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From Patrick Jennings
BBC Sport at Pristina
All day the term”wonder” kept coming up. These tens of thousands of people spilling into Pristina’s streets have seen yet another.
This was September 2016 when Kosovo played their first global football match.
On Saturdaythey expanded an unbeaten run with their result yet – a 2-1 home victory over the Czech Republic. It is the longest run in Europe.
Kosovo have an excellent likelihood of attaining Euro 2020. And their next qualifier is against England on Tuesday (19:45 BST). They are relishing the prospect.
This country of about 1.8 million people campaigned for 2 years before being admitted as Fifa and Uefa associates at 2016. The process began immediately after its declaration of independence from Serbia in February 2008. Some countries – like Serbia – still do not recognise its right to exist.
This a troubled and young country from the center of the Balkans should shine on the main stages of football wasn’t the fantasy of 1 man. However, there is one figure who’s admired here over all others – along with his story will help clarify the roots of this team.
He was crucial to Kosovo’s effort for recognition as a football nation, also is a hero in the nation. Following his death last year at age 57, the team’s home floor was renamed in his honour: The Fadil Vokrri Stadium.
Like so many individuals here, Vokrri’s life has been marked by the war that raged within this area only just more than 20 decades ago. From the freezing cycle of counter-vengeance and vengeance, as well as the tensions between Serbs and ethnic Albanians that exist today.
And Vokrri was among very few – maybe the only one – capable to talk across the divides which cost so many lives. Football was his speech.
After Vokrri was made president of the Soccer Federation of Kosovo that he was starting from scratch. His offices were two rooms at a Pristina apartment cube; two computers and 2 desks. It was 16 February 2008. Kosovo announced its independence the day.
Vokrri was in control of a institution with no money, he had a nationwide group which didn’t possess the right at an isolated state with minimal infrastructure.
What he did have was his standing. He was the greatest footballer Kosovo produced – although the exciting new generation of talent that is emerging may challenges soon that name.
He was charismatic charming and convincing. Secretary Errol Salihu and he were.
“After we spoke in the home at this time, at the beginning my dad was thinking the process would be easy,” states Vokrri’s eldest son Gramoz, 33.
“Now we are recognized as a nation, it will be quickly, he thought. He soon realised it’d be anything but easy, but he did not mind it that way.”
Gramoz resides in Pristina. He would often accompany his father and help with his job If he was old enough. Like his father, he is well known at the capital of Kosovo. As allies and acquaintances cease to say hello Chat is disrupted every five minutes. Many stay longer. Among them are former generals from the Kosovo Liberation Army, football agents, and also government officials.
“My father never made a political declaration in his entire life and just focused on football. Soccer is higher than everything else – that was his vision,” he states.
“It enabled my father to help reach our aim – of entering Uefa and Fifa.”
Vokrri was an adventurous forward with two feet. If he was not the most prolific goalscorer perhaps his flair and decision made amends. He was adored by the fans. They recognized in him among the own – even when he wasn’t.
He grew up in Podujeva, a small city that today lies close to Kosovo’s northern boundary with Serbia. Back then, exactly it was part of Yugoslavia. He was created in 1960. Throughout his youth, Yugoslavia was a communist country composed of diverse nationalities, languages and religions, more or less held jointly by its own charismatic leader Josip Broz Tito.
This was an age when Kosovar Albanians such as Vokrri were seldom celebrated. They rarely became symbols of Yugoslav pride. However, this ability was not possible to dismiss.
Vokrri was the very first to play Yugoslavia – and that he are the one. His debut came in a 6-1 defeat by Scotland and believed the goal, the first of six in 12 caps between 1984 and 1987.
He had begun at Llapi, his home team, before going to Pristina. In 1986 he went on to Partizan Belgrade and stayed for 3 years “the most beautiful” of his career,” he explained.
They won the league title in 1989 in 1987 along with also the cup. In between, Italian giants Juventus came calling – but Vokrri has been made to turn them down. He hadn’t completed the then-compulsory two years’ military service, so couldn’t go abroad. He finished his duties while playing for Partizan, fulfilling light tasks during the week between matches.
But leave the country he’d, for reasons that were spiralling out of anyone’s control.
Many historians put President Tito’s departure as the vital point from the collapse of Yugoslavia. They say he left a power vacuum which would be filled by resurgent rival nationalist factions.
Produced in 1986, Gramoz was the first of Vokrri along with his wife Edita’s three children. By 1989, the family had decided they could stay in Yugoslavia no more. Vokrri settled on the Notion of departing for France. In the summertime, he signed Nimes.
“At this moment, everybody in Yugoslavia knew that war would occur,” Gramoz states. “They simply didn’t know when or where it would begin.”
The next decade would be defined by years of suffering. Throughout the 1990s, Yugoslavia was plunged into a bloody conflict where as many as 140,000 people were killed.
From this fighting emerged that the different modern territories of now: Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the recently renamed North Macedonia. Kosovo was the last to declare itself an independent state.
Lulzim Berisha was 20 when he took up arms. He also joined the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This was 1998.
For the past six years he’d been in Pristina, still living under Yugoslav principle but enjoying soccer in what was an unofficial Kosovan top flight set up after the institution of some separatist shadow republic there.
Matches were held on pitches in rural locations. Fans could collect on sloping hillsides to watch. Serbian police would prevent the gamers in route and detain them. But somehow they managed to find up word the street for the resistance. Following the match, players will wash their bodies that are helpless in a nearby river.
When fighting began in 1998 this soccer league stopped.
“I made a decision to join the KLA because of my country,” says Berisha. “I’d no military experience but I watched many terrible things happening here. That was the reason.”
There was open conflict between Kosovo’s freedom fighters the KLA and Serbian authorities in the region. It resulted in a crackdown. Civilians were driven from their homes. There were killings, atrocities and forced expulsions at the control of Serb forces.
The key turning point in the war arrived from 1999. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) had intervened in Bosnia and it did so again in Kosovo. A bombing campaign pushed Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw troops and permit international peacekeepers in. Milosevic’s government dropped a year later. He’d later be held at the United Nations (UN) war crimes tribunal for genocide and other war crimes carried out in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia. In 2006, he was discovered dead in his mobile prior to his trial could be completed, 64.
The territory remained for two years under UN rule, after Serb forces left Kosovo in 1999. About 850,000 people had fled the fighting. An estimated 13,500 individuals were killed or went missing, according to the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC). The HLC, with offices in Pristina and Belgrade, continues to operate on documenting the individual price of Yugoslavia’s wars – like the civilian victims of Nato’s bombardment.
As peace returned to the area, so did many of Kosovo’s refugees. Kids were appointed after then UK prime minister Tony Blair – rendered as one single first title: Tonibler in Albanian. There’s tremendous gratitude in Kosovo into the countries that intervened. Nowhere is it more evident compared to Bill Clinton Boulevard in Pristina, in which a picture of the former US president looks out throughout the traffic below.
Berisha uses few words to describe his life he observed.
He is one of the principal personalities supporting the biggest fan club Dardanet of the federal team. The name means”the Dardanians” – the people of an ancient kingdom that ruled here.
Dardanet have simply opened a brand new cafe bar that serves as their headquarters. Opposite an old tile mill whose chimneys grow into the skies, the call to prayer from a neighborhood mosque carries over energetic conversation between the revived chain-smokers gesturing inside their exterior seats. The other fuels are dark espresso coffee and conversation about soccer of any sort. Serie A is the very passionately discussed. That are the Premier League.
Lulzim sucks because a point at the conclusion of each sentence that is short on his teeth.
“We need every kind of people to arrive at the stadium. Every game we give 100 tickets for lovers. We need families to develop,” he states.
On the table next to people, a reel of tickets for the England game in Southampton is unfurled with glee. They came that afternoon. The visas to travel would be via also. Lulzim clarifies there will be a game against an English fan club at Hounslow on Monday, before Tuesday’s Euro 2020 qualifier in St Mary’s.
Inside, the walls have been high with framed photos of Kosovo players, new and older. Vokrri’s picture is everywhere. They describe themselves as”Children of Vokrri”. He has become a legend for the fan club. They produce banners, T-shirts and online articles that take his image under messages for example:”Hunting down on us.”
“Vokrri is a legend,” says Berisha. “He’s our hero. He did. For Those people.”
But pride of place in the fan club pub belongs to the match top worn by Valon Berisha when he scored the first target in official competition of Kosovo. That was a 1-1 draw in Finland, a 2018 World Cup qualifier played in September 2016.
It was the culmination of several years’ work. Not so long it seemed like things would go downhill.
Vokrri returned from France to Kosovo roughly five years after the war finished. Football’s world governing body Fifa turned Kosovo’s first attempts towards enrollment. At that stage the country had only been recognised by 51 of the UN’s 193 member nations. It appeared that a majority will be required.
Rather, they chose to play unofficial games against unrecognised countries: Northern Cyprus, a team representing Monaco, a team representing the Sami inhabitants of north Norway, Sweden, Russia and Finland.
The players in this time were drawn almost exclusively in the pool. Individuals who had been forced to flee their houses or who had taken up arms and fought.
There was another way. Tantalisingly out of reach.
“At 2012, if Switzerland played a game against Albania, 15 of the players around the pitch have been not able to represent Kosovo,” Gramoz says.
“My dad was in the match, watching with Sepp Blatter, afterward the Fifa president. Mr Blatter said for my father:’Are you loving the match?’
“He responded:’It’s like seeing Kosovo A versus Kosovo B.'”
The major step forward came in 2014, when Fifa allowed Kosovo to play friendly games against its member countries – . There was substantial opposition from Serbia.
Mitrovica was the location for Kosovo’s initial recognised friendly match. This town, together using nearby Albanian and Serbian populations divided in 2 by the Ibar river, and nevertheless needs the presence of Nato troops now, 20 years from their arrival as a peacekeeping force. Oliver Ivanovic, a prominent politician viewed as a medium Kosovo Serb leader, has been shot dead outside his party offices there.
Albania goalkeeper Samir Ujkani decided to accept a call-up, as did Finland international Lum Rexhepi, Norway’s Ardian Gashi along with Switzerland’s Albert Bunjaku. The opposition were Haiti. It ended 0-0.
“For us, it turned into a big, big success,” states Gramoz.
“It turned out to be a crystal clear message in Fifa. The moment they enabled us to play friendly matches we took this to mean:’Do not quit, you will enter as full members – but we want the time to prepare people.’
“Even if we did not have the right to play our national anthem, it is OK. We play football. {That
