Last night, after a serious illness at age 81, a legendary coach of Hajduk Stanko Poklepović died.
It was enough to say Mister Stanko. In Split and in football Dalmatia, it is immediately known that it refers to a celebrated coach and a former head coach of the Croatian football team, Stanko Poklepović.
Born in Split on April 19, 1938, he played for RNK Split and Jadran from Kastel Sucurac and started his coaching career with Hajduk U-19 squad. He was a close associate of the most famous Croatian coach Tomislav Ivić. He has introduced many new elements into a training process. He coached the first Hajduk's team from 1984 to 1986, followed by Budućnost from Titograd (Podgorica) from 1987 to 1989 and then Borac from Banja Luka from 1989 to 1990. Afterwords, he coached Apoel from Nicosia in 1991 to once again take over Hajduk with which he won the first Croatian championship and Super Cup in 1992. In 1992/93, when Hajduk won the first Croatian Cup, Poklepović led the Club.
From June 1992 to April 1993, he coached the Croatian national team. From 1994 to 1995, the Iranian national team and then one of the best Iranian clubs Pirouzi from 1995 to 1997. He won two titles in Iran.
In Slovenia, from 1997 to 1998, he trained Publikum from Celje. He returned to Croatia and took over Osijek and won the Cup of Croatia in 1999.
He was a coach of Hungarian Ferencvaros, Iranian Isfahan, and he also trained GOŠK Jug, Dubrovnik, Mladost 127, on two occasions also Solin.
At the end of the eighties and in early nineties, he was on duty with the Yugoslavian national team B. Since 2006, he has been a coordinator of Hajduk'sYouth Academy and from 2007 to 2009, he was the Head of Academy. In February 2010, he became the coach of the first Hajduk team, until October of the same year. In that period, Hajduk won the cup in the 2009/10 season. and earned the placement in the Europa League group stage, and then in 2015, he coached Hajduk for the last time, for a short term.
In Stanko's great sports heart, a special place was reserved for the first Hajduk's title in independent Croatia, which they won in 1992. Sometimes earlier, Hajduk won the last Yugoslav cup with Skoblar on the bench, defeating the Red Star in Belgrade. Poklepović was invited to return to Split from Cyprus, and when Hajduk was in question, all other offers and opportunities didn't matter!
Mister Stanko said: "It was a difficult time. Real war horror. We went through the barrage of fire on a dark night, surrounded by enemy fires. The players all bravely endured it and won the first Croatian trophy". This title, he said, was a soul's salvation for him, the reward for all the effort he had invested in his career. As he said, being the first is what each sportsman dreams of, and when you are first with Hajduk, and when this is the first title in Croatia, that really has a special importance. Although the country was in war, the imperative of winning the first Croatian title was enormous. Enjoyment, he said, was to conduct such a squad ready to make every effort to achieve this ultimate goal.
Stanko Poklepović is a great name of Croatian football. He coached and raised numerous Croatian and Yugoslav football players and continued the sequence of top football pedagogues from Hajduk, which has long ago started with Luka Kaliterna.
