From the Terraces

Hammers Balkan chairman Haris Juricic blogs to express his pride at the appointment of Croatian Slaven Bilic as West Ham United manager
Haris Junicic is the chairman of Hammers Balkan, the West Ham United supporters’ club for fans living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia…
 
Hello fellow Hammers!

When I heard that Slaven Bilic had been appointed as a West Ham manager, my first thought was that our Club’s popularity will rise in the Balkan area, particularly Croatia.

My biggest hope with him in charge is that he will bring those European nights that West Ham fans deserve, because he sure has quality as a manager to motivate players to give their best.  We from Hammers Balkan will stand behind our new manager and give him deserved support.

His appointment as a new West Ham manager has made us proud, because we at Hammers Balkan have been supporting and will support all Balkan players and managers who at West Ham United, and although it is not a big list we hope in future it will be bigger.

One more reason to be proud is that the Balkan media, especially the Croatian media, will report more about West Ham and not only other ‘popular’ clubs.

We will definitely see an improvement on the pitch in terms of style as he sure has that quality to motivate players. He has the required authority, and we can expect more attacking football from him and in, my opinion, he can drive our club forward. We will definitely see more entertaining football, and we can also expect that he will fix those defensive errors that our players are sometimes prone to do.
One more reason to be proud is that the Balkan media, especially the Croatian media, will report more about West Ham and not only other ‘popular’ clubs
During his time as a manager of the Croatian national football team we could see he was in favour of attacking football and that is what most of our fans want. His style of football has brought to Croatia to the Euros in 2008 and 2012 and, since we are due to play in qualification rounds for the Europa League, we could expect him to take us through them too.

As a big West Ham fan, I’m hoping he will persuade Demba Ba to come back, but I hope he might also snatch up few players from Turkey such as Burak Yilmaz or Moussa Sow, with whom we have been linked.

As far as Croatian market goes, I do not reckon he will bring in many players from that league, but since his appointment some media outlets have been reporting that he could bring highly-rated youngster Alen Halilovic from Barcelona on loan, and Tino-Sven Susic from Hajduk Split. In my opinion, there are a lot of quality players on our Balkan area, but a lot of those transfers will depend on our available budget.

Bilic’s passion is one thing no one should doubt, and we can all expect that he will fix the relationship of some West Ham fans with the Club. Besides his talent to play guitar, he had some really nice success with rock bands Newera and Rawbau. Also he is multilingual, as he speaks fluent English, German and Italian and that is a huge boost for him and the club, because he can interact with fans and journalists from all over the world.

All of us at Hammers Balkan would like to welcome Slaven Bilic to West Ham United.

For more information about Hammers Balkan, visit our Facebook page and our website HammersBalkan.com!

Haris Junicic
Chairman, Hammers Balkan
 
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of West Ham United