like they’re doing something but they’re not doing very much. I’m not out for cheers. I’m out to win games. How can I say this . . . I give 100% in every game I play. Last year I scored 20 League goals. I must be doing something right.”
There are other preconceptions that he differs from. Australians are expected to be sunny and laid-back. And Mark Viduka is. But there is also Marko Viduka. By parentage he is Croatian, with all the passion and pepper that implies. “Where my father’s from, Dalmatia, the people have a reputation for being laid-back. So that, combined with being an Aussie, probably explains my timekeeping. But Dalmatians have also got spirit. I’m very stubborn, and if my mind’s set on something, I won’t budge. That could be the Croatian in me.”
Stubbornness does not always go down well in a regimented game. At Celtic, Fergus McCann, then chairman, allegedly reneged on a promise to improve Viduka’s terms if he succeeded in his first season. The pair fell out. After scoring 37 goals in 41 starts, suddenly Viduka did not score again. Earlier this season there was a dispute with the equally stubborn Peter Reid that led to a nasty confrontation in training. Viduka had arrived in the dressing room late before a game with Arsenal. “I was signing autographs out at the back of Elland Road. I’d arrived early, but everybody wanted my autograph. You don’t want to let them down,” he says.
Now detached from Leeds, Reid has softened towards the player, and Viduka regrets the extent of their spat. “It was a misunderstanding. He was under a lot of pressure. I’m sure he doesn’t hold any grudges against me, and I don’t hold any against him. I quite liked Peter.”
If there is one thing Viduka would like to get straight about himself, it is the question of loyalty. When he left Celtic, it was for just £6m, but McCann was gleeful at the generous sell-on clause agreed with Leeds. Viduka would not stick around long at Elland Road, McCann reckoned, before angling for another move. Nearly four years later, Celtic are still waiting for their money.
“People can have their opinions about me, but at the end of the day I’m still here, aren’t I? For the last three years they’ve been saying, ‘He wants to leave, he wants to leave’. Well, I had the chance to go to one of the biggest clubs in the world (AC Milan in 2001) and I didn’t, because I thought we could win things at Leeds — the Premiership and even the Champions League.
“I like this club. I like living in Yorkshire. My wife likes it here. My feelings for Leeds are underestimated. It’s the press. They send over the wrong vibe. People have forgotten very easily things I’ve done. I scored 22 goals last season, and as soon as I came back this season, people were having a go at me.”
A nice story told about Viduka is how, after scoring four times against Liverpool, he stayed after the man-of-the-match presentation to sign autographs for 300 people. Last year he invited fans to e-mail him at his website, run with the help of one of his four sisters. He replied to hundreds of messages, until unable to cope with the sheer volume.
He has also been loyal to Croatia. In 1995, when by 19 he was already a two-time Australian Footballer of the Year, he rebuffed Borussia Dortmund to join Croatia Zagreb. Franjo Tudjman, then president of Croatia, travelled to Melbourne to secure his signature. Now Viduka is planning to use some of his money to help the country’s children. “It might be building an orphanage or something else. I want to get it 100% right before committing, because sometimes you get involved and you don’t know where the money ends up, especially in places like Croatia. But I want to do something. The country’s still paying for the war and needs to get organised, having been communist for 50 years, then having the war, then moving to democracy. But it’s a beautiful place. Ivana’s Croatian, and we return every year for our holidays.
“I was watching a programme on Croatian television about how a lot of hospitals don’t have money for medicine. I’d like to do something to help with that. A friend of mine is a doctor who works in a kids’ unit out there, and he’s asking me if I could get some hospitals here to donate the medicines they need in Croatia for cancer treatment for kids. He reckons hospitals in England might throw out medicines that are past their use-by date, but which he could still use in Croatia. I’ve tried to organise getting medicines sent over, but it’s difficult with customs and all that stuff. I’m a footballer, I don’t really know about these things, but if anybody reading this knows a way round it, or can think of other ways to help, I’d love them to let me know.”
When Croatia fought for independence, Viduka’s four cousins all served in the country’s special forces. Other relatives became refugees. Zadar, his family village, was devastated. “It’s a three-hour drive from Zagreb, and as soon as they opened up the roads after occupation, my dad came over and we went to see what was left. We drove through without even realising. It was rubble, and there was grass growing as high as this roof where buildings used to be.”
OCTOBER 9, eternity. Viduka’s infinity-eth birthday. Up in heaven, he is throwing his ideal dinner party. The guests are Jesus Christ, Franjo Tudjman, Diego Maradona and Ozzy Osbourne. Ivana and Anna Rose, his mother, are cooking, Croatian-style. He might play Osbourne some of the guitar chords he has been learning. How would the conversation go? “Well, I’d like to maybe ask Jesus a few questions. Get some things clear. I mean, people have been arguing about these things for a long time, you know. Diego — what a legend — I’d want to talk soccer with him. Tudjman has my greatest respect: Croatia, as a country, never had freedom for 1,000 years, and he led us there. Ozzy? He’d be there for laughs.” So, what sort of career would Viduka be looking back on, from up there? “I’m 28. In the next couple of years I’d like to be playing at the highest level. I’d like to be in the Champions League again. I want to win things. Is it possible here? Maybe. Football’s a strange game. A guy could suddenly turn up, like at Chelsea, and say, ‘We’re going to buy the best players in the world’. I’d love that to happen to this club.
“At the end of this season we’ll have to see what happens. If it comes to the situation that I have to leave because of the financial situation, then it will have to be done. It’s happened with other players. But I don’t want to leave Leeds just for the sake of leaving Leeds.” And how would Mark Viduka like to be remembered? “As a good player, mate. I don’t want to wear any dresses, I don ’t want to be a fashion icon or have a fancy hairdo. I just want to be a good player.”
Now what is so complicated about that?
The big interview: Mark Viduka
Leeds won’t be relegated — not if their top striker has anything to do with it, he tells Jonathan Northcroft
February 2, 2004. The transfer window is slamming shut. It is deadline day, and, in the northeast, a day of deals and wheels. On the A1, Mark Viduka is speeding towards the turnoff for Teesside in a desperate attempt to reach the Riverside and complete a medical for Middlesbrough before close of business at 5pm. If ever haste is indecent, it is now. Leeds United are out of hope, yet the Australian’ s only worry is that he will be out of time. There he goes. Tara, teammates, g’day signing-on fee. A rat racing away from a sinking ship in a silver Mercedes-Benz.
Nice story, except for one detail. None of it happened. Although Viduka’s dash was reported in newspapers and radio bulletins, the truth was different. The only travelling he did was on an aircraft returning to the UK from Melbourne, where he had just left his father strapped to a life-support machine, recovering from a brain haemorrhage. He spent three weeks at his dad’s bedside, and only left to help save Leeds from relegation.
“Middlesbrough made a late bid, but to be honest, I wasn’t in a position to give them a decision. I had a lot to think about with my dad, and I want to see if I can put things right with Leeds,” he says. “I don’t want to see Leeds go down and I didn’t want to just leave them like that.”
Viduka is more resigned to the press coverage than hurt. “I hope Leeds fans know me, but a lot of people get led by the press. They influence people.”
We have been here before, me and Mark. Or rather me and Marko, as he was called in December 1998, when Celtic signed him from Croatia Zagreb. He lasted two days in Glasgow before disappearing back to Melbourne via Zagreb. His old and new clubs rowed about the transfer, and having bottled up the pressures of three years playing in what was still a warzone in Croatia, he suddenly found it all too much.
Three months later, having finally returned to Celtic, Viduka explained himself to The Sunday Times. Then, as now, there was a record to put straight. The stories were wild. Some papers claimed he left Scotland because of a drug test, others that the issue was money, others that he had been sent to a mental institution. There were even hints about Aids. Viduka can laugh now, but at the time it caused him great distress.
“Do you remember that other story? When I ‘walked out’ before a game when Kenny Dalglish was manager?” he says with a shake of the head. “I was sent home by the Celtic doctor with a high temperature and a virus, but they wrote that I’d chucked in a transfer request.”
Viduka has found that, like a virus, misinformation spreads. To this day, the media give him a rough deal.
“Mark’s more shy and sensitive than he looks, but he’s basically a down-to-earth, straightforward guy,” confided one of his friends. “So why the bad rep?”
JANUARY 1, 2002. Viduka scores twice as Leeds defeat West Ham 3-0. As the team knocks passes about, the crowd at Elland Road shout: “Ole!” With this victory, Leeds move top of the Premiership. Five days later, they go out of the FA Cup to Cardiff. Five months later, David O’Leary is out of work. Since then, the crises have not stopped. “If I could explain exactly when things started to go wrong,” Viduka says with a smile, “I’d be doing your job, mate.”
We are on a balcony overlooking an indoor pitch at Leeds’s training ground at Thorp Arch. Viduka, in shorts and club top, is relaxed and open to any questions. But although he joins in politely as I trawl through the glories that have gone (“three seasons ago we were in the Champions League semi-final and on cloud nine — amazing”) and the colleagues who have departed (“I could understand selling Rio because of the money, but letting Ollie (Olivier Dacourt) go so cheaply was a disgrace”) he is not really interested in looking back. “What’s the point?” he asks. “You can’t change the past. What this team needs to change is the future.”
In midweek, Viduka, playing for the second time since returning from Australia, spearheaded a 4-1 victory over Wolves. Leeds leapt off the bottom of the table and suddenly are just four points away from escaping the relegation zone.
“If we’d lost to Wolves we’d have been six points adrift at the bottom and would have found it very difficult to come back. But the win’s given us confidence again. As we came off, I thought, ‘We haven’t played a game like that all season’. We went one up, they pulled one back, but we didn’t stop going. It was like the old Leeds was back. All week, you felt a change. Training ’s been very, very fiery. Everybody’s up for it. The situation we’ve been in is difficult, but the key now is to shut all that out. Ultimately what happens between now and the end of the season is up to the players — us. If you look at the whole picture, how are we going to get out of this shit? It’s us.”
Viduka’s belief could be pivotal for the club. When Leeds scrambled to safety last season from a similarly dire position, their big man was their big player, scoring 14 times in their final 10 games, including the goal that ultimately secured their survival, a gorgeous strike in the 88th minute of a 3-2 win at Highbury. He looked particularly pleased against Wolves to be back in tandem with Alan Smith, who has spent so long stranded in midfield. “I like Smithy. He’s a good lad and a great partner to have. He’s Leeds through and through, and he doesn’t want to go down either. If key players here start promoting a different attitude, the whole thing can change, and people like me and Smithy have to take a lead. It starts at every training session, you know.”
In training, Viduka’s recent fierceness has surprised some colleagues, and he has confronted one teammate for not taking things seriously. “When I was at home I had a lot of time to think. Basically, I reckon, what are my options? Either I sit on my backside and go down, or I do everything I can to turn this around.”
Cynics might ask: why the determination now? Viduka’s response would be that his desire to battle is not new, it just has renewed focus. Commitment to Leeds? It’s worth remembering the circumstances in which he left to fly home to his father, Joseph.
It was a Friday night, January 9, when the call came from Melbourne to say Joseph was in intensive care. He had come home with a headache, gone to hospital and was found to have bleeding in the brain. Within half-an-hour he was operated on and put on a life-support machine. “The people at the hospital were particularly good, and I’d like to thank them,” Viduka says. “Their speed saved my father’s life.”
He had the permission of manager Eddie Gray to go home immediately, yet stayed to play against Spurs the next day. “They weren’t going to wake Dad for a couple of days, so I thought, ‘If I’m here, I should play. We’ve got a chance of beating Tottenham’. So I played. But in the first half I was so full of emotions, I couldn’t carry on. I was thinking, ‘What am I doing chasing this bloody ball around when my dad’s lying there halfway across the world?’ Some things are more important than this game. I’d give up football tomorrow if it meant my dad was going to be okay.”
Substituted at half-time, Viduka went straight to the airport. “The flight was a nightmare. Australia’s so far, and you’re sitting on the plane thinking, ‘What’s going to happen? Is Dad going to wake up?’ He was in a coma for 15 days. He’s awake now, but can’t speak. The doctors think he can make a full recovery. Let’s hope so. My dad’s my hero. He’s a self-made man, a builder, who came to Melbourne from Croatia with nothing and raised five kids. He was under stress all the time with loans, and a couple of times we could have been bankrupt. But he always worked harder and pulled us through. He loves his football, and he’d drop everything so I could play. I had my Holy Communion, you know. They made us wear this bloody robe . . . when it was finished, I got straight out of it, and me and my old man went off, because I had a tournament that night.”
JULY 5, 2001. Viduka signs a new five-year contract. Peter Risdale and two other Leeds directors fly to Dubrovnik, where the striker is holidaying with Ivana, his wife. The day is spent on Viduka’s boat. The group talk until sundown about Croatian history and the pleasures of sailing. When the directors leave, Viduka gives them presents. In a money-driven game, the actual contract is agreed in just 20 minutes.
So why the bad rep? One answer might be that, from the era of cigarette cards to this age of Premiership poster boys, we prefer our football heroes to come in just two dimensions. Viduka is more complicated. What you see is not always what you get. Take his playing style. He is a huge man, with ox-like shoulders and great hams for limbs, yet he does not crash about like a target man. His gait is casual. He is not a striker who chases balls to the corner flags when there is little chance of keeping them in. A section of the Leeds support has barracked him for being “lazy”. An old chestnut. In a recent Prozone test, Viduka was found to have done the third most running of his team in a game. “Maybe I look that way (lazy), but that’s my style, know what I mean? Some players run around and it might look like they’re doing something but they’re not doing very much. I’m not out for cheers. I’m out to win games. How can I say this . . . I give 100% in every game I play. Last year I scored 20 League goals. I must be doing something right.”
There are other preconceptions that he differs from. Australians are expected to be sunny and laid-back. And Mark Viduka is. But there is also Marko Viduka. By parentage he is Croatian, with all the passion and pepper that implies. “Where my father’s from, Dalmatia, the people have a reputation for being laid-back. So that, combined with being an Aussie, probably explains my timekeeping. But Dalmatians have also got spirit. I’m very stubborn, and if my mind’s set on something, I won’t budge. That could be the Croatian in me.”
Stubbornness does not always go down well in a regimented game. At Celtic, Fergus McCann, then chairman, allegedly reneged on a promise to improve Viduka’s terms if he succeeded in his first season. The pair fell out. After scoring 37 goals in 41 starts, suddenly Viduka did not score again. Earlier this season there was a dispute with the equally stubborn Peter Reid that led to a nasty confrontation in training. Viduka had arrived in the dressing room late before a game with Arsenal. “I was signing autographs out at the back of Elland Road. I’d arrived early, but everybody wanted my autograph. You don’t want to let them down,” he says.
Now detached from Leeds, Reid has softened towards the player, and Viduka regrets the extent of their spat. “It was a misunderstanding. He was under a lot of pressure. I’m sure he doesn’t hold any grudges against me, and I don’t hold any against him. I quite liked Peter.”
If there is one thing Viduka would like to get straight about himself, it is the question of loyalty. When he left Celtic, it was for just £6m, but McCann was gleeful at the generous sell-on clause agreed with Leeds. Viduka would not stick around long at Elland Road, McCann reckoned, before angling for another move. Nearly four years later, Celtic are still waiting for their money.
“People can have their opinions about me, but at the end of the day I’m still here, aren’t I? For the last three years they’ve been saying, ‘He wants to leave, he wants to leave’. Well, I had the chance to go to one of the biggest clubs in the world (AC Milan in 2001) and I didn’t, because I thought we could win things at Leeds — the Premiership and even the Champions League.
“I like this club. I like living in Yorkshire. My wife likes it here. My feelings for Leeds are underestimated. It’s the press. They send over the wrong vibe. People have forgotten very easily things I’ve done. I scored 22 goals last season, and as soon as I came back this season, people were having a go at me.”
A nice story told about Viduka is how, after scoring four times against Liverpool, he stayed after the man-of-the-match presentation to sign autographs for 300 people. Last year he invited fans to e-mail him at his website, run with the help of one of his four sisters. He replied to hundreds of messages, until unable to cope with the sheer volume.
He has also been loyal to Croatia. In 1995, when by 19 he was already a two-time Australian Footballer of the Year, he rebuffed Borussia Dortmund to join Croatia Zagreb. Franjo Tudjman, then president of Croatia, travelled to Melbourne to secure his signature. Now Viduka is planning to use some of his money to help the country’s children. “It might be building an orphanage or something else. I want to get it 100% right before committing, because sometimes you get involved and you don’t know where the money ends up, especially in places like Croatia. But I want to do something. The country’s still paying for the war and needs to get organised, having been communist for 50 years, then having the war, then moving to democracy. But it’s a beautiful place. Ivana’s Croatian, and we return every year for our holidays.
“I was watching a programme on Croatian television about how a lot of hospitals don’t have money for medicine. I’d like to do something to help with that. A friend of mine is a doctor who works in a kids’ unit out there, and he’s asking me if I could get some hospitals here to donate the medicines they need in Croatia for cancer treatment for kids. He reckons hospitals in England might throw out medicines that are past their use-by date, but which he could still use in Croatia. I’ve tried to organise getting medicines sent over, but it’s difficult with customs and all that stuff. I’m a footballer, I don’t really know about these things, but if anybody reading this knows a way round it, or can think of other ways to help, I’d love them to let me know.”
When Croatia fought for independence, Viduka’s four cousins all served in the country’s special forces. Other relatives became refugees. Zadar, his family village, was devastated. “It’s a three-hour drive from Zagreb, and as soon as they opened up the roads after occupation, my dad came over and we went to see what was left. We drove through without even realising. It was rubble, and there was grass growing as high as this roof where buildings used to be.”
OCTOBER 9, eternity. Viduka’s infinity-eth birthday. Up in heaven, he is throwing his ideal dinner party. The guests are Jesus Christ, Franjo Tudjman, Diego Maradona and Ozzy Osbourne. Ivana and Anna Rose, his mother, are cooking, Croatian-style. He might play Osbourne some of the guitar chords he has been learning. How would the conversation go? “Well, I’d like to maybe ask Jesus a few questions. Get some things clear. I mean, people have been arguing about these things for a long time, you know. Diego — what a legend — I’d want to talk soccer with him. Tudjman has my greatest respect: Croatia, as a country, never had freedom for 1,000 years, and he led us there. Ozzy? He’d be there for laughs.” So, what sort of career would Viduka be looking back on, from up there? “I’m 28. In the next couple of years I’d like to be playing at the highest level. I’d like to be in the Champions League again. I want to win things. Is it possible here? Maybe. Football’s a strange game. A guy could suddenly turn up, like at Chelsea, and say, ‘We’re going to buy the best players in the world’. I’d love that to happen to this club.
“At the end of this season we’ll have to see what happens. If it comes to the situation that I have to leave because of the financial situation, then it will have to be done. It’s happened with other players. But I don’t want to leave Leeds just for the sake of leaving Leeds.” And how would Mark Viduka like to be remembered? “As a good player, mate. I don’t want to wear any dresses, I don ’t want to be a fashion icon or have a fancy hairdo. I just want to be a good player.”
Now what is so complicated about that?