How Kosovo, 'Brazil of the Balkans', consoled a nation's disappointment
It is a year of resonant anniversaries for Kosovo: a century since the formation of pre-war Yugoslavia, 20 years since the war crimes of Serbian nationalists posed an existential threat and a decade since independence was declared.
The significance of 2018? Kosovo's football team will end the year unbeaten, with the chance of European Championship qualification having top-scored in the Nations League and won their group.
Fans will flock to Prishtina's bars for this Sunday's qualification draw and whatever that campaign yields, Europe's youngest nation are two wins away from a major tournament. Macedonia, then Georgia or Belarus stand in their way.
"Football is like a religion," says Arnolld Korenica, editor of the biggest online Albanian-speaking news website, Telegrafi.com. "The source of happiness, pride and joy. The only method to relax after a hard-working and low-paying day, and after daily political disappointments."
In 2016, Kosovo were yet to play a competitive game, selected squads from 12 players and their national stadium was not fit for purpose. Now their free-flowing play has supporters calling them the 'Brazil of the Balkans'.
One could wish for no more emphatic riposte to the fatuous argument that sport and politics do not mix than Kosovo's decisive 4-0 win over Azerbaijan to seal their play-off spot.
On the morning of the match, Kosovo were denied in their latest bid to join Interpol, a further blow in the struggle for international recognition.
Yet that was not going to stop fans celebrating the fruits of two decades of reconstruction, and the achievements of their beloved team managed by Swiss coach Bernard Challandes.
"In the evening, politics couldn’t prevent the success of our country," said Korenica, although politicians quickly rushed to the stadium to commandeer the triumph as their own.
Continental Europe's only bifurcated river runs through Kosovo - the Nerodimka, which flows into both the Aegean and Black Sea - a geographical metaphor for the state's double-edged and contested history.
A majority of United Nations member states, 82 percent of the European Union, The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank recognise Kosovo as an independent entity, but Serbia and its allies do not.
Frissons of hope followed by abrupt disappointment, even heartbreak, is also the tale of their football development. In July, legendary player and head of Kosovo's federation Fadil Vokrri died of a cardiac arrest while exercising in a gym, aged 57. The stadium in Prishtina is named in his honour, and he is remembered as an unrivalled visionary.
Like every profession in Kosovo and Albania, football suffered a 'brain drain' due to successive mass emigrations fleeing war, or the privations of authoritarian communism under Enver Hoxha - the Stalinist so hard-line he denounced Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union as unsuitably 'revisionist'. Some footballers retired to join the Kosovan Liberation Army.
Xherdan Shaqiri, Granit Xhaka, and Valon Behrami were a generation born too early to represent Kosovo, but Heerenveen's Arber Zeneli, Werder Bremen's Milot Rashica and Manchester City goalkeeper Aro Muric are potential stars who have committed.
In their latest squad, there was not a single outfield player over 30, reflecting the country's population which has an average age of 27.8, the youngest in Europe. Many players lost family during the war.
Nato's 1999 intervention is a rejoinder to the paint-by-numbers clichés of both isolationist right and 'anti-imperialist' left: the deployment of Western force to defend a majority Muslim population from the looming threat of state-sponsored, ethnically-motivated killing.
Such was the gratitude of some Kosovar Albanians that 'Tonibleer' became a popular baby name for a generation of boys, after the Prime Minister they viewed as a saviour. A reminder that the world is not as Manichean as we sometimes think.
