Radomir Antic , a man who leaves great memories in football, especially for Atlético de Madrid, dies after struggling for months against a complicated disease. But, above all, a man who left friends wherever he passed away, dies for teams that did not necessarily wear rojiblanco, as Míchel , Fernando Hierro , Andrés Iniesta or Víctor Valdés , and many of those who have been linked, can testify to this. to Real Zaragoza or Real Oviedo. The same thing happened in the media, including EL MUNDO, where their opinions were clear and harsh, not political. This was Antic, close and warm in personal treatment, direct and demanding professionally. A painstaking coach and a man who made friendship, as Tahar Ben Jelloun wrote, a religion without God.

Radomir had been born in Zitiste, in Yugoslavia, in 1948. It is certain that he would have liked it to be said in this way: Yugoslavia. Despite the success and well-being of her family, settled in Madrid, to whom soccer had brought her, she never ceased to be tormented by the suffering of her people during and after the Balkan war. Those people were all, not just Serbs. It was impossible to find a host like Rado in Belgrade, always at the airport waiting to explain every place and every episode in the history of his land. Son of a military man, he had been educated with severity and austerity. I used to often remember the anecdote of the first time that, almost as a teenager, he appeared in a local newspaper for a football game. He showed it to his mother and she replied: "Very well, son. Tomorrow all the people will go to the service with you."

Soccer was his profession and his passion, but in fact, all sport was. He was an accomplished chess player, he never missed a match from Novak Djkovic , who was joined by an excellent relationship, just like with the great technicians of Balkan basketball, from Zeljko Obradovic to Boza Maljkovic . He was an indefatigable conversationalist, despite his run-down Spanish, and a family man, who did not hesitate to open his house to his friends, very close to that of Mariano Rajoy , in Aravaca, Madrid. If you told him if you could see him, he always answered with his metallic accent: "Without a doubt!"

Iron principles

Of all the teams he was able to tell some anecdote, as when he told Emilio Butragueño to stop pressing, because he needed his energy for something else, and that for the other there was Adolfo Aldana . Ramón Mendoza threw him out of Madrid when Madrid was the leader, before ending up in Tenerife, and in Atlético he found the top with the double in 96, against an already decadent Barcelona of Johan Cruyff . He had lived with Jesús Gil , whom he remembered under his principles of friendship and gratitude, despite everything else and a decline that he also had to suffer and of which he had many suspicions. With that secret he has left us.

He had traveled through numerous countries, since after winning Belgrade's Partizan as a player he went to Turkey, to Fenerbahçe. His first move to Spain came next, to play for Zaragoza in 1978. From there he went to Luton Town, a stage that had left him with a great memory of English football. As a coach, he practically toured the same cycle, Partizan and Zaragoza, where he had as a second a graduate in Philosophy and Letters who had not missed, even as a student, any training from another Serbian compatriot, Vujadin Boskov . It was Víctor Fernández , who would later triumph in the position of first coach. Antic, however, took the Maño team to UEFA that year.

The methods of the Yugoslav school had already been advanced for the Spanish not only by Boskov, but in the Miljan Miljanic era , one of the first to reach the League, as Del Bosque and the footballers of the time in Madrid well remember. . Antic was an heir to that tradition. Míchel or Hierro remember their shapes well and, today, they are among some of the soccer personalities most affected by his death. That way of working made Atlético champion but he could not straighten a crazy Barcelona in the last years of nuñismo , with Joan Gaspart in front. "Two months there was like two years elsewhere," he recalled. The Serbian team, in the World Cup in South Africa, was their last great challenge, called by their country on a mission of salvation. Chinese football, in recent times, was a testimonial step of someone who was a coach every day, and a friend forever.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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