The coach of the Croatian national football team, Zlatko Dalic, points out that he is satisfied with the attitude of the players towards the national jersey after securing a place in the European Championship.
With the victory against Armenia, Croatia qualified for the sixth consecutive European Championship.
“What makes me happy and what I want is for the player, when he is not in the national team, to be humble, to keep quiet and do his job, and to impose himself through goals and matches, not through the newspapers. Whoever makes noise in the newspapers is no longer on the national team and will never be. They know that very well. Only positive. Ante (Budmir, scorer of the goal to qualify for the European Championship) was positive, he deserved this chance and he got it,” Dalić explained to RTL.
After he left for Saudi Arabia, Marcelo Brozovic (31) received criticism from various quarters, and after Modric left the game against Latvia, it was Brozovic who was the captain of Croatia.
“Broz also has the right to his one bad day, a bad Sunday. That was in October. He has been pulling, playing, and running for six years. Every game, he runs the most kilometers and does his best. Maybe now his intensity has dropped due to going to Saudi Arabia, but he never fails in the national team”, explained the Croatian coach.
After the defeats against Wales (2:1) and Turkey (1:0), the dissatisfaction of the Croatian public was felt, but Dalic did not address them and pointed out that he currently feels great support from the public and fans.
“I haven’t experienced or felt criticism because I don’t follow social networks or portals when someone makes noise. And the clamor of frustrated people who feel guilty that Croatia has done something and try to take out their frustration on me with their anger. I didn’t follow it. Wherever I appeared and wherever I was, I only experienced support. I have never had more motivation than now, I have never been stronger than now.
That spilled over to our national team. What is very important – after those two setbacks in October, the national team followed me. It can happen that in these situations players turn their backs on the coach or the selector, but that didn’t happen to us,” concluded Dalic.
