Team building

As anyone who has spent any time in Montenegro will tell you, time is relative. Like Matthew McConaughey travelling through a wormhole, minutes, hours and weeks can mean varying units of time depending on who you are meeting, why you are meeting them, what you intend to be doing. Usually, then, if you are talking to a builder (in my experience), your standard units of measuring time assume somewhat stretchy, quantum proportions  – 14:00 can mean any time from 14:00 until some time next week, tomorrow can mean the next day, the one after it or the one after that, and next week can mean next month.

But not with Musa and his crew!*

Bolimir’s half-wits from 2008 would have turned up wearing converse trainers, t-shirts and without spades, brains or cigarettes. They then would have worked slowly using tools fashioned from garden wood, bunking off whenever a few drops of rain fell. That is if they had bothered to show up at all.

With ten days of more or less dry weather, Musa’s guys turned up at seven on the dot every day for ten days running, forming boards, steels, cement and gravel all in position and ready to go. They finished not only our new septic tank, but also the large supporting wall necessary to bear the weight of the new building above it with perfect timing so that by the time the rain did fall, the concrete had set. Now, with the digger they require for the house foundation channels unavailable for the days they want, they have set to work making the internal steels in advance, and making sure they have all other necessary materials delivered so that when the digger does arrive they are ready to go.

I know. Too good to be true, right? Just as well they put a shift or two in, because now it’s raining heavily, and until it stops there will be no digger and no concreting. Ah well.

In addition to Marko the architect (struggling to cope with clients who have started building before he’s finished his plans) and Imzo, Musa and team, we are also assembling some – but not all – of the all-star Dragan team from 6 years ago. Dragan Majstor is gone (I mean absent, not dead, although he might well be given his Drina intake), Electric Dragan and American Dragan both dropped, the former for being a volatile arse with a tendency to stomp off site like a six year old at the merest criticism and the latter because his prices have become a little high. Dragan the Carpenter and Dragan the Plumber are back on board, however. New signings have also been made, more of which next time. And none of them are called Dragan, which makes a nice change.

In the meantime, I managed to get time off for good behaviour to see some teams of a different variety – namely Montenegro versus Sweden at the compact but atmospheric  Budučnosti stadium in Podgorica. I’d been shouted a ticket by the extremely well-connected Ben Perks, one of several Podgorica-based Brits I’ve rather belatedly been getting to know over the last few weeks. Now that our ridiculously busy season is over and George and Evie are sleeping through the night, I can finally rebuild by social life, which, Emma apart, has of late taken the sort of battering that Montenegro’s football team have had to get used to over the years.

Ben P, Drago (honorary Brit), me, Marty, Adrian and 2 blokes I can't remember!

I was excited to go to my first football match for over 4 years because of one man’s likely participation; the legendary Zlatan Ibrahimović. Despite his very Balkan name, he is of course the hugely egotistical and phenomenally talented captain of Sweden, a man whose outrageous goals are only marginally more famous than his near complete aversion to physical exertion, sort of a Swedish Matthew Le Tissier but with slightly glossier hair. Anyone who follows football will have an opinion about Zlatan, positive or negative, and not only would this be the first time I’d ever seen him play live, but it would also be my first time supporting my adopted country’s national side (bit tricky to do when they were playing England in the last two qualifying tournaments).

At €10 a pop, the tickets were absurdly good value, and the north stand was full of bouncing, booming Montenegrins taking as many opportunities as possible to light flares, chuck toilet roll onto the pitch and make insinuations about Ibrahimović’s sexuality and oral hygiene preferences. We were, of course, in the rather safer environs of the west stand, with an excellent view of what turned out to be a pretty entertaining game.

Well, the last 10 minutes anyway. After Sweden went a goal up early on it seemed as though all that would really happen was that the Scandos would probe and pass without really putting a shift in while the Montenegrins relied on their defence to either gift the Swedes a second goal as they had done the first or bail them out from set pieces (the only times they really threatened were from corners). With the Montenegrin captain and talisman, Stevan Jovetić, seeing little of the ball, I began Zlatan watching instead. The big man turned in a pretty typical sort of performance, demanding the ball be played to his feet (presumably so he was spared the effort of sprinting) and glaring at any team-mate who attempted a through ball for him to run on to. Watching him receive the ball in the attacking third of the pitch was a study in what I shall call Zlatanism. First he would glance up, instantly calculating the likelihood of scoring the world’s most astonishing goal from wherever he happened to be on the pitch, and if he decided it was beyond even him he would reluctantly let the ball go, passes to team-mates very much a secondary consideration. He fell over a few times, sliced one volley so wide it went for a throw in, passed the ball into space where no-one was on at least five occasions and broke into something more than a jog twice. Apart from rattling a post with a rasping free kick and – oh yeah – scoring the opening goal, he did next to nothing all game...! Like I said, pretty typical.

Sweden’s lethargy/complacency was to do for them eventually. With 10 minutes to go, the Montenegrin no:16, who had spent much of the match sprinting gamely down the right wing and then falling over, sprinted down the right wing into the penalty area and then fell over a naively outstretched leg. Penalty! Jovetić tucked it nervelessly away to raucous cheers from the home crowd – and then we got a proper ding-dong of a finale as the game degenerated into an end-to-end free-for-all more in common with parks football. We had full length saves, last gasp tackles, a controversially disallowed goal (for Sweden) and a pair of stunning misses, one from Sweden’s no:9 from 6 yards and one from an unidentified Montenegrin player from what looked like 6 inches – how he managed to put that over the bar I’ll never know. It finished 1-1, a pretty fair result and a pretty good one for Montenegro, a country that has just 650,000 citizens (fewer, their coach had once joked, than the total number of pro footballers in England).

I’m going to have to do this sort of thing more often...

So that’s the weekend done. Now it’s time to get back to work (assuming that the rain does at least desist for a couple of days). We’ve got a house to build...

*at least not yet, I reserve the right to revise this opinion if he turns out after all to be a lying, drunk waster.