Pazinka

Damir Desnica played for the club before he moved on to Rijeka and to Kortrijk in Belgium, and he did it deaf — reading the game off the movement around him rather than the whistle. He is the name that travels furthest from Pazin, a town in the interior of Istria where the football club has spent most of its life in county leagues.

It started in 1948 inside the sports society SD Pazin. The present name arrived in 1970, taken from the local textile factory that had begun paying the bills; the factory is in the name still.

The short spell that everyone in the town measures the club against came at the start of the 1990s. Pazinka won the western group of the second tier in 1991/92 and went up into the newly formed top flight of Croatian football, where it stayed for two seasons, 1992 to 1994. Nothing was won up there. Coming down was not the end of the story so much as the return to it: the club has since taken the second county division of Istria in 2006/07, the first county division in 2013/14, and the western fourth tier in 2016/17 — the same climbing done over again, one rung at a time, in front of a ground that holds 2,500.

That ground is the Gradski stadion Pazin, though older supporters still call it the Igralište NK Pazinka. Blue is the colour.

Trips to Poreč to face Jadran, or to Buje, get billed in the local press as the Istrian derby or the neighbours' derby — nothing older or angrier than that, but they fill the terrace.

Ivo Pamić played here too, and later wrote the history of football in Pazin himself, which is one way of making sure the seasons in the county leagues were written down by someone who had been on the pitch for them.