Goal standard

With the 55-yr-old Croatian as head coach, the Indian men's football team is showing a kind of aggression they were not known for. He can get them into the Top 10 in Asia, Stimac says. They are already winning more. They have the right ambition. What they need is the right support

- Dhiman Sarkar

Igor Stimac is in Metkovic, on the Croatian coast. "I'm in a place with 15 houses," he says, flipping the camera to show a sliver of road, a small beach just beyond it, and an emerald sea.

It's a bright afternoon, and the head coach of the Indian men's football team is visiting his hometown, his parents, brothers and their families. No such trip is complete without a visit to NK Neretva, his first football club.

Stimac, 55, says he can't live without football. He calls it "a kind of professional illness".

It's why he took coaching badges soon after retiring as a player, along with former Croatia teammates Slaven Bilic and Aljosa Asanovic. "We knew this would be our lives."

By 2001, aged 35, Stimac was managing the academy team at Hajduk Split. Bilic, 33, was in charge of the club's first team.

They were all part of the golden first generation of Croatian players. Representing a new country after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991-92, they finished an exhilarating third in the 1998 World Cup.

That was, Stimac says, "the brightest of our great teams, the one that paved the way for our players to go to top clubs".

In 1987, four years before his country became a country, Stimac was also on the Yugoslavian team that won the Under-20 World Cup. "We had six Croats in the starting line-up, playing with Bosnians, Montenegrins and Serbians. It wasn't difficult blending in," says the former central defender. "We were growing up together. Also, any kind of nationalism was immediately killed."

Croatia was independent by the time Stimac made a big-ticket move of £1.5 million to Derby County, in 1995. He was named captain after helping the club qualify for the Premier League, and remains an icon at the club. Since 2005, he has managed Hajduk Split, the Croatia national team, and clubs in the Asian powerhouses of Iran and Qatar.