Mark Viduka: 'I basically gave everything up because I loved football so much' | OneFootball

The night in question was mid-August 1997, the first leg of a Champions League qualifier in which Viduka wore the blue of the Croatia Zagreb. He left having been defeated by two John Beresford goals, before Temuri Ketsbaia netted in the return leg to see United through.

After what feels like several minutes, Viduka composes himself enough to spill the words out. “I’d spent the evening teaching Goran Juric, a defender who was a good mate of mine, how to swear in English,” he says. His face still bears a grin, and his raised cheekbones squash his narrow glasses.

“At corners I could just hear him yelling out these obscenities. He didn’t even know what he was saying, but his intention was to intimidate the Newcastle players.

“I had to mark Stuart Pearce from corners, and he turned to me and said, ‘why do I always get the f*****g ugliest ones?!’ I started p*ssing myself.”

Almost three decades has passed since that night, but Viduka recalls “the whole setup” being “very impressive. It’s a very intimidating place to go if you’re not playing for the local team.”

He returned plenty across the years, both while at Middlesborough and during a four-season stint at Leeds United. “There was one game that has always stuck in my mind,” he says. “Newcastle just kept attacking us and the crowd got behind them, and we just could not get out. It was like there was some sort of energy or something. It was definitely the 12th man.”

A decade after his first Tyneside trip, Viduka returned to St James’ Park again. This time, though, he was entering the home dressing room. By then 31, Viduka had a strong body of work behind him. A trio of Croatian titles with Zagreb – who, since 2000, have gone by the name Dinamo Zagreb – earned him a move to Celtic. A season on, Leeds paid £6 million to take him south and he personally enjoyed four successful seasons at Elland Road. However, having reached the 2001 Champions League final, Leeds’ star dropped vertically and, by the time he left in 2004, the club was in financial meltdown and had dropped into the Championship. Three years at Middlesbrough included a UEFA Cup Final defeat to Sevilla. By the time he arrived on Tyneside, Viduka had 86 Premier League goals and 20 assists over 202 matches.

Sam Allardyce became United manager in May 2007, and a month later, having rejected new terms at Boro, Viduka became his first signing. He was already based in Wetherby and knew Alan Smith and James Milner from his time at Leeds. He had also worked with coach Steve Round on Teesside. Viduka was seeking a “change, a new challenge” and United offered it.

He reels off a list of teammates he was close to, with virtually everyone in the first team on it. He and Habib Beye were particularly close, with Shola Ameobi described as “one of the nicest blokes I’ve ever met.”

Supporters never really took to Allardyce, or at least not to his style. Results were middling, the odd few victories mixed with a similar number of defeats. “I recall him being under pressure because I think a lot of players and a lot of the fans were a little disappointed with the style of play. We got results, but I don’t think we played that well football wise. It was about a lot of energy and a lot of running.”

Viduka himself was sometimes misrepresented as a target man, a bulky centre-forward who would bully and bash, hassle and harangue. But that does not do justice to the purity of his footballing talent, his touch, his goalscorer’s instinct, his ability to be many things to many coaches. He himself grew frustrated with Allardyce’s style.

“I would always prefer getting the ball into feet rather than getting it up high – it’s very difficult to control up there! I'm not one of those guys who says everyone has to play out from the back. I think that's bullshit. Mix it up as well - you start getting predictable otherwise.”

Then between a goalless draw in the FA Cup third round at Stoke and a 4-1 victory in the replay, Allardyce departed, and Kevin Keegan returned. “I knew how much of a legend he was,” Viduka begins. “But I've met legends who I didn't really like that much! You can watch someone as a kid on TV, and you look up to them. But when you meet them, you’re a little bit disappointed. Keegan was the opposite.

“He was a very likeable guy, respectful to everyone whether they were a cleaner or the club president, you know what I mean? And he used to give me little tips about finishing. “Sometimes in football it takes you a long time to understand things. You don’t get to know what’s happening until you’re a bit older. You can’t put your finger on it. As a striker, Keegan was really good for me.”

Viduka’s grin returns as he recalls a post-training conversation with Keegan. “We’d just finished a session, and afterwards he came up to me and said, ‘I know that you know the secret’. I go ‘what do you mean? What secret? What are you talking about?’

“He meant that you don’t try and hit the ball too hard. You place it. A lot of people in shooting positions just want to kick the shit out of the ball. As you get older you realise it’s more about direction and placement than belting it. I didn’t even know it was a secret!”

As well as Keegan, Viduka adored Terry McDermott, having worked with him at Celtic and found the “old school” Arthur Cox reminded him of his dad. “He just knew football,” he says.

It was afternoons and evenings spent with his dad that spawned Viduka’s love of football. With his parents having emigrated from Croatia to Australia, he grew up in Melbourne. His old man would take him to watch local side Melbourne Croatia, who later became Melbourne Knights. “My parents were the old school type. Respect your elders and all that. When you're raised by people like that, you learn to appreciate everything you get.”

His upbringing also brought resilience, an inner steel, that streak of something only the best athletes possess. He needed it in spades to deal with the way the English press attacked him at times.

“I was portrayed as a lazy mercenary most of the time,” he says. “Just come to get the money and all that. But I’ll ask you a question: who do you think sacrificed more for their career? Somebody from the UK playing in the Premier League or somebody like me?

“First of all, if you look at an Aussie player, even today, if a club gets a chance to sign a European or an Aussie…you know the perception there.”

Viduka, like many footballers, had to develop an ability to ignore outside patter. “After a while you become immune but it’s not nice. Imagine in tomorrow’s newspapers something is written about you that’s not true. How would you feel?” Devastated. “But what would you do about it?” What can you do about it? “What happens is you start getting a thick skin. The first time it happens, you’re young and you get really upset about it. Later, it becomes just water off a duck's back.”

There is something sad about hearing another human talk about it in such terms. The act is wrong and yet the person, the victim, just has to suck it up with no means of rebuttal. Fighting back is futile – the tabloids just double down.

“It’s part of the process. Yes, it is sad, but it’s why when I look at a footballer, yes I look at skill and that is a great thing. But being mentally tough is most important.

“It's not going to be a walk in the park. You're getting paid a lot of money and you're going to get criticised, which is fair enough. Criticise me for my game and that is fine. But when you start talking about people’s personalities and off the field stuff, I think that’s not really correct.

“For me, the big thing is that there's a lot of really good quality players out there, but they can't deal with some of that stuff. They don’t make it to probably the heights they should because they can't deal with the pressure of having to perform. They can't deal with the pressure of being criticised non-stop and being in the newspapers. It stops them going to that next level.”

Someone who was able to cope was Andy Carroll, who was just breaking through during Viduka’s time. “A nice kid,” Carroll had that blend of talent and resilience.

“To get to the highest level of football, you have to have that fight in you. That’s why, in my opinion, most players come from middle- or lower-class backgrounds. As kids they grew up through that sort of stuff and have had to fight. At the end of the day, it's a battle every single week, every single day, at every training session. You're battling against your opponent one-on-one, then you're also battling against the opposition collectively. If everyone wins their own battles on the field, the whole war can be won.”

Under Keegan, United finished strongly, losing just two of the final nine games and picking up 15 points. Viduka and Martins played up top, with Michael Owen operating just behind them.

“Oba was very unpredictable,” Viduka recalls. “That was his biggest strength. Nobody knew what he was going to do, and he was explosive. Very explosive.” Viduka’s role was to “get the ball, hold it up, bring them into it. Then I’d have to get myself into the box to score. That was basically it. It worked well for a while.” United finished 12th and Viduka ended the season with seven league goals. Going into 2008/09 there was a buzz, some Geordie giddiness at what Keegan might deliver. That was punctured in early September 2008 when Keegan departed. “We’d started playing well and then all of a sudden he was gone,” Viduka recalls. “I was very disappointed.”

Joe Kinnear arrived. “He had been out of football for a while and you could tell,” Viduka says, who by then was battling his Achilles. “He was a bit out of touch, a bit like me now. I don’t know half the players in the Premier League. You have to have that knowledge within you, you know what I mean?”

When Kinnear started mispronouncing players’ names “it was a big shock to people” in the dressing room. “I think he sometimes he didn't even know some of the players who were there. That just doesn't work.”

In February, before a trip to West Brom, the late Kinnear fell ill and ultimately required a heart bypass. Shearer, a man Viduka had faced more than a decade earlier in that Champions League qualifier, was brought in on a caretaker basis with United’s Premier League status in a perilous position.

Viduka had earlier chuckled at newcastleunited.com’s query as to whether he leant into Shearer for some pointers that 1997 night. “You’re not going to go up to Shearer before a game and say, ‘oh Alan, you’re such a good player can you give me some tips?’ are you?!” He speaks with an Aussie twang and a glint in his eye.

But the nugget mining did belatedly begin once United’s record goal-scorer was his manager. “And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘work hard and be good to your mother’. That’s what he said!” Did you do both of those things? “Yes!”

Viduka’s Achilles was still bothering him and had limited him to a handful of appearances by the time Shearer arrived. A specialist in Sweden had suggest an operation that involved cutting the tendon in half and then re-joining it. “It would have been tauter apparently. But a friend of mine had the operation in Australia when he was 21 – it took him 18 months to get back.” He didn’t have that sort of time and chose to manage it.

Shearer was frank with Viduka. He wanted him fit. “I’m the type that responds to people if they tell me straight out. I don’t like all this shifty business.”

Viduka did get himself fit. Well, sort of. He had wedges in his heels and his body, having spent a career in one boot shape, took time to adjust. It needed to compensate, and his calves took the strain. Extended warm-ups could get him through a game pain free, but for days afterwards he would be in agony.

He still managed to start United’s last five games. A home victory under the Monday Night Football lights against Middlesbrough had the squad believing they would stay up. It was, he says, a “tough one” given he “didn’t want them to go down. But I was happy that we won. And I thought, ‘shit, you know, we’re getting a bit of momentum here.”

Then Fulham happened, with Viduka’s seemingly legitimate equaliser disallowed for a supposed foul by Kevin Nolan. That point would have kept United up.

“Anger, disappointment, everything,” he replies when asked about the post-match emotional cocktail. “It means so much to you, it means everything. It's not just doing your job – there’s a lot of emotion in that situation.”

On the final whistle at Villa Park a week later, with United’s relegation confirmed, Viduka was “devastated. The team wasn’t that bad, and we didn’t have bad players. But the last couple of years had been very unstable for us.”

That sunny yet solemn Sunday in Aston proved the last of 509 professional dances for Viduka, who also wore Australia’s gold 43 times. Fulham were keen, as were several others, “but I just said, ‘no, I don’t want to do it.’”

Viduka has put distance between himself and football now. Instead, he and his wife focus their energy in running the Non Plus Ultra coffee shop in the hills of north Zagreb. His youngest son plays and has a game the day he is interviewed. Viduka may or may not attend.

His passion for caffeine stems from when he left Melbourne Knights to spend 3-and-a-half seasons in Zagreb. “When I landed as a 19-year-old, the first thing they said to me was ‘do you drink coffee?’ I couldn’t work out why they had asked but I quickly realised that is the culture over here. It’s all about meeting with friends over a cup of coffee.” Viduka’s caffeinated drink of choice is a Cortado.

Was Viduka’s love of football, consciously or otherwise, drained from him by his career?

“That's a good question, actually,” he responds, his mind almost visibly whirring. “Do I think that? Look, you know, one of the things is that I maybe have something because of all the sacrifices that I had to make. I lived most of the time away from my parents, and then they passed away not long after I finished.

“If I had lived in the UK and played for a Premier League team and my parents and family were there, I probably wouldn’t have [fallen out of love with football]. But I basically gave everything up because I loved football so much. Maybe there was a bit of resentment there.”

Viduka makes clear that he has no regrets, but it’s the unseen level of sacrifice that made him bristle at the press’s mercenary label. “There's nobody who loved football more than me. I come from a country where football was the third or fourth sport – there was no money in it. If I was after money, I'd have played Australian Football League. The money is great, but it comes along later because somebody wants to give it you. By then you’ve done the hard yards.”

It is often said that people dream of being a footballer. What they actually dream of is the glory, the Wembley winner, scoring a goal in front of their home end. They don’t think about the childhood given up, the lows, the physical pain. “People don't dream about what David Beckham had to go through, for example,” Viduka says. “You go into a game with the best of intentions, and something happens in the heat of the moment. He dreams of playing for England, and then one little moment changes everything, turns him into the bad guy. That never really came into it when he was a little kid, you know?

“People don't dream about being remembered like Roberto Baggio. He worked his whole life and was one of the best players in the world. He had hundreds and hundreds of huge moments, but he is remembered for missing a penalty in the World Cup Final. You've got to have that balls to get up there and take that risk.”

There are no regrets about Viduka’s decision to join Newcastle, either. “Newcastle is a beautiful city, and the people are very passionate,” he says. “I loved the city, and I loved living there. The fans are really full-on, and they love their club. I hope that they that they can get some more joy.”

Viduka pauses to reflect. “I was disappointed at the end, more so in myself that I wasn't fit, and I couldn't contribute more. I was proud that I played for them. I was disappointed with the way that it went at the end of the day. But that's another one of those things that I didn't dream about.”

United didn’t see the best of you then? “No. No. In parts yes, but no. I would have loved it if I got there and we started gelling, playing together and everything was great. What happens when it doesn't happen like that? You have to live with it.”