Istra 1961

Antonijo Ježina spent the second half of the 2000s and the turn of the following decade standing between the posts for NK Istra 1961. Behind him, the shirt stayed the same yellow it had always been, the shorts green, the colours the fans call the Green-Yellows.

Getting to wear that name at all took longer than it should have. The club traces itself to NK Uljanik, formed in Pula in 1948 and named for the shipyard that gave the city its industry. It merged with NK Pula in 1961 to become Istra 1961, folded soon after, and had to be revived in 1964. Sponsors and boards spent the early 2000s renaming it after a shipyard anniversary, then a brewery, then nothing at all, until the supporters' group Demoni made clear they would not follow a club that wasn't called Istra and didn't wear its own colours. In 2007 the name came back, and with it the shirt.

On the pitch, Deja Radonjić is the name still cited when the club's Prva HNL scoring record comes up — 16 goals in the 2014–15 season. Nikola Kalinić passed through on loan from Hajduk before he went on to Fiorentina and the national team, one of several careers that touched Pula only briefly on the way somewhere bigger.

The fixture that still carries weight in Pula is against Rijeka, across the Učka mountain, a rivalry with roots in the early twentieth century when the two cities sat on opposite sides of a border. Istra plays its home games at the Aldo Drosina stadium, rebuilt between 2009 and 2011 down to its current 8,923 seats, in a city that has followed this shirt through every name it was forced to give up and get back.