Wednesday 16th September ko 16:00

Prva Liga Republika Srpska

FK FAMOS VOJKOVIĆI 0

FK LAKTASI 2 (Šinkanjić 36 48)

Att 100 at Stadion u Centru, Vojklović

Entry 5 KM (approx £2.13)

So when you think of Sarajevo, what comes to mind? It could be the place where West and East meet, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires met here, and the point is marked in Sarajevo Old Town. Or could it be as the place where the First World War started? Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist shot Archduke Franz Ferndinand by the Latin Bridge in 1914. When you literally stand in his footprints you do feel the weight of history.

Or you could think of a the Bosnian capital as where Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won Ice Dance gold at the 1984 Winter Olympics. Sadly most will remember the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1996 during the dreadful Bosnian War that resulted from rampant nationalism that was unleashed after the collapse of Yugoslavia following Marshall Tito’s death in 1980. I’d visited Pula back in 1991 when Yugoslavia and its methods was still very much in place. I flew home, and discovered there’d been riots in Belgrade- I’d been completely unaware. Those riots slowly descended into all-out civil war.

In Bosnia & Herzegovina that set Serb, Croat and Bosniak against each other, with Sarajevo put under siege by Serb forces for 4 years, who shelled the city from the mountains on two sides. The main throughfare Ulica Zmaja od Bosne became grimly nicknamed Snipers Alley with the Holiday Inn in the middle of it all. The hotel had been built for the Olympics but became a refuge for journalists covering the war. These days the hotel has been repaired, and Robyn and I enjoyed staying there, but we wouldn’t have booked our room facing the street back then!

You see the a scars of war just about everywhere in Sarajevo, from the buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, to the Sarajevo Roses. These are places where mortars hit and 3 people or more died. Rather than a straightforward repair, the damaged areas were repaired with red resin as a memorial. These days passers-by walk over them, Robyn and I found doing that impossible.

The Dayton Accord ended the war in 1995 and the country was and is divided into two political entities, the Republika Srpska (for Serb areas) and the Federation of Bosnia & Hertzegovina for Croats and Bosniaks. The accord set up the currency, the Convertable Mark currently closed, pegged back then to the Deutsch Mark, now at 2KM to the Euro.

The country has 3 presidents each with equal status, one from each of the ethnic groups. Sarajevo lies in the Federation, but much that surrounds it is in the Republika Srpska. We were to see the differences in sharp contrast. The issue with living in a melting pot society is that on occasion that pot does boil over.

Most football in Bosnia is run along those two political entities, only the top flight sees all clubs from all areas play each other. I’d booked a taxi from the Holiday Inn, but quickly saw the issues, even though it was only a 20 minute drive. We’d visited Bosnia in the build-up to a General Election, but the second we crossed over from the Federation to the Republika the political parties’ posters all changed, Bosnian flags were replaced with Srpska ones, Latin script with Cyrillic, and Mosques and Catholic chapels with Eastern Orthodox churches. It was as close as I’ve ever been to crossing an international border without leaving a country, those stark contrasts being in no small part to ethnic cleansing during the war.

Our taxi driver Erdin sensed our reaction and smiled, “We all use Bosnian passports” but he’d had to take off the “Taxi” sign from the roof of his car- he wasn’t licenced outside of the Federation, and we were soon dropped off in the town square in the little town of Vojkovići. We knew the game was on, the Tribuna App is excellent, and based on the Comet software used in the likes of Wales and Estonia. But everything seemed so quiet, a little bar was opening up, some chickens were clucking in someone’s front garden but I could see players warming up. We turned the corner, heading for the stand, and got the surprise of a lifetime.

“Hello Laurence!” said Isak, who’d spotted we were likely to be at the game, and had followed the blog for a while. He was there with a colleague to gather statistics for football betting companies, but delayed entry into the stadium to meet Robyn and I. It was lovely to meet them, and while I’m used to meeting people I know at some fairly unusual football matches- I read a set of fixtures the same way as anyone else after all, this was very pleasantly odd! Robyn commented later that it will be the nearest (hopefully) I’ll ever get to being famous, but Isak was a lovely chap, and it is good to be appreciated!

There was plenty to consider after we’d paid to enter the single viewable side. Famos is an acronym; Fabrika Motora Sarajevo produced motor engines in Yugoslav times and generally no end of sports clubs were sponsored during the days of Communism. You’ll find the club named two ways, either Famos Vojkovići or Famos Istočna Ilidža (East Ilidza) the local municipality. Perhaps the way to look at it is to say Vojkovići is where they play, and Istočna Ilidža is where they represent. The club have returned to the top flight of Republika Srpska football for this season.

We were delayed slightly due to the Police presence, clearly mandatory, being at least 10 minutes late. They really weren’t needed and at least one of them sloped off early (to that bar?), perhaps he didn’t like football? When you’re watching your first ever game in a particular country and you’ve got no point of reference it is difficult to put what you are seeing in any perspective. What we watched seemed to be at semi-professional level, but the flags on the backs of the Laktasi shirts weren’t just from Republika Srpska. There were players from Portugal, Argentina, and less surprisingly Serbia.

What made all the difference on the pitch was visiting striker Milan Šikanjić. He started his career at Red Star Belgrade before moving to a steady stream of Bosnian clubs, and was just that little bit sharper than anyone trying to mark him soon found out. He won the game for the visitors, but little more than than 15 minutes later we were back in Erdin’s taxi, still without that sign, heading towards a view.

He took us to the edge of the mountains that frame Sarajevo. These days they are part of the Federation but during the siege were controlled by the Serbian forces. It was one thing seeing the bullet holes on Snipers Alley but seeing where they were fired from was truly chilling. Time and time during our time in Bosnia and Herzigovina we heard the same thing from all sides; there are still grievances but it is better to accept those differences than return to the horrors of war. And people the world over can learn from that view.

Dedicated to Erdin. Thanks for everything