Meet Our New Left Back / Winger

August 18th, 2010 | by: Harun | Comments Off

With a great outing in yesterday’s Champions League play-off between Tottenham Hotspur and Young Boys Burn, Senad Lulić has all but secured a call-up to the Bosnian national team and, most likely, a spot in the starting XI as well. More below the field.

Who exactly is Lulić? Judging from the German-language Wikipedia, he was born in Jablanica, in northern Herzegovina, in 1986, but left for Switzerland due to the war. He began his professional career there, first breaking out in 2008 with a transfer to the respectable Grasshopper Club Zürich. That summer he also made an official appearance for the Bosnian national team, but it was in the infamous Azerbaijan match which was boycotted by every single previously active Bosnian international (ironically, we still won 1-0).

After a decent few seasons with GCZ, Lulić signed this summer with last season’s Swiss Super League runners-up, Young Boys Bern. In recent weeks he’s apparently secured a spot in the starting XI, and supposedly is on good terms with the Young Boys’ Bosnian manager Vladimir Petković, a native Sarajevan and former FK Sarajevo player.

Here’s a very nice goal Lulić scored for Grasshopper the season before last against FC Basel. The defending is absolutely atrocious, but the strike is still class.

On to his performance from last night. Lulić started the game very strong, hitting the post in the 2nd minute before fixing this mistake in the 4th to give his team a 1-0 lead. Although Young Boys seemed to focus their attacks down the right flank, Lulić still did an excellent job, regularly providing a threat on the left and creating two fantastic opportunities in the second half. All in all he appeared fast, disciplined, physically fit and capable of providing great crosses. You can see his highlights in the video below.

It’s almost funny to recall that just a few days ago Sušić was complaining to the Sarajevo press that he needed another left-back. Voila – here he is. And while it’s true that Lulić typically plays more offensively, I don’t see that being a problem. We’ve already tried playing midfielders as fullbacks (See Salihović, Sejad) and it’s worked reasonably well. So long as the system is good and the player is disciplined, there is no reason it can’t work out defensively.

Meanwhile, offensively, Lulić adds a whole new dimension to our style of play, since he possesses two attributes – crossing and speed – that none of our other potential answers there have. Following the defeat against Germany, I identified our lack of speed and dearth of fullbacks (or wide players more generally) as two of our biggest weaknesses. With Lulić and Mujdža, we seem to have addressed both issues, and enter the qualifiers as a much more complete and better-rounded team – at least on paper – than we exited the last.