Edin Dzeko to Retire From Bosnia Squad October 2
Bosnia and Herzegovina captain Edin Dzeko will play his final match for the national team on October 2 against Sweden, closing out 151 caps and nearly two decades in the Dragons' jersey.
When Edin Dzeko’s message appeared on social media this morning, phones across the Dragons’ fan base would not stop ringing. The captain of the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team wrote out what had long been suspected but never officially confirmed: on October 2, against Sweden, he will pull on the national jersey for the last time.
The guessing is over. So are the questions at every press conference about when the Diamond would hang up his boots. The date is now set in writing, and it arrives just as he had signaled it would, with plenty of emotion packed into the announcement itself.
“I used to wonder when this moment would come. But I could never have imagined how emotional I would be,” wrote Edin Dzeko, captain of the Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team, in a post on social media.
A number that says it all
151 matches. That is how many times the 40 year old forward has worn the jersey bearing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s crest, scoring 73 goals along the way. It all began nearly twenty years earlier, at the Asim Ferhatovic Hase stadium, against Turkey. Back then Dzeko was a young man just knocking on the national team’s door; today he is the captain who has represented the Dragons for almost two uninterrupted decades.
Seventy three goals in the national jersey is not a tally a player from this part of Europe racks up by accident. It is work put in match after match, season after season, regardless of whether that evening he was wearing the colors of Wolfsburg, Manchester City, Roma or Inter. The national team was always something apart for Dzeko, and that comes through in the farewell message itself.
The statistics, impressive as they are, do not capture nearly as much as a single line from that message, the one about the boyhood dream he carried “every one of the 151 times” he stepped onto the pitch for his country.
Asked what moment stands out as the biggest of his career, Dzeko’s answer is no surprise.
“Qualifying for our first World Cup in 2014 is still one of the happiest moments of my life as a footballer,” wrote Dzeko, recalling the road to Brazil, the goal against Wales that opened the door to the World Cup, and the match against Italy in Zenica, played that March.
For the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team, that remains its only World Cup appearance, and Dzeko led the way both on the pitch and off it. Head coach Sergej Barbarez has already bid farewell to his captain with a message of thanks, aware that from October the Bosnia bench will lose the player who carried the team through its hardest moments, on the field and in the locker room alike.
What comes next on October 2?
The match against Sweden now carries an entirely different weight. It is no longer just another fixture on the calendar, but the last chance to see the Bosnia and Herzegovina jersey on Dzeko’s back. He himself has called on fans to come to the stadium and share that emotion with him, rather than send him messages of gratitude just yet.
“For now I just want you to be there that evening against Sweden, so we can share one more emotion together,” the captain said.
There is no hollow sentiment here. A man who, at 40, still wore the armband and walked out for his 151st cap has earned the right to choose how and when he steps away. Bosnia and Herzegovina have rarely played without him up front, and even more rarely without him as the leader in the dressing room.
On October 2, Sweden will line up on one side of the pitch, and on the other the Dragons will send off a player of a kind they are, by all appearances, unlikely to have again for a long time. The stadium should be full that day, because matches like this are not watched from an armchair. They are remembered as part of a club’s history, this time an entire national team’s.
