A broad smile unravels on Milos Kerkez’s baby face as he watches a clip of himself doing what he probably does best: putting his body on the line for the cause, in this case his previous club, AZ Alkmaar. It was May last year, deep into a 3-0 Eredivisie win at Nijmegen, when the ball squirted free after he executed an expert slide tackle on the touchline. Having gone to ground, Kerkez was surely at a disadvantage to beat Anthony Musaba to the punch?
“My teammate Tijjani Reijnders went: ‘No, no!’ I was like: ‘I have to do something,’” says the Bournemouth defender. So Kerkez, on his backside, scrambles towards the ball, throwing his body at it, twirling mid-air like a commando, to block and retain possession. “I wanted to hit it with my head but it came off my back. I mean, it’s still a good tackle, no?”
It is, he says, an innate instinct. That passion was clear when playing on the streets of Vrbas, the Serbian town where he grew up, 30 miles north of Novi Sad, as a boy with his older brothers, Rade and Marko, who plays for Partizan Belgrade. It was not jumpers but blocks of stone for goalposts. “My brothers were tough on me. They would tackle me, I would fall, my skin would be cut and bleed. I realised: ‘I like to do this.’ Cars would not be able to drive down the road because otherwise our ball would hit the cars, so they had to turn around … we’re playing football now. Roadblock,” he says, grinning. “They were good times.”
These, too, are exciting days for Hungary international Kerkez, an athletic force in one of the most absorbing teams in the Premier League, a self-proclaimed “crazy left-back”. According to Bournemouth’s data, their average distance-covered of 107km per game is second to only Brentford in the division. Andoni Iraola’s side never know when they are beaten, best evidenced by extraordinary comeback wins at Everton in August and at Ipswich last time out, both games they were losing after 86 minutes.
“We have a team with a profile of players who can run at maximum intensity for the whole game … we are tough to play against. You can feel it in a game, when you put the other team under pressure: ‘Ah, this is tough.’ They can’t settle. It’s hard but you get moments to recover, throw-ins, free-kicks … sometimes we need one or two minutes just to calm down a little bit. Then we can go again for 30 minutes.”
No wonder, then, Kerkez values the importance of switching off. “In the summer when I go [to Serbia] for a holiday I just go for three, four days, I’ll be alone in a house, maybe with one friend, chill there, chop wood, make fire, camp, fish, that’s it, no phone. People want you to focus on football, but you need something else because when you do that, when you come back you’re even more motivated, more energised to do more on the pitch.” Where is his go-to fishing spot? “They are not on the internet … I’m not going to reveal my locations,” he smiles.
During international breaks Erling Haaland sometimes returns to his roots to recharge, the striker previously posting updates from Norway, fishing rod in hand. “Obviously he has that Viking mentality, so you know how it is, he likes to be in the wilderness. That’s also what I like, to be outside, to go into the woods and stay there for a week … I’ve done that sometimes; put the fishes I have caught on the fire, fry them, clean them, eat them the same night … it’s what I like to do.”
Kerkez, who is learning to drive, his theory test at the end of the month, may have only recently turned 21 but he has grand plans. He wants to give back to his family, especially his mother, Tiijana, and father, Sebastijan, who sometimes had to follow his progress from afar. For eight months an 18-year-old Kerkez was in Hungary, his dad in Germany working in a chemical factory, where Rade also worked, and his mum had three jobs across the care sector. “It was a little bit tough growing up,” he says. The former Ipswich and Watford striker Tamas Priskin helped him settle at Gyor – the pair reunited at Portman Road last weekend – before he earned an eye-catching move to Milan, rubber-stamped hours after a video call from Paolo Maldini.
Given his energy levels, it is no surprise to learn Kerkez enjoyed parkour and climbing trees as a kid. “My age goes up, but I’m always the same,” he laughs. He also spent plenty of time on his father’s farm, collecting chicken eggs, surrounded by birds and bulls. “He loves to spend his whole day on the farm, with the dogs, ducks, fishes, in the wild. I’m going to build him a new one, hopefully soon. A bigger one, with more animals. I want horses, cows, dogs, everything. I want to have a big space, so when I go there, I can just disconnect from football. I want to build a lake, fill it up with fishes so then I can fish all day. It’s an idea from my dad but we have to make a plan now.”
Now Kerkez, who learnt German after living in Austria for five years while in the youth system at Rapid Vienna, has kicked on again. His English is flawless and he can also speak Hungarian and some Italian. “Everything has changed quickly. It is a bit crazy. Everything went: ‘Boom.’ I knew I could do it … but I didn’t know I could do it so quickly.”
He registered his first Bournemouth goal against Wolves last month. “It was a great action from the team: did you see how many passes we did before? I just felt I had to finish it off. In my head it was: ‘Smash it hard.’ I was worried it was going to go into the middle [of the goal] but it went into the top corner. So, really nice.”
He lives with his parents in Lilliput, near Poole, and is slowly harnessing his six-month-old rottweiler, Maximus, who has a diet of raw meat and could grow to weigh 85kg. “He’s going to be a big boy. I want to teach him that he cannot do anything until I tell him … that’s how my other dog is,” alluding to Had, his Italian mastiff. “After Hades, the God of the underworld,” he says. “I miss him because I took him to Milan, to Amsterdam but now he is in Serbia.”
Conversation with Kerkez is like Bournemouth, fluid and fun; trawling through YouTube clips of Roberto Carlos in his late teens, making his Hungary debut at 18 and forging a close friendship with Dominik Szoboszlai, paying Grade 92 a visit, the barber shop owned by his Bournemouth teammates Adam Smith and Lewis Cook, his love of his mother’s cooking – Serbian delicacies cevapi, grilled mincemeat, or kajmak, a creamy dairy dish are calorific treats – and grabbing the megaphone after Alkmaar qualified for the knockout stage of the Europa Conference League. “‘OK, I have to sing now and say something.’ When you give your all, the fans give you the love back.”
Kerkez is renowned for his lung-bursting runs towards the opposition byline but he takes pride in the art of defending. “Maybe people see how much I go forward and they forget about my defending but the first thing I’m good at is defending, one v one, in the duels. Anything extra is a bonus, because I have the energy to do it, so why not? It is the best thing for us as defenders, to lock down the wingers.” Asked if any battle has proved particularly satisfying, Kerkez’s answer speaks volumes of his character. “I don’t care who is there. I just do my job.”
Rade, his eldest brother, is arguably his biggest fan and often chooses Bournemouth when he and Milos play each other on the video game Fifa. “He waits every week for my game – that is the best day of the week for him, when my game comes. He says: ‘I don’t know what to do when you don’t play every three days.’” Kerkez has converted Vojvodina, the region he hails from in Serbia, into Cherries. “The whole place is in Bournemouth kits. Everyone asks for jerseys. Whenever I go back now I see younger kids just using phones and staying inside the house playing video games.
“It makes me a little bit sad because 10 years ago it wasn’t like this. We just waited to go outside to play football. My mum always called me into the house. ‘Come back, come back.’ When I go back and give boots to the kids, I bring them back a little bit of that fire to play football. I want to help them because it’s sad to see the newer generations always looking at screens. I’m talking with my dad about trying to build a training centre, an indoor pitch in my town, for the kids in the region; bring a couple of coaches in. I want to help them get on the track to sports.”
Bournemouth are seeking to eclipse last season’s haul of 48 points, their best tally in the top flight. They entertain West Ham on Monday in search of a fourth straight win that would extend their fine home form. Manchester City, Arsenal and Tottenham have all departed Dorset empty-handed in recent months, though no one is getting carried away. “We are pushing but we’re not even halfway through the season and in the Premier League everything can change in two games,” Kerkez says.
As for his ultimate goal? “I believe I can make it at the top level of football … then I can build an even bigger lake,” he says.
