A bomb. The exact place where Edin Dzeko played football with his friends. And he, barely six years old, was not there for one single reason: his mother said no.
It was the siege of Sarajevo, and little Edin went out to kick a ball among missiles as if the war were just background noise. His house had already been bombed — the whole family was living crammed into his grandparents’ apartment. But Dzeko kept playing anyway, every day, without fear. Until one day Belma, his mother, forbade him from going out. Minutes later, a shell fell right on that spot.
“My mother saved my life”, declared the Bosnian striker, now 40 years old and captain of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the World Cup. “I had no childhood because of the war, but all of that made me stronger.” Belma summed it up with cutting precision: “A shell fell exactly where Edin was playing with other children. There were dead and wounded.”