Silvio Maric should have amounted to much more than he did as a Newcastle player. Signed from Croatia Zagreb in February 1999, he came with a good reputation as a goalscoring midfielder, having scored 28 goals in 91 appearances for Zagreb. Maric looked for all the world like a solid signing, with an eye for goal and the bit of quality that we would need. And while I know it’s not a guarantee of any kind, when you think of the midfielders that Croatia has produced over the years – Modric, Rakitic, Prosinecki and Boban spring to mind – it seems very much typically NUFC that we could sign a Croatian dud!
I’m sure there’ll be many a Mag who disagrees with me on this latest choice for a ‘one that got away’. But to that I’d say, you might just be missing the point. The point of this series isn’t to look at amazing players that we lost; more to look into the ones that just should have been better than the disappointments or disasters even, that they turned out to be. So for me, Silvio Maric fits the bill perfectly. For me, there was a player in there, but he just simply didn’t come out to play!
Maric was signed by Ruud Gullit, who you’d have thought might just have had a good eye for a decent midfielder. And Maric did have quality. At £3.5m he could have been a bargain, but in the end we actually ended up losing almost half of our money when he was sold to Porto after just over a season.
Silvio arrived looking out of shape and rather than hitting the ground running, he just hit the ground. It was obvious from very early on in his Toon career, that he wasn’t going to be up to the demands of the Premier League, but also that he just didn’t seem to fancy it. And yet here was a midfielder with vision and real quality on the ball. Coupled with his eye for goal – his career stats of 46 goals in 222 appearances kind of back this up – all he really needed was the desire to succeed or a bit of hard work and he could have been so much more for us.
My one real positive memory of Maric was at the 1999 FA Cup semi final against Spurs when he set up the second clinching goal for Alan Shearer. He took the ball to the edge of the box on the left hand side, drew two defenders in and then, when most would have whipped over a cross, he checked back and laid a perfect set up back to Shearer on the edge of the box who thumped it with the outside of his right foot, beyond Ian Walker and into the back of the net. The goal will always be remembered as yet another Shearer thunderbolt, but Maric’s vision under pressure, with the clock ticking down and Spurs looking for an equaliser, was important as well.
Maric made under 30 appearances for Newcastle and only scored in Europe, where he had an impressive record of 2 goals in 3 games that might have hinted at the player we actually had. Ultimately though, he just didn’t seem to have the stomach for the Premier League and in 2000 he was off to Porto for £2m. His final move was back to Zagreb in and he retired in 2006.
We can only really speculate about whether Maric was ‘one that got away’, but what I would say is that he was another one of those players that could and perhaps should have done so much more on Tyneside.
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