Football poet
About stews, spiral impostations and a football coach who is a physicist.
Stanko Poklepović, a native of Split, was the celebrated coach of Hajduk. The first jersey he wore was that of the football club Split. He did not take off any clothes for a full twenty years, until 1976. Then he got a job as a shipbuilding engineer, he worked as a welding chief. Not long after that, Tomislav Ivić invited him to be his right hand in managing Hajduk. He chose between Stanko and another former Split player, Kusa Kraljević, but in the end he chose the legendary Špac. Šjor Špaco asked the director of the club if he could leave and he said: - Come on! – and that's how Špaco became an assistant coach.
Many important players left Hajduk in the early eighties, and many young juniors who had not played in the first league until then arrived: Asanović, Andrijašević, Španjić... Torcida was delirious because Hajduk was in the race for the championship that season under Poklepović's leadership. Compared to the score of previous years, Hajduk excelled! He scored, then unimaginable, almost two goals per game.
Ćiro called him a "football poet", and many called him a football genius. His well-known strategies with unusual names, such as cotavi attack, kolovaje, pijere, made both players and opponents laugh, but also confused. Even the combination of coffee and "juice" in Poljudski cafe is named after the famous spiral installation. These were just some of Stanko's football innovations.
Pirju, the name that journalists often grabbed for, wanted to demonstrate visually at one of the Poljud matches. Namely, everyone was wondering what it was - stew.
At the aforementioned match, Špaco appeared with, no less – a funnel. Then he explained: - The last time I was there, the topic was stew, and the journalists had no idea what it was. The stew is a funnel: you close the flanks and let the center halves lead the game, who then go inside, into our stew, and leave a hole behind them. And it can be a reverse stew, even halved... -
For Večernjak, he also revealed the source of his strategies: - All my ideas came from physics, every action is opposed by a reaction. For every attack comes a defense, for every defense comes an attack. Anyone who does not know how to realize this in football is not a coach. –
And Špaca's exceptional knowledge of football physics enabled him to achieve significant sporting success, which is why he will forever be remembered as Hajduk's iconic coach.
