edgecroft
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From the Telegraph
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-city/8313941/Manchester-Citys-Aleksandar-Kolarov-eager-to-get-one-over-on-Manchester-United-rival-Nemanja-Vidic.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/footba ... Vidic.html</a>
Manchester City's Aleksandar Kolarov eager to get one over on Manchester United rival Nemanja Vidic
By Mark Ogden 7:15AM GMT 10 Feb 2011
The pair went relatively unnoticed, two Serbian footballers meeting up in their adopted city of Manchester, joking about putting their friendship aside for 90 minutes when City face United at Old Trafford this Saturday.
For all of Sir Alex Ferguson’s jibes about “noisy neighbours” and City being a “small club with a small mentality” in the wake of the “Welcome to Manchester” billboard which celebrated Carlos Tévez’s defection from red to blue, Manchester is an oasis of calm for Kolarov in derby week.
Having grown up in the poisonous atmosphere of Red Star-Partizan rivalry in Belgrade, and fresh from three years experience of the increasingly divisive Lazio-Roma derby, Kolarov admits it is a welcome relief to arrive in a city where humour overrides hostility.
“In Manchester, there is more humour,” Kolarov said. “In Rome or in Belgrade, it is different. Here, the fans just want to win, but they don’t think bad. The fans just want to support their teams to the maximum and this is good. I like this.
“I knew Nemanja before I came to Manchester and we are very good friends. We speak all the time and go to dinner together. Being here is good for us.
“But in Rome, when you have the derby, you speak about it two weeks before and two weeks afterwards. Maybe it is the mentality of the south in Italy, but it is very similar to the mentality in Belgrade.”
Recent encounters in Belgrade’s ‘Eternal derby’ have been marred by serious violence, with 5,000 riot police on duty for last October’s fixture.
Kolarov, a Red Star supporter, admits that the hooliganism has become a stain on his country’s reputation.
“The problems are there in Italy and other countries too, but they only say that we Serbs are the bad people,” Kolarov said.
“I can’t explain why it is so bad in Belgrade between Partizan and Red Star. In the last five years there have been lots of problems with hooligans and that means there are lots of police at all of the games now.
“I played in Italy with Lazio and the derby against Roma is also very bad, but in Manchester, it is a big derby, but much quieter than those. If you see the derby in Milan, between AC and Inter, it is like the derby in Manchester – a big game, but the pressure is only on the pitch and not away from it.”
A £19 million signing from Lazio last July, Kolarov has overcome a three-month ankle injury lay-off during the autumn to become a fixture at left back in Roberto Mancini’s City team.
The 25 year-old insists, however, that his traumatic childhood, when he experienced at first hand the Nato bombings in Belgrade in 1999, has forged his character and determination to succeed in England.
“Everybody from my country has a story from when they are young,” Kolarov said. “When I was young, my story is that I had two wars, but maybe you have to grow up quicker. Maybe that is why Vidic is captain of Manchester United and why Dejan Stankovic plays for 10 years in Italy and wins everything.
“It was a difficult time during the bombings. I was 14 when it was happening, but when you have something like that every day, after three days it becomes normal for you.
"The fear is there for the first one or two days, but you have to continue with your life. At nine o’clock, you would hear the siren when the planes were coming, so there was nothing you could do. You could hear them overhead and could see where the bombs were being dropped.
“There was a military airport near to my house [in Belgrade], less than 2km away, and it was being bombed every day. I saw everything. But you can do nothing about. You have to live your life.
"There is bombing, life continues. Bombs fell near my house, the windows blew in, but fortunately nobody that I knew was hurt.
“People protested on the bridges when they started to bomb everything. They just said, ‘Well if you die, you die.’ People slept normally in their houses. If it’s your destiny to die, you die.
“It was scary, but I was young, so I didn’t understand really what it all meant. For my parents, it was very bad. I also have an older brother, so it was difficult for them with all of the worries about the future.
“But kids are kids and, after a couple of days, you just go out to play and get on with your life. When you are a kid, you just want to play football. You can’t play football because you have bombs in the city, but for three months we didn’t go to school and we still played football in the street.”
Twelve years on, battling for local pride in Manchester appears trivial in comparison, but Kolarov insists that City are closing in on and United.
He said: “We have had some very good results and we are not too far from United. We are third now, so we want to try to win the Premier League, but we also have the FA Cup and the Europa League.
“We will see in the end, but we are a very strong team and we want to win things.”
Win, lose or draw, Kolarov will at least be able to discuss it with Vidic over lunch. Welcome to Manchester.
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-city/8313941/Manchester-Citys-Aleksandar-Kolarov-eager-to-get-one-over-on-Manchester-United-rival-Nemanja-Vidic.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/footba ... Vidic.html</a>
Manchester City's Aleksandar Kolarov eager to get one over on Manchester United rival Nemanja Vidic
By Mark Ogden 7:15AM GMT 10 Feb 2011
The pair went relatively unnoticed, two Serbian footballers meeting up in their adopted city of Manchester, joking about putting their friendship aside for 90 minutes when City face United at Old Trafford this Saturday.
For all of Sir Alex Ferguson’s jibes about “noisy neighbours” and City being a “small club with a small mentality” in the wake of the “Welcome to Manchester” billboard which celebrated Carlos Tévez’s defection from red to blue, Manchester is an oasis of calm for Kolarov in derby week.
Having grown up in the poisonous atmosphere of Red Star-Partizan rivalry in Belgrade, and fresh from three years experience of the increasingly divisive Lazio-Roma derby, Kolarov admits it is a welcome relief to arrive in a city where humour overrides hostility.
“In Manchester, there is more humour,” Kolarov said. “In Rome or in Belgrade, it is different. Here, the fans just want to win, but they don’t think bad. The fans just want to support their teams to the maximum and this is good. I like this.
“I knew Nemanja before I came to Manchester and we are very good friends. We speak all the time and go to dinner together. Being here is good for us.
“But in Rome, when you have the derby, you speak about it two weeks before and two weeks afterwards. Maybe it is the mentality of the south in Italy, but it is very similar to the mentality in Belgrade.”
Recent encounters in Belgrade’s ‘Eternal derby’ have been marred by serious violence, with 5,000 riot police on duty for last October’s fixture.
Kolarov, a Red Star supporter, admits that the hooliganism has become a stain on his country’s reputation.
“The problems are there in Italy and other countries too, but they only say that we Serbs are the bad people,” Kolarov said.
“I can’t explain why it is so bad in Belgrade between Partizan and Red Star. In the last five years there have been lots of problems with hooligans and that means there are lots of police at all of the games now.
“I played in Italy with Lazio and the derby against Roma is also very bad, but in Manchester, it is a big derby, but much quieter than those. If you see the derby in Milan, between AC and Inter, it is like the derby in Manchester – a big game, but the pressure is only on the pitch and not away from it.”
A £19 million signing from Lazio last July, Kolarov has overcome a three-month ankle injury lay-off during the autumn to become a fixture at left back in Roberto Mancini’s City team.
The 25 year-old insists, however, that his traumatic childhood, when he experienced at first hand the Nato bombings in Belgrade in 1999, has forged his character and determination to succeed in England.
“Everybody from my country has a story from when they are young,” Kolarov said. “When I was young, my story is that I had two wars, but maybe you have to grow up quicker. Maybe that is why Vidic is captain of Manchester United and why Dejan Stankovic plays for 10 years in Italy and wins everything.
“It was a difficult time during the bombings. I was 14 when it was happening, but when you have something like that every day, after three days it becomes normal for you.
"The fear is there for the first one or two days, but you have to continue with your life. At nine o’clock, you would hear the siren when the planes were coming, so there was nothing you could do. You could hear them overhead and could see where the bombs were being dropped.
“There was a military airport near to my house [in Belgrade], less than 2km away, and it was being bombed every day. I saw everything. But you can do nothing about. You have to live your life.
"There is bombing, life continues. Bombs fell near my house, the windows blew in, but fortunately nobody that I knew was hurt.
“People protested on the bridges when they started to bomb everything. They just said, ‘Well if you die, you die.’ People slept normally in their houses. If it’s your destiny to die, you die.
“It was scary, but I was young, so I didn’t understand really what it all meant. For my parents, it was very bad. I also have an older brother, so it was difficult for them with all of the worries about the future.
“But kids are kids and, after a couple of days, you just go out to play and get on with your life. When you are a kid, you just want to play football. You can’t play football because you have bombs in the city, but for three months we didn’t go to school and we still played football in the street.”
Twelve years on, battling for local pride in Manchester appears trivial in comparison, but Kolarov insists that City are closing in on and United.
He said: “We have had some very good results and we are not too far from United. We are third now, so we want to try to win the Premier League, but we also have the FA Cup and the Europa League.
“We will see in the end, but we are a very strong team and we want to win things.”
Win, lose or draw, Kolarov will at least be able to discuss it with Vidic over lunch. Welcome to Manchester.