Remembering Raddy Antic: a hero from Atlético Madrid to Luton

Radomir Antic made a lot of people very happy, and David Pleat was just one of them. The son of Bosnian partisans who was born in 1948 and died on Monday aged 71, he scored the late goal that rescued Luton from relegation in May 1983, just as he had taken them up the summer before. “An amazing act of escapology,” the commentator called it and that shot from the edge of the area by a substitute who had been on for 10 minutes sent his manager skipping and leaping and bounding across the pitch like a kangaroo in a beige suit. That image stayed with them; it stayed with him, too. Antic enjoyed replaying it, for those who hadn’t seen it – and in Spain, where he managed for 16 years, the place he made his home, mostly they hadn’t. As a player, he had won the league in Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, and played at Zaragoza, but he kept returning to Maine Road. When Javier Cáceres, from Süddeutsche Zeitung, asked him for his most important, most fondly remembered goal, Antic recalled a header for Fenerbahce scored with a fractured skull but took the pen and started sketching… Read full this story

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