‘I survived two wars’: Milos Ninkovic’s pain of past and present amid an award-winning career

It’s still a story about those things but now, it is inescapably also about the memories of fleeing to bomb shelters below ground and feeling the tremors of missiles landing on your city just metres above your head.

Sitting in the players’ lounge at Sydney FC’s training ground, the last of his cornflakes still in a bowl in his hand, Milos Ninkovic should feel a million miles from the war zone he experienced as a teenager. Even as the rain sleets down, he still feels the security and comfort of life in his adopted second homeland every day.

And yet a phone call just minutes before this conversation has stirred up all sorts of emotions and memories. Ninkovic can feel more than just empathy with the friend in Kyiv he has just been chatting to, a friend from the near decade he spent playing in the Ukrainian capital; he also understands first-hand the fear of living in a city under bombardment, the panic of parents trying to protect their children physically and emotionally.

“I survived two wars,” he says quietly.

This is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and its attack on the capital Kyiv, is painful twice over for Ninkovic after he moved there as a teenager, played Champions League and amassed more than 100 appearances for Dynamo Kyiv. It’s a city where his daughter was born, and where they were supposed to visit later this year at her request, to see the places of her infant years. It’s hard for a parent to explain to a 10-year-old why that trip is now postponed indefinitely.

As a child born and raised in Belgrade, Ninkovic himself lived through the start of the Yugoslav Wars, as the former Republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated along ethnic lines. As a teenager he spent nights in the basement of his apartment block with neighbours and friends, while bombs from NATO planes rained down on his city. His mother’s place of work was destroyed; football training was continually curtailed by the wail of sirens.

More than two decades later, Europe is again in conflict. Ninkovic rarely looks genuinely sad, but there is a melancholy as he relates a conversation with his daughter about the city where she was born.

“I wanted after the season to go there because my eldest daughter was born in Kyiv, and she’s never been back there,” he says.

“She‘s 10 years old right now, and she was like, ‘Daddy, can I go to Kyiv? You know, I want to see the apartment (where they lived) and I want to see the hospital and stuff’. And I said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go’ … but now obviously we won’t. But the most important thing is just to finish the war. Finish it. That’s the most important thing for the people.

“I have so many friends there in Kyiv. I just spoke with a friend of mine, like half an hour ago from Kyiv and the situation is very bad. They don‘t have anything, the pharmacies are closed. They don’t have anything in the supermarkets. He was waiting in front of the supermarket for four hours to buy one packet of chips, you know, there is no bread, no eggs. It’s very bad. It’s really bad.

“I‘m just praying that the war will finish soon, and hopefully, everything will get back to normal.”

At least there is training, and A-League games in quick succession, to distract Ninkovic from his worries about Kyiv. If it feels improper to be discussing football and tactics in the same breath as the invasion of a country by a belligerent superpower, then that seems to be the way of it now; everyday life has to exist against the backdrop of a global pandemic, or potential world war, or even crippling floods.

In fact this story was first mooted weeks ago, prompted by Ninkovic’s remarkable longevity at Sydney FC – the fifth oldest player in the competition, he has played the eighth highest number of games this season, albeit in a side that has played more fixtures than most other teams.

But far beyond those numbers is the qualitative presence of Milos Ninkovic; the fact he won the Johnny Warren Medal in 2016 and then did so again last year speaks to the standards he continues to set. After training he sometimes coaches the team’s younger members (what the latter have dubbed the Ninko10 Academy); on the pitch he regularly covers more ground than the majority of those younger teammates. And that’s the irony in all this; Ninkovic came here in 2015 to wind down.

“You know the funniest thing?” he says. “I‘ll never forget, when I came here and when I spoke with the CEO and before I signed the contract, first question I asked him was, ‘How many games a week do we have?’ He was like, ‘Only one a week’. I said, ‘One game a week? Okay, I’m coming!’ Now all of a sudden, after nearly seven years here now, I’m playing two games a week or more, which is crazy.”

*****

We weren’t supposed to be at Leichhardt Oval the day Ninkovic announced his quality to his teammates. The friendly was behind closed doors, an experimental run out for Sydney FC and the Mariners in pre-season, but a couple of journalists were let in on the proviso nothing was reported.

Which is why no one read about the volley Ninkovic scored, meeting a corner on the full from the edge of the penalty area, top corner. From memory everyone was startled, on both sides. Really they shouldn’t have been, coming from a player of exceptional pedigree; five years earlier he had faced the Socceroos at the World Cup. But it’s another to see that in the flesh, especially on first sighting of a new signing.

In fact that first season turned into a relative struggle for Ninkovic as he got used to harder pitches and the heat. It’s hard to remember that now, as awards and trophies have piled up since, but it’s all quite logical to the man himself.

“I always had the feeling that in Europe, you’re training too much, you know, every time it’s Monday double session, Tuesday double session. Look, I played nine years in Kyiv and (the) first two years, I was injured. But I can‘t remember how many games I played 90 minutes, I always felt tired because I felt like we trained too much. But when I came here I said to everyone that I began to feel so much better at 30, 31 years old than when I was 25, which is crazy.

“Even now I‘m still enjoying to play, and I’m still happy when I come to training and to games – and I always want to win. Even at 37 I still think I can improve some things. Some people when I say that, they are laughing, but I really think that it doesn’t matter how old you are, you still have some chance to improve yourself, to be better. And that’s why I’m trying even every training (session), to stay fit and then to try to be better and win games.

“That's the most important for me, to win trophies. I never had the goal to be the best player in the league or the best scorer, just to win games, win trophies and that’s always been goal number one for me.”

Part of that is the responsibility he feels towards Sydney’s generation next, many of whom have had to make a rapid transition to the first team this season thanks to a spate of injuries.

“I‘m trying to help them because the league needs to give more chances to young players,” he says. “If the league doesn’t develop young players then the Socceroos will have problems as well you know, and I’m really happy that it’s not just Sydney but the other clubs also are giving a chance to young players – which is good for Australian football.

“I‘m happy to help them. Last year it was Cam Devlin and Luke Ivanovic, they always stayed with me (after training) and they’re laughing, they call it the Ninko10 academy. I’m trying to help them on the pitch and off it as well with some advice.”

Off contract at the end of the season, Ninkovic prefers to concentrate only on the immediate term – starting with Saturday night’s derby with the Wanderers at CommBank Stadium.

But he jokes that he is “half-half” Serbian/Australian now, and will formalise that with Australian citizenship as soon as his daughter’s Serbian passport is renewed.

But where he will settle long term is clouded by the chaos of the world. “To be honest with you, with this crazy situation now in the world, you never know, you can‘t plan anything.

“I would like to stay here. My family‘s happy, you know, kids are happy. And we’ll see, you can’t plan anything. But we go just day by day, month by month, year by year.”

Tom Smithies is a writer with KeepUp.com.au

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