Aleksandar Duric

 

Scoring for Singapore

 

Former Yugoslav Aleksandar Duric won his first cap for Singapore in 2007. That year, he also scored two goals in a football match against Tajikistan to send Singapore into the third round of the 2010 FIFA World Cup qualifiers—for the very first time.

 

Playing football professionally was never on the cards for Aleksandar Duric. At 15, he was the junior kayaking champion of Yugoslavia. At 17, he had climbed to eighth in the world. So it came as no surprise when he was picked to represent his country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in canoeing at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. But his joy was tempered by the civil war in his country, which forced him to seek refuge abroad. After the Olympics, he went to Hungary, dumping canoeing for the better-paying sport of football. But it took time to impress the Hungarians.

In the meantime, Duric suffered a personal tragedy. His mother was killed in an artillery attack in 1993, during the Bosnian War. To get by, he became an illegal moneychanger, dodging both the crime syndicates and the police for three years. “I was hungry. I didn’t have a job and a future. I was ashamed to do it,” he recalled with a furrowed brow. In 1994, a friend in Australia invited him to try out for South Melbourne Hellas, one of Australia’s largest clubs. They were looking for “a tall strong player” who could “play in different positions.” So the 1.92m tall Bosnian left for Australia. By 1998, he was playing for West Adelaide and when it went bankrupt a year later, he moved to Singapore to play for the Tanjong Pagar United Football Club in the S-League, the Singapore professional football league.

At the end of the season, he returned to Australia and became a citizen there, hoping to play for their national team, the Socceroos. But in June 2000, he took up an offer from another club, Home United Football Club, and moved permanently to Singapore. By then, he had married Natasha, a Russian-Australian architectural engineering student. When his daughter Isabella was born in 2002 in Singapore, “it hit me that a part of my life is here,” said Duric. So in 2006, he applied for citizenship but was rejected. Friends thought he was “mad” to give up his Australian citizenship but he persevered. On his third attempt, he became a Singaporean in 2007. “The only thing that would stop me is if the application fee was as steep as $1,000,” he quipped. Very soon after in November that year, Duric won his first cap for Singapore. He was then playing for the Warriors, the Singapore Armed Forces Football Club. The club’s general manager Kok Wai Leong asked to speak to him. Duric thought it would be a “casual conversation”. Instead, Duric was handed a letter and told that it was his “call-up for the national team”.

He crowned his national debut with two goals against Tajikistan in the 2010 FIFA World Cup qualifiers, which sent Singapore into the third round—a first for the country. In 2008, he captained Singapore in a friendly against Bahrain, becoming the first foreign-born player to start a game as skipper. During the 2012 ASEAN Football Federation Suzuki Cup, Duric scored the winning goal against Malaysia, drubbing Singapore’s arch-rival on their turf 3-0. Singapore went on to win the Cup and Duric retired from international competition. He was 42 years old and had racked up 24 goals in 53 international appearances for Singapore.

In 2014, Duric played his last club match for the Tampines Rovers. He entered the game at half-time and scored a goal in the 73rd minute against Brunei’s Duli Pengiran Muda Mahkota (DPMM) Football Club. That night he left the field victorious, but emotional about leaving the team. By then, he had won eight league titles, three Singapore Cups, three Player of the Year honours, four top scorer awards and was on the way to becoming the league’s all-time top scorer. Today, he is the assistant coach at the Tampines Rovers, a job he has described cheekily as “man-managing 25 babies”. He still wakes up before dawn to run 15 kilometres each day. In 2011, Duric adopted a seven-day old Muslim boy, whom he and his wife named Massimo, from a children’s home in Singapore where he has been volunteering for over a decade. He has two older children, Isabella and Alessandro. Duric said Singapore reminds him of his childhood village of Doboj, which was small, multi-religious and tight-knit. There, he celebrated Eid al-Fitr and Christmas with his neighbours. Singaporeans take time to warm up, he said, pointing out that neighbours have looked “shocked” when he greets them in the morning. “But that is until they open up,” he continued, “then they say ‘let’s go to this festival and this night market.’ In the end, it just needs more effort on my side.”

References

Dawn Yip, “Sometimes we Played With no Shoes,” Red Sports, September 19, 2008.

Belmont Lay, “11 Reasons S’poreans Love Footballer Aleksandar Duric as Much as Fandi Ahmad,” Mothership, October 29, 2014.

“Aleksandar Duric: A tribute in Numbers,” The New Paper, November 1, 2015.

“Aleksandar Duric,” Worldfootball.net, accessed October 2015,
http://www.worldfootball.net/player_summary/aleksandar-djuric/

Interview with Aleksandar Duric in April 2015.

 

 

Aleksandar Duric
Yugoslavia, b.1970