Newsletter

The day Bora took a player to the World Cup for fut-tennisMediotiempo

Bora Milutinovic is remembered for having led Mexico to the famous ‘fifth game’ and had a reputation for taking advantage of teams without much international renown and during his time in USA he did his thing.

The Serbian coach was hired by the United States Soccer Federation in 1991, when he was competing with Rinus Michels o Carlos Queiroz. And he managed to shape an inexperienced American team for the World Cup they hosted in 1994.

Milutinovic He was also famous for establishing fut-tennis sessions in training, which he took seriously and his important decisions they came out of how they performed in said exercises, so he left it to see Alexi Lalas.

I saw a teammate get on the World Cup roster for the way that played fut-tennis on one of the days before the cut,” he told the BBC with a laugh.

“We knew that Bora took it very seriously (foot-tennis) because he also played it. For him, the evaluation of that futsal-tennis it was more about how the individual or individuals they tackled the game together. What are they doing? How competitive are they? How did they take the loss? How do they choose their partner?” she added.

Lalas remembered that Bora was a expert to test your patienceand that one of his great tests was his hair, which was part of his image as a player, which also caught the attention of the Serbian.

He had very long hair and I remember we were in Phoenix, Arizona and Bora’s assistant said to me, ‘Bora wants you to cut your hair‘” he recalled Lalas. “He was angry and I started yelling ‘this is America‘, ‘This is not cool,’ but the fact is I would have done anything to be on the team and I remember walking down the street to the barbershop to get a haircut.”

“We had a meeting that night and it was the first time Bora had seen me (since the haircut). She walked in, just greeted me with a nod and continued. That was a year and a half before the World Cup and he never said anything else about my hair or how I looked because at that time I had passed that test. He wanted to see because he knew that, for me, hair was important. From that moment on, I grew my hair and beard. If I had to make that sacrifice, I would come back with a vengeance.”

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending