Swiss Review 3/2018

21 Swiss Review / May 2018 / No.3 ability and skills as a coach. Petkovic, who now holds dual Swiss and Croa- tian nationality, had big shoes to fill in 2014 as the successor to the world- class coach Hitzfeld, and the man be- fore him Köbi Kuhn, a national hero who was popular as a player and later also as a coach. Nowhe has the oppor- tunity to surpass both of these coaches. He will try to lead Switzer- land into the quarter-finals of a tour- nament for the first time since 1954. Petkovic, the com- posed motivator (with Swiss striker Haris Seferovic) Photo: Keystone calmly led themthrough the play-offs and the period of doubt as though he had been coaching at the top level for 20 years and not just ten and as if he had been through it all many times be- fore. That was not actually the case. In contrast to his predecessor Ottmar Hitzfeld, Petkovic had not experi- enced dozens of big matches in packed-out stadiums. There are still situations that he is going through for just the second, third or fourth time and the fact that he is overcoming them reveals a great deal about his trast to former star players who are of- ten given big jobs before ever having coached a team. There are probably lots of things that Petkovic has learned along the way that he is not even aware of today and not just dating back to the 1960s and 1970s in Sarajevo, but also later when he arrived in Switzerland as a 23-year-old player and was left wait- ing at Kloten airport. As the result of a misunderstanding nobody was there to pick him up. This was followed by another misunderstanding when Chur mistakenly thought they had signed a striker who turned out to be a midfielder. You might say that Petk- ovic knows no other way than having to continually prove himself, and hardly any other attribute could help somebody more in the football world where what happened yesterday counts for little today. The best exam- ple: Petkovic’s YB team played some magical football, but his tenure is mainly remembered for failing towin the title in 2010. It is a similar story with the national team. During the qualifying cam- paign for the 2018 World Cup, he led the team from one victory to the next for nine consecutive matches, but everyone was waiting for the tenth game away to Portugal. Switzerland lost and had to play off against North- ern Ireland. Doubts were raised about the strength of the team, that it too is punching above its weight and has been doing so for years. But Petkovic Two years ago at the European Cham- pionships in France, he also fell short of this mark, losing to Poland in a penalty shoot-out in the last 16, but he has probably also learned things from that defeat that he is not even aware of today. BENJAMIN STEFFEN IS SPORTS EDITOR AT THE “NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG”