Reality Czech

Liberation from Liberec sounds faintly like the title of some Cold War pulp fiction. To Blaha it is cold fact. Achieving this accounts for the 27-year-old currently walking even taller than his 6ft 4in frame would normally thrust him. A deal tying him to Aberdeen till the end of the season has offered him a new beginning, one that Pittodrie manager Jimmy Calderwood has intimated could have a permanence. If Blaha is offered a long-term contract, he is convinced that some of the happiest times in his career could lie ahead in the Granite City - a hope undoubtedly fuelled by the miseries of his recent past.

A droll character, Blaha’s soft-spoken purr gives way to an urgent, angsty, delivery when he relates the disaffection that followed his 300,000 move from Sparta Prague to Slovan Liberec in the summer of 2002.

So intense did his alienation become that there were times this season when he considered "running out of the country". For "a brief moment", in fact, he considered jacking in football.

Liberec quickly lost faith with the front man after one season. Across the 2003-04 season, Blaha didn’t know whether he was coming or going with unwanted loan spells to lesser lights Zlin and Plzen and when Aberdeen then expressed an interest in him last summer, Blaha believed he would be allowed to say ta-ta to Liberec. But with no prospect of a transfer fee, Ludvick Karl, owner of the Czech Republic’s third force, was intent on keeping the player for the two years remaining on his contract.

This put the kibosh on a move to the north-east of Scotland last August. It also resulted in free spirit Blaha being forced to train with regional league side Kunovice, managed by his father Lubomir Snr. Until late February, that is, when a court of arbitration ruled that he could rip up his contract with Liberec, so reviving the Pittodrie club’s interest and the forward’s enthusiasm for football.

"I was not cheap by Czech standards when I went to Liberec," he says. "But they didn’t want me after a year and a half, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me leave.

"I didn’t want to go on loan but in the Czech Republic there is no choice. ‘Go there,’ they would say. ‘But I don’t want to,’ I’d reply. ‘Go there. You must,’ they’d then insist. The loan clubs were more than 400 kilometres away and I thought about burning my furniture because it was so annoying to keep moving it.

"At training camp in the summer, I said I was happy to stay if they needed me. But they didn’t want to play me so when Aberdeen came in I asked to leave. ‘Stay here. You have a contract and receive money, what more do you want?’ they said. ‘I want to play because I am a footballer,’ I said.

"They didn’t understand that. The club is run by rich people who made their fortune in engineering. To them, football is only a business and players are goods. Maybe they think I am stupid, some sort of loser. That is their problem. I am glad I am out of the Czech Republic."

It had all looked so different when he set out on his football career with Banik Ostrava at the age of 18 before moving on three years later to Synot. Despite a serious ankle injury that curtailed his outings for the best part of 18 months, 11 goals in 35 appearance prompted Sparta Prague to recruit him in 2001.

By then, the 6ft 4ins forward had worked his way to the fringes of a national team, who in the current FIFA world rankings have only world champions Brazil above them. There was no disgrace, then, for Blaha in being a standby player for the senior side. "But at Sparta it all broke," he sighs. "I didn’t play much and one year later the offer from Liberec was a good one."

Blaha was at a crossroads. He had given his all to football, dropping out of a geography course at college after only one year to pursue his dream, but he was not to be put off and had the example and advice of his father to bolster his resolve.

"My dad played during the communist regime and then there were no professional footballers, only factory workers who played for their local sides," says the frontman, who hails from a humble background in the small town of Uhersky Brod, where he had an elder sister for company when growing up.

"I couldn’t imagine myself waking up at five o’clock every morning to go to a factory at six," Blaha states. "Everyone said football was only a dream for me until I started to grow at 15. Before that I had problems because I was very thin and had no power, no muscles.

"But I started to visit a fitness centre, because of my father, and eat lots of beef. It made me bigger but I didn’t like it."

Aberdeen Blaha does like. The tallest player in the SPL can now joke about the culture change he and girlfriend of four years’ standing, Lenka Vlachhynska, have overcome since decamping to the north of Scotland.

"When Lenka was to come here first, she became sick with a high temperature," he grins on recalling. "I told her she had a fear of Scotland. She blamed this fever on a trip to the sauna."

Lenka would appear to be the ideal partner to support Blaha in his sporting endeavours. She was a genuine tennis prospect in her youth, no less than former Wimbledon champion Martina Hingis’s doubles partner, in fact, until a wrist injury five years ago put paid to her dreams.

"Lenka’s father has said that Martina’s mum would ring up and say his daughter must play with her daughter," he recalls. "But Lenka didn’t want to because she was better than Martina. She was stronger and had more power and her father wanted her to play with boys."

In Scottish football, her man is playing with big boys. Big, bruising boys whose uncomplicated approach earns the game in this country a reputation for being about physique at the expensive of flair. It is a style that has already hit a bum note with Blaha.

"In my second match, against Motherwell, a defender hit me and gave me an injury to my buttock," he says, stressing both syllables in buttock as if the word were hyphenated.

"Oh, it was terrible. I had a sore buttock and couldn’t sit, lie or anything. But it was my mistake because I didn’t protect myself as the player came towards me."

Blaha will hope this is the only time that he finds Scottish football to be a real pain in the arse.

THREE FROM THE EAST

Zoltan Varga: As any Aberdeen fan of a certain age will tell you, Hungarian international Zoltan Varga was a maverick genius, blessed with a level of technical ability never seen before at Pittodrie. A surprise 40,000 signing in 1972 from Hertha Berlin, Varga thrilled Dons fans for just one season before moving to Ajax in 1973 to replace the legendary Johan Cruyff.

Illian Kiriakov: Small and hard, the offensive Bulgarian midfielder relished physical battles, and so was tailor-made for Scottish football. Signed by Roy Aitken for a fee of 400,000 from Cypriot side Anorthosis Famagusta in 1996, "the Man from Uncle" become a minor legend during his time at Pittodrie.

Tsanko Tsvetanov: Part of the Bulgarian side which reached the World Cup semi-finals in 1994, Tsvetanov arrived to play alongside his pal Kiriakov.