Twenty-one years have passed and no, we are not only referring to the passage of time since Hajduk’s last championship title, but so long that he was killed, that football manager Dino Pokrovac was killed. So close to Hajduk…
That’s what we wrote last year, we’re just adding one more year.
Pokrovac was Hajduk’s mainstay, external advisor and representative of many football players, and the agent of transfers with which he strengthened the “white” team. Split’s “master from the sea” in that – so to speak Pokrovec’s era – was champion in 2001, 2004 and 2005, and won the cup in 2000 and 2003…
If you find a football player interesting and hot on the HNL market, call Pokrovac for help. That’s how Hajduk worked. It was enough just to see how he helped to untie “grop Kranjčar” and bring Niko from Mamićevo Dinamo to Hajduk that winter, January 2005. He was of great help in negotiations with Igor Štimac, Davor Šuker, Franjo Pašalić…
The news archive says: in a classic ambush on June 11, 2005, in the Trnje neighborhood of Zagreb, between 2:30 and 3:20 a.m., the football manager, 43-year-old Dino Pokrovac, was killed with three shots, two in the chest and one in the head.
In the night from the tenth to the eleventh of June. Late in the evening of the 10th, but since it was past midnight, the time of death is officially written as June 11th. Who killed him was never discovered.
Pokrovac was known as a reliable associate of football players, a solid support that radiated confidence. Hajduk strengthened the team with the football players who were (also) led by Pokrovac.
As we already wrote once, Niko Kranjčar was like the cherry on top of the championship cake, which the “whites” and their fans enjoyed at the time.
Pokrovac did business with Hajduk, but Hajduk and football itself were only one of Pokrovac’s jobs. The manager was also involved in other things, he was allegedly also a usurer, and his Gucci purse and a black notebook with a list of debtors disappeared, as has long been reported in the media as a special mystery.
A year and a half before he was shot dead in the haustor at Korčulanska Street 3a in Zagreb, Pokrovac had a Mercedes car worth 80,000 German marks set on fire in front of the entrance to the building, as was reported at the time. Obviously, it was a warning…
Who he resented remained unknown all these years.
There was an extensive investigation and search for the killer, but it yielded no results.
As a note to the younger ones, it was written: Pokrovac expanded his business as a football agent from the end of the nineties, he had a number of players in his portfolio – from Dinamo players Dino Drpić and Vedran Ješe, Mladen Pelaić from Zagreb who came to Hajduk, to Hajduk players Srđan Andrić, Marij Carević, Petr Krpan, all the way to Nika Kranjčar, then Danijel Hrman, Mate Dragičević… One of his last jobs was the departure of Mate Neretljak to Južna Korea.
We also wrote this, so we are happy to repeat it. All the players who came under the patronage of Pokrovac were overjoyed with the cooperation. Neretljak, also known as the “golden ball from Orašje” (the famous slip of a quizzer), said:
– Dino is like my mother. And when mom takes care of her properly, then the child doesn’t miss anything – said Mato…
Time flies, 21 years without Pokrovac, 21 years without Hajduk’s championship title.
