News from Croatia

I received an email from a footy mate in Croatia, KC Koracak, or Crusher as he was known to the then Phoenix Scorpions. KC was a graphics design student in AZ several years ago. He started playing footy with our club for one season before traveling back to his home in Zagreb, Croatia. By the time KC left, he had fully embraced the game and introduced it to his countrymen in Croatia.
KC filed the following report on the Croatian team's first-ever international competition in Vienna.
'Croatian footy team went yesterday to Vienna happy to be able to play it's first game ever. We were making history buy fielding a team in Schnitzel Cup, participating along host Austria and Czech Republic in the first tournament in the "3 nation" series. As Austria and Czech Republic have few years experience in playing footy, we came as an underdogs, not expecting
anything. Czeck team arrived the night before, while we left Zagreb at 5 a.m. Arriving at the site 40 minutes before our first game, at that time Czechs and Austrians played their game, with Czechs wining it. We played Czeck republic first (Check the group photo and the body builder with huge "guns"). We took early lead and never looked back. Our Indian substitude entered in second quarter and in his 3rd second of playing career had a clash with one Czeck player who ended up with sprained elbow (or something), and had a surgery the same day. BTW, Sunil is the skiniest guy on our team.

Austrian team performed much better then against Czecks and after a half time score was 4.3.27 to 4.1.25 for us, but we put our best guys too start 3rd quarter and scored 4 goals in a row for a comfortable win. I didn't catch the final scores of all games, but the host committee will e-mail me. We asked about the trophy, and they said it's getting done in the kitchen (Schnitzel?!). All players went to the Billabong bar in Vienna and had few pints, but since we had a 4 hour drive back, the night in the bar wasn't too long.

So we came, we saw and we won, everyone was surprised with our performance, including ourselves. We are glad we finaly put Croatia on the footy map of the world, and our next assignment is our tournament - Croatian Open - July 22nd.

- John "Pops" Meier
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