Croatian midfielder Mateo Poljak has found love with an Australian-Croatian girl called Katarina Vujica. Picture: Nic Gibson. Source: The Daily Telegraph
Croatian midfielder Mateo Poljak has found love with an Australian-Croatian girl called Katarina Vujica. Picture: Nic Gibson. Source: The Daily Telegraph
SOME fairytales are just meant to be -- even if the hero of the story couldn't have imagined his dreams would come true.
Western Sydney Wanderers midfielder Mateo Poljak took a chance and left his homeland of Croatia for Australia on a one-year contract to play in the edgling club's rst A-League season.
And as the Wanderers marched up the leaderboard, backed by their remarkable fans, and Poljak's career rose and rose, he fell in love with a beautiful Australian girl named Katarina Vujica.
Tomorrow afternoon, Poljak, 23, and his teammates will fight the Central Coast Mariners for the final chapter of the fairytale -- the A-League trophy -- and Katarina will be cheering him on all the way.
"I think I get more nervous than him," she said.
"I speak to him before the game, after the game, I'm there when he's frustrated about something, excited, I'm there. I can't even imagine them losing -- in my mind they've already won."
The couple came together four months ago after Katarina, 22, changed plans at the last minute and caught a Wanderers match on TV.
"I was actually watching the game and he popped up on the screen and my mum said that boy used to play in the same club as my brothers," she said.
"I was meant to be at a party, I wasn't even meant to be at home."
When Katarina tried to send a screen shot of Poljak's Facebook page to her brothers in Croatia, she unknowingly sent the star player a friend request. Then her first message to him was an apology for accidentally adding him as a friend. They got talking about their shared Croatian heritage and discovered they had family and friends set to arrive at Sydney Airport within half an hour of each other -- but Katarina slept in and missed the meeting.
"He met my parents, my whole family before me," she said.
Eventually they settled on a date for drinks.
"I was like, of course, she was beautiful," he said. "People told me, 'There's a really big Croatian community there (in Sydney), you'll meet a lot of people', but I'm pretty reserved. I didn't think that I would go there and things would be like this.
"That would be crazy if I had that plan. That was all that was on my mind, to do better in my football career. This is a big, big bonus."
Poljak has already signed on for another season with the Wanderers.
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