Tauras

Tauragė sits in the west of Lithuania, and for most of the past eighty years its football has run under whatever name the era demanded. The first side called Tauras was put together in 1942. After that came Žalgiris, then Maistas, then MSK, then Elektronas as the Soviet period closed, then Tauras-Karšuva, then Tauras ERRA. The current legal entity dates only from 2007.

The one title stands at the far end of that sequence: the Lithuanian SSR championship in 1987, won four years before the republic's football went its own way. Under the Žalgiris name the club had already come second in 1948, which makes the 1987 side the only one to finish the job.

Home is the Vytautas Stadium, holding around 3,000. Red and black on the shirts, and the supporters have never needed more than that — Raudonai juodi, the Red and Blacks, is what the club is called in Tauragė and in the press.

The 2008–09 Lithuanian Cup run ended in the final. Passing through the club in those years were players who would go on to the national team, among them Artūras Rimkevičius, who later set the record for goals in a single A Lyga season.

There is no derby with a name. What there is instead is a regional argument along the Baltic coast road: Neptūnas of Klaipėda, the port city an hour to the north-west, and Minija of Kretinga beyond it. Two towns close enough that the fixtures were always played with no love lost, and near enough in size that neither side could claim to be the bigger club.