Minija Kretinga last played in a Lithuanian Cup final in 1970 and last won it in 1964, when around 5,000 spectators watched a team of local footballers defeat Baltija Klaipėda. After decades away from the highest level, bankruptcy and reconstruction, another Minija side now has the chance to add a new chapter to one of Kretinga football’s defining stories.
When Minija Kretinga won the Lithuanian Cup in September 1964, the occasion was significant enough to gather around 5,000 people to the stadium in Kretinga. The home side defeated Baltija Klaipėda 3-2, and contemporary reporting preserved one particularly intimate scene from the celebrations that followed. As the victorious players received the traditional oak wreaths, Minija captain Ramutis Trumpenskas was greeted by his 18-month-old daughter Esmeralda, who came to congratulate her father with a kiss.
More than six decades later, that team still occupies an unusually prominent place in Minija’s history. It was not simply a cup side enjoying a fortunate run – Minija also finished third in Lithuania’s A Class championship that year, while Trumpenskas scored 25 league goals. Several members of the generation would remain among the names associated most closely with football in Kretinga, including Trumpenskas, Stasys Bajelis, Romualdas Skurvydas, Kazimieras Mačiulskis and player-coach Algirdas Andriuškevičius. Most importantly, the trophy they won in 1964 remains the last Lithuanian Cup brought back to the town.
On 11th October, Minija will finally have another opportunity. Darius Gvildys’ side face Kauno Žalgiris at the Darius and Girėnas Stadium, having become the first team representing Kretinga to reach the final since 1970. That makes the 56-year absence from the final remarkable enough, but another number gives a better sense of the history confronting the current team – it has been 62 years since Minija actually won it.
The generation that set the bar
The history of organised football in Kretinga predates Minija itself. The Lithuanian Sports Encyclopedia traces predecessors in the town back to Žemaitis in 1936, with the team subsequently appearing under several names. As Melioratorius, Kretinga had already reached the Lithuanian cup final in 1958, losing an extraordinary match 5-3 after extra time to Spartakas Vilnius. The Minija name dates from the early 1960s, and within a few years the club had produced what would become its defining team.
These competitions belonged to a very different footballing and political world. Lithuania was under Soviet occupation, and the domestic cup was then known as the Tiesa Cup. The players were not full-time professionals in the contemporary sense and records of the 1964 team describe Trumpenskas as working for Kretinga’s construction and repair organisation, while Bajelis was employed as a driver for the chairman of the district executive committee. Yet the demands the team placed upon itself could be considerable. Trumpenskas later recalled that they trained almost every day and described one particularly unforgiving conditioning exercise where the players would be driven to Palanga and made to run the roughly 25 kilometres back to Kretinga.
The results proved that those efforts were not in vain. Minija won 15 of their 30 league matches in 1964 and scored 59 goals, finishing behind only champions Inkaras Kaunas and Panevėžys Statyba. Their cup campaign took them past Šiauliai’s Elnias 3-1 in the semi-final, while Baltija reached the final by eliminating Inkaras, themselves the strongest league side in Lithuania that season.
The decisive match was played in Kretinga on 13th September. Trumpenskas gave Minija a remarkable start, scoring in both the ninth and tenth minutes, before Bajelis added another with a diving header from a corner. Baltija scored twice themselves, but Minija held on for the 3-2 victory. In a town whose football history had already included the disappointment of the 1958 final, this time the cup stayed in Kretinga.
The impact of that generation of players endured long after the team itself had disappeared. When Pirma Lyga invited Kretinga to celebrate its footballing history in 2020, there were enough notable players for two historical selections. One, presented as the town’s team of legends, was constructed largely around the generation responsible for the 1964 triumph and another cup run six years later. More than half a century on, Minija were still measuring their footballing past against the team of Trumpenskas and his contemporaries.
The long wait begins
Minija did have one more opportunity to win the cup during that era. In 1970 they reached the final against Nevėžis Kėdainiai, with the first match in Kretinga finishing goalless. The return in Kėdainiai ended in a 3-1 victory for Nevėžis. Minija could not have known it at the time, but the defeat marked their final appearance in the competition’s deciding match for the next 56 years.
The club remained at the highest level of the Lithuanian republican championship until 1977, but over time the great Minija side became increasingly a matter of local football history rather anything else. After Lithuania regained independence, there was a brief return to the country’s top division in 1992–93. It proved a difficult one, as Minija finished last in the 14-team championship, winning twice and drawing four of their 23 matches while scoring 12 goals and conceding 56.
Kretinga nevertheless continued to produce footballers who did much better than their local club. Later generations included Lithuanian internationals such as Linas Pilibaitis, Donatas Kazlauskas and Simonas Paulius, but Minija increasingly operated further down the domestic pyramid, and by the late 1990s were competing in the western section of the third-tier II Lyga. Eventually, in 2016, Minija ceased operations following bankruptcy.
That interruption did not endure and VšĮ Kretingos Minija was established in 2017, making the Minija that will face Kauno Žalgiris on 11th October, technically, a phoenix club of the side that won the cup in 1964. The new club returned to Pirma Lyga in 2019 and gradually began to establish itself again in Lithuania’s second tier. In 2025, Kretinga municipality announced the completion of the sporting-area phase of the Šaulių Stadium redevelopment, including a natural-grass football pitch with drainage, irrigation and lighting as part of a project costing more than €3 million. The same year brought a significant change at club level when Triple M, associated with former Fulham, Celtic and Lyon forward Moussa Dembélé, acquired a majority stake in Minija. The new investors outlined ambitions to develop the club over the longer term, including eventually challenging for promotion to the top division.
The 2026 squad was assembled with that broader project in mind, with recruitment placing greater emphasis on experienced Lithuanian players and footballers already familiar with the domestic game. Yet, before Minija could make their return to Lithuania’s highest league, the cup unexpectedly provided a much more immediate connection with the club’s past.
A new Minija reaches the final
The decisive step came against Dainava Alytus in the semi-final on 1st of September. Minija fell behind early to Gustas Zabita’s goal and did not equalise until Diba Nwegbo struck in the 51st minute. When Abou Sow restored Dainava’s advantage in the 69th minute, the second-tier side again found itself chasing the match, but Linas Zingertas responded almost immediately. Ten minutes later Nwegbo scored his second of the evening to complete a 3-2 victory.
The coincidence in the scoreline is striking. Sixty-two years after Minija defeated Baltija 3-2 to win their only cup, another 3-2 victory had taken them back to the final. There is no deeper significance to the numbers, of course, but they provide an elegant connection between two teams separated by radically different eras of Lithuanian football.
Gvildys was more interested in what reaching the final meant to the players he had in front of him. Speaking to the Lithuanian Football Federation after the semi-final, he said that some had endured difficult previous seasons and even considered leaving football before finding their place within this Minija side. “The lads still don’t quite realise what they have achieved,” he said of a team that had just ended the club’s 56-year absence from the final.
There is a personal historical connection for the coach as well. Gvildys has already won a Lithuanian Cup final at the stadium to which Minija will travel on 11th October, having lifted the trophy there as a Sūduva player in 2006. Twenty years later, he returns to the Darius and Girėnas Stadium attempting to win it from the touchline with a club whose own wait has been three times as long.
To be sure, Kauno Žalgiris will present formidable opposition. They reached the final with a 1-0 semi-final victory over Šiauliai and enter the match as the top-flight side against opponents still competing in Pirma Lyga. For Minija, however, the unusual weight surrounding this final comes from something larger than the difference between the two teams’ present league status. Indeed, the club has promoted the occasion with the phrase, “History does not repeat itself. It continues.”
In Minija’s case, the distinction is particularly appropriate. The team of 2026 cannot recreate the world of 1964, when thousands gathered in Kretinga to watch Trumpenskas and Bajelis – footballers who worked ordinary jobs away from the pitch – win a cup competition played within Soviet-occupied Lithuania. What has survived is a place in Kretinga’s football folklore cherished by that 1964 victory. The old photograph, the names of Trumpenskas and his teammates, the crowd of around 5,000 and the story of the cup being won at home have remained part of the identity inherited by subsequent Minija teams, even when another final seemed like a distant fantasy.
Now, for the first time in 56 years, it is no longer distant. Minija will walk out in Kaunas on 11th October with the chance to win a trophy that last came to Kretinga 62 years ago. Whatever happens against Kauno Žalgiris, simply reaching that stage has already connected the club’s present more closely to its most celebrated past than any Minija side in more than half a century. Victory would do something more – bestow great hope for the future and another chapter in the story to tell alongside the one that began in 1964.
