The news about the death of Ivica Osim, even though it happened on Sunday, the so-called football day, does not belong to the domain of the sports section only. It belongs much more to pop culture or the history of a former country - Yugoslavia, which, as we see, still exists thirty years after its formal end and bloody disintegration. Because Ivica Osim, known as Švabo, was someone like Davorin Popović or Kemal Monten.
And if football coaches in a country where, as they say, all its inhabitants are national team selectors, can be indisputable to the point of worship, then it is possible that the only ones like that were Bobby Robson and Ivica Osim. Perhaps Jürgen Klopp as the third, because he, like Osimo, as a person is decorated above all with the alchemical charm of receptivity, humanity and dignity, wherever he lived and worked. There was no vanity, pride or vanity at all in Ivica, endemically so typical for this climate, and sport in itself.
Ivica Osim was born in Sarajevo on April 6, 1941. His father was a railway worker. Ivica, even though he was one of the best mathematicians in high school, still opted for football, playing, logically, in FK Željezničar from Sarajevo (Desire from miles) in 1954, where he made his debut in the first team in 1959. Ivica was that famous, sometimes irritating Bosnian school of dribbling, but he was still adorned with the epithet from the radio broadcast: Strauss from Grbavica. He was declared the best soccer player of Yugoslavia in 1967, at the end of the sixties he moved to the Dutch Zwolle, then to the French Strasbourg, where he will end his career in 1978, and in France he also played for Sedan and Valenciennes.
Photo: FoNetHe came from the famous Bosnian school of dribbling: Ivica Osim
He scored eight goals for the Yugoslav national team in 16 games, and at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, he became assistant coach to Ivan Toplak, whom he succeeded in that position in 1986. His aura, or charisma, starts from Desires games in the UEFA Cup in the 1983/84 season, and the famous semi-final on April 24, 1984, when the whole of Yugoslavia cheered for Željezničar, who unfortunately, in the last minutes, conceded a goal from Hungarian Videoton and lost the expected final with Real Madrid.
Although as a coach with the SFRY national team, he did not qualify for the European Championship in Germany in 1988, it was a time of great expectations. At the World Cup in Italy in 1990, Yugoslavia, led by Osima, lost to Argentina in the quarter-finals on penalties, although they deserved to reach the semi-finals several times over. It all ended with the suspension of our national team from the European Championship in Sweden in 1992, due to sanctions, although Yugoslavia, led by Osim, qualified for that championship. The championship was won by Denmark, which replaced us. Of the sporting injustice, Osimo's tears in his eyes and his resignation seven days earlier, after the outbreak of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were much more impressive. "If nothing else, the only thing I can do for that city is for you to remember that I was born in Sarajevo, and for you to know what is happening..." Ivica said then.
In parallel with the national team, Osim at that time coached Belgrade's Partizan, with whom he won the last Marshal Tito Cup. After that, he took over the Greek Panathenaikos, and in 1994 Sturm from Graz, where he lived and worked until 2002, and where he died today at the age of eighty-one.
Under Osimo's leadership, Sturm was the champion of Austria twice, played in the Champions League, and Ivica was declared the most important coach in the history of the club. He finished his career in Japan, first as a coach of JEF United from 2003 to 2006, and then as a coach of the Japanese national team until 2007.
He was married to Asima and had three children: Amar, Selimira and Irma. The epitaph to Ivica Osim can, and must, be followed by a soundtrack: the song "Zemljo moja".
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