“When your phone goes at 6am on a Saturday as a football manager, or as a parent, it’s not going to be good,” Neil Harris, the Millwall manager, tells The Athletic. “It’s either the wrong number or it’s bad news. And it’s that moment of fear.”
The voice at the other end of the line that June morning belonged to Andy Marshall, the Championship club’s goalkeeping coach. He informed Harris that he had something to tell him.
“My immediate thought was, ‘What have you done? Are you OK?’,” Harris recalls. “He said, ‘It’s Mati’. So I said, ‘Oh what’s he done?’. He just went, ‘He’s died’.”
‘Mati’ was Matija Sarkic, Millwall’s first-choice goalkeeper, whose father, Bojan, had rung Marshall to break the tragic news that he had been found dead in his apartment while on holiday back home in Montenegro.
“I remember in that moment going into ‘Dad mode’,” Harris says. “I was like, ‘S**t. Marsh, you deal with yourself and the family. I’ll get to the football club’.
“Then it was like, ‘What do we do now?’.”
Harris, speaking to The Athletic from his office at Millwall’s training ground in Bromley, south-east London during the October international break, has spent a large chunk of the four months since trying to figure out the answer to that question.
Sarkic had been staying at his new apartment in the coastal town of Budva with partner Phoebe, the former Aston Villa defender Oscar Borg and his girlfriend. In the early hours of June 15, Sarkic awoke feeling unwell and collapsed shortly afterwards. Attempts to resuscitate him by Borg’s girlfriend, a nurse, and paramedics failed. He was just 26 years old.
As detailed by The Athletic at the time, his death came just a week after he had been best man at his twin Oliver’s wedding, along with their older brother Danilo and a childhood friend.
His family were told he suffered sudden heart failure.
Back in London, Harris — who only returned for his second spell in charge of Millwall in February — was faced with the grim task of breaking the news to their colleagues. First, he notified James Berylson, Millwall’s Boston-based owner, before spending five hours glued to his phone, speaking to other members of staff and senior players in his squad.
“It was unprecedented,” Harris said. “You try to draw on your own life experiences. I dealt with having (testicular) cancer as a young player, I dealt with finishing my career through injury to come back and coach, and then I’ve had to deal with things at this football club both as a player and manager.
“It’s back to dad mode again — you just try and do the right thing. I went into preservation mode for the group.”
For Marshall, Sarkic’s death was a particularly grievous blow. He had been the goalkeeper’s mentor since he first arrived at Villa as a nervous, skinny teenager almost a decade earlier. Since then, Marshall had seen him blossom into an international goalkeeper who appeared destined to play in the Premier League.
He grew close to Sarkic’s family and, in the days before his death, had been away with him in Turkey and Spain for some extra coaching.
Marshall then travelled with a friend to Brussels, where he proudly watched from the stands as Sarkic delivered a standout performance for Montenegro against Belgium. It was a game that carried extra meaning for Sarkic as he spent much of his childhood in Belgium and was friendly with the likes of Wout Faes and Orel Mangala from his time in Brussels club Anderlecht’s academy.
After that, Marshall told Sarkic to switch off and enjoy the celebrations at his brother’s wedding in Portugal and that holiday in Montenegro, before they returned to work for a new season in English football’s second tier. “Life couldn’t have been better for Mati,” Marshall tells The Athletic.
Then, just 10 days after the high of that Belgium match, Marshall took a life-changing call of his own.
“I was in bed and my phone was buzzing away,” he says. “As I picked it up, I could see it was Matija’s father. I missed the call, so I texted him saying, ‘Is everything OK?’. He called straight back. And as I picked up again, there was a sixth sense in me — I just knew.
“On the Sunday, my partner was booking the flights, on Monday morning I flew to Montenegro and on Monday afternoon Matija was buried — it happened that quickly. It was really, really tough.”
Millwall had dealt with tragedy before.
Just under a year earlier, their popular American owner John Berylson — James’ father — had been killed in a car crash, plunging the club into mourning. But the death of Sarkic was felt especially keenly in a squad who had taken him to their hearts since his arrival from Wolverhampton Wanderers in August last year.
Players reassembled for pre-season at the end of June and Harris took the decision to spend the first three days together honouring Sarkic’s memory before focusing on the football side the following week.
On that first, emotional day back, he gathered everyone around the 18-yard box on one of the training pitches.
“I spoke to the players and staff and said, ‘We remember Matija, we remember what a brilliant team-mate and friend he was, also how privileged we are to be here. Let’s get through the next three days together. It’s fine to laugh, it’s fine to cry. No one is judging anyone’,” Harris says.
“The players decided Matija would have wanted us to have a smile on our face and enjoy it. Then we came in the next week and said, ‘Right, we’ll never forget Matija, we’re really going to celebrate him in the Watford game (Millwall’s first match of the season) but in the meantime we do pre-season in his honour’.”
Marshall was in the huddle listening to Harris’ speech.
“The manager stood in front of everyone and said, ‘This will not define you as a footballer, but it will define you as men’,” he said. “And I think that’s so poignant, because it does.”
In a touching tribute, Millwall’s players chose to hang Sarkic’s No 20 shirt up in his space in the training ground’s changing room, where it will stay for the rest of the season. “The space where he got changed, it’s still there and it’s empty,” defender Jake Cooper told The Athletic. “It’s a reminder that he’s still part of us and will forever be.”
Millwall have also retired the No 20 shirt, unveiled a Sarkic mural in the Cold Blow Lane Stand concourse at The New Den funded by the supporters’ club, planted a tree in his memory outside the stadium’s players’ entrance and introduced a save of the season award named after him.
With pre-season preparations underway and the season inching ever closer, they were then faced with the unenviable task of having to find a new first-choice goalkeeper.
Marshall, who had been instrumental in bringing Sarkic to the club, was adamant he should play a key role in finding his replacement, along with Millwall’s new sporting director Steve Gallen. They recruited Lukas Jensen, from Lincoln City of League One, with Liam Roberts arriving from Barnsley, another third-tier club, as backup. Both were identified for their character traits, as well as their ability as players.
“We knew it was going to be extremely tough for them to come into such difficult circumstances,” Marshall explains. “You have to come in and fill the boots, not only of how Matija was playing, but to deal with the emotional response of everything that was going on. That was really hard. But the way the whole goalkeeping department came together to help everybody was fantastic.”
On an emotionally charged afternoon on August 10, Millwall began their Championship campaign at home against Watford for what became Sarkic’s memorial match, with his family present at The New Den and a minute’s silence held before kick-off.
After going 2-0 down, Millwall rallied and thought they had salvaged a point through a late Duncan Watmore goal, only to lose 3-2 in the last minute. On this occasion, however, the result felt of secondary importance.
“We didn’t start the game very well. I think it (the circumstances) had an impact,” Cooper says. “But it was important to show our respects with Mati’s family and his partner there, and to see them on the sideline and knowing how tough it must have been for them.
“They’re still going through a tough time. That gap will never be filled in their lives. It was about trying to give them the moment that they could remember Mati and show how special he was in the football club.”
That Watford loss summed up Millwall’s season to date as they have struggled for consistency in what is a notoriously unforgiving division. But they have lost just once in the past five league games ahead of Wednesday’s meeting with Wayne Rooney’s Plymouth Argyle.
Yet whatever happens on the field, Millwall’s response in the face of a dreadful tragedy has won many admirers.
In the hours after the Watford game, Harris was consumed by the nagging feeling they had let their late goalkeeper down by losing. By the Sunday morning, however, things felt different.
“I had a coffee and I was like, ‘What am I talking about? We gave the boy a brilliant send-off. We’ve shown he was loved and that’s what matters’.”
(Top photo: Ben Peters/MB Media/Getty Images)
