after losing to another Swiss team Blažević had managed 35 years earlier, FC Sion, 3–0 on aggregate, and his tenure there ended in June 2006. Once again, he returned to Croatia, this time to take over NK Zagreb. The club experienced a successful 2006–07 season which saw them finish third behind Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split and earned them a spot in Intertoto Cup 2007. However, in the following season the team made for an early exit, losing against their first Intertoto opponent Vllaznia on away goals. After Ivica Vrdoljak and Mario Mandžukić were transferred to city rivals Dinamo Zagreb at the beginning of the season, the team saw a string of mediocre results before finishing the season sixth. Immediately after the last game of the season, Blažević announced that his stint at NK Zagreb had come to an end by mutual consent between him and the club's chairman. Bosnia and Herzegovina On 10 July 2008, Blažević was appointed head coach of Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team replacing Meho Kodro who had been dismissed two months earlier by the Bosnian FA (FSBiH) officials after reportedly refusing to take charge of the national team for a friendly against Iran. Since Kodro's dismissal was seen by many fans as the latest in a series of problematic decisions by the much-maligned FA leadership, Blažević was thus, by proxy, not welcomed with open arms by certain sections of the public upon his arrival. With the national team in complete disarray and many players refusing to even answer call-ups by interim head coach Denijal Pirić, the appointment of Blažević was seen by many fans as FA's desperate makeshift solution designed to appease the public in the wake of the ongoing two-month fiasco by bringing in a fairly established name. However, combining his carefully crafted showman public persona with some decent initial results on the pitch, Blažević quickly managed to charm most of the public into getting behind him. By his own admission, Blažević had already been close to getting the Bosnia-Herzegovina national team job six years earlier in 2002, but ended up not getting hired due to influential FSBiH executive Jusuf Pušina who considered Blažević unsuitable for the job because of the coach's association with the Croatian wartime president Franjo Tuđman and his political party. Staying true to all the staples of his coaching style from his previous places of employment, seventy-four-year-old Blažević quickly