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It was a sweltering hot night in Vienna and the pitch at the Ernst-Happel Stadion looked like the site of a terrible traffic accident. Men in blue shirts lay strewn all over the ground, some face down, some on their knees, all of them just staring blankly ahead.

Croatia had just lost to Turkey on penalties in the Euro 2008 quarter-final and one man was in a worse state than the rest. Darijo Srna was sobbing uncontrollably.

The medical crew gathered around him and tried to calm him. The manager, Slaven Bilic, crouched down next to him, stroked the back of his head and held his hand. Even the referee, Roberto Rosetti, came by to check on him. But Srna was inconsolable – he cried and cried until the tears ran dry.

A year later he cried again but this time they were tears of joy after Shakhtar Donetsk won the Uefa Cup. "I'm very emotional by nature," he says. "And sometimes I take things too much to heart because I've been through a lot of stress and hardship in my life. But that has also helped me strengthen my character."

Bilic says of him: "No kicks or tackles from opponents can stop him. They bring him down and he appears broken, lying on the ground in pain, but then he just shakes it off and continues running like he's Robocop or something."

Srna is a fighter, his determination on the pitch a reflection of the person he is off it. But then he has always been acutely aware of how fragile life is. Srna's father Uzeir, a Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak), has been through unimaginable horrors. When he was a baby during the second world war he very nearly died when Chetniks, the Serb nationalist paramilitary forces who raided Bosnia, burned his village to the ground.

He survived but his pregnant mother and sister were burned alive, and his father was killed afterwards by a stray bullet. Yet to start school, he was already an orphan. Uzeir was adopted by a Slovenian family and they changed his name, but his brother Safet eventually managed to find him and take him back to Bosnia. He became a goalkeeper and fate brought him to Metkovic in the southeast of Croatia, where Darijo was born in 1982.

His father's story has been an inspiration throughout Srna's life. "My family made sacrifices so I could pursue my dream of becoming a top footballer. I had no other choice but to succeed," he has said. His parents insisted that he should get a good education and sometimes had to drag him off the pitch to study; but once they realised how determined their son was, Darijo was supported all the way.

Srna used to help his family sell vegetables in the market and he saved enough money to buy his first pair of football boots. "My father was angry and took them away from me, saying he'd return them to the store. But then he came back with the best Adidas boots they had," he said.

When he received his first big pay cheque he bought his father a Mercedes. In 2009, when Shakhtar played the Uefa Cup final in Istanbul, Darijo paid for a charter flight from Croatia, carrying no less than 125 of his friends and family members. In Ukraine he often buys match tickets for orphaned children. "Everything I've accomplished I owe to my family," Srna has said.

The Croatia captain has a brother with Down's syndrome, to whom he dedicates his every goal. His name, Igor, is tattooed on Darijo's chest. His wife's name, Mirela, and his daughter's, Kasja, are also on his body, as well as a drawing of a female deer (srna in Croatian).

But a big fighting heart is no guarantee for a successful football career and Srna has had to work extremely hard on the pitch to get where he is today. He joined Hajduk Split as a 16-year-old but the club nearly missed out on him despite his obvious potential. They are notorious for missing out on young talents from the region – Zvonimir Boban and Luka Modric are among those who have been deemed "not good enough".

And i f it had not been for Milan showing an interest in Srna, Hajduk probably would not have given him a youth contract either. He started out as a winger and later played right wing-back, although he usually plays as a right midfielder for Croatia. In 2000 Slaven Bilic, then a seasoned veteran who had just returned from Everton, joined Srna at Hajduk. They played together for a year before Bilic retired and became the manager. The two men had formed a special bond which was strengthened further when Bilic took over the national team in 2006. Four years later, Bilic made Srna captain.

Srna had joined Shakhtar in 2003 and grew with the club, winning the Ukrainian league several times as well as that Uefa Cup. He had offers from Spain and England but chose to stay in Donetsk, and last season he captained the club to the Champions League quarter-finals.

Still, when Srna was made national captain after the failure to reach the 2010 World Cup finals, not everyone was pleased. Some said that he was too emotional, not able to keep his feelings in check in the heat of the moment. Others argued that he lacked leadership qualities and some even felt that his Muslim background was an issue – although no one would say that publicly.

"The media doubted that I was the right man for the job but Slaven showed a great deal of faith in me," Srna said as Bilic's team struggled during qualifying for Euro 2012 and as the recession hit Croatia harder than most places, the mood in the country plummeted. It showed on the football pitch, too. The criticism of the national team seemed fiercer than ever and Srna said: "There have been times when I felt as if I was on trial for murdering six people. I'm not ashamed to admit that I see a psychiatrist. I do it to ease the pressure. I need it."

The pressure was at its most suffocating when Croatia drew Turkey for the Euro 2012 qualifiers, with the nation's fans craving "revenge" for the defeat on penalties in 2008. Bilic's team won 3-0 away in one of the most impressive performances ever and the second leg was a formality. But the win was not enough to bring closure. "Oh no," the manager said. "The 2008 game will haunt us for the rest of our lives."

So here are Croatia again, most of the old gang still together, only four years older and more experienced. Of those who were in the squad in 2008, only Srna has not moved clubs. He is content in Ukraine but craves one more adventure with the national team. "Let's be perfectly honest – we have to qualify from the group because we have the quality for it," he said. "But it would be really great if we could go one step further than last time and reach the semi-finals."

It sounds like an improbable dream, but then Srna's dreams tend to come true. If this one does, maybe the demons from Vienna could finally be put to rest.

Aleksandar Holiga is a football writer with Tportal.hr

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