Euro 2012 Runners and Riders: Poland

A Badge of Dishonour

Chants of “Where’s the eagle?” and “Screw the FA” echoed around the stadium in Wroclaw as Italy coasted to a comfortable two-nil friendly win late last year. The target of the supporters’ anger was not the performance on the pitch but a commercial decision by the Polish Football Association, the PSPN, to drop the traditional eagle badge from the national team’s shirt. The affair escalated to the Polish parliament, with President Bronislaw Komorowski adding his voice to the dissenters. The eagle was eventually restored, but now sits awkwardly alongside the modern, poorly-designed squiggle intended to replace it. It was a messy, self-inflicted wound for a governing body preparing to co-host a major tournament.

This is not the only issue facing the Polish side. While the red band across the middle of the new Nike home shirt fails to extend all the way around, the team itself seems incomplete, a little light on experience going into the finals.

The Weight of History

The golden era for Polish football, between 1973 and 1983, feels like a distant memory. That was the decade of Zbigniew Boniek and Grzegorz Lato, of a third-place finish at the 1974 World Cup that included victories over Argentina and Brazil. Another third place followed in 1982. By contrast, Poland’s history in the European Championships is surprisingly thin. This summer marks only their second appearance at the finals, the first coming just four years ago in Austria and Switzerland. That debut was a disappointment, ending with one draw, two defeats, and an early exit.

The man tasked with preventing a repeat is Franciszek Smuda, a veteran of the Polish game who has been coaching for twenty-nine years. His appointment in 2009 was long anticipated after a successful domestic career, notably winning three league titles in four years with Widzew Lódź and Wisla Krakow in the late 1990s. Yet Smuda is not a universally popular figure. High-profile fall-outs with several experienced players have left his squad short of seasoned internationals, placing immense pressure on a small core of key men.

Dortmund's Finest

Much of Poland’s hope rests on two players who ply their trade in Germany. Captain Jakub Błaszczykowski has just won a second successive Bundesliga title with Borussia Dortmund, where he has played for the last five years. Even more important is his club team-mate, striker Robert Lewandowski. After finishing last season as the third-highest scorer in the league with twenty-two goals, Lewandowski has attracted admiring glances from clubs across England, Spain and Italy. He is the only player in the squad to have reached double figures in international goals. Poland's over-reliance is stark: if Lewandowski is injured or successfully marked out of a game, it is difficult to see where the goals will come from.

English supporters may recognise the names in goal, as Arsenal’s Lukasz Fabianski and Wojciech Szczęsny are both in the squad, the first to be announced by any of the sixteen competing nations. The Polish national anthem, “Poland Is Not Yet Lost”, refers to a seventeenth-century Swedish invasion known as “The Deluge”.

The draw has been kind. As co-hosts, Poland were seeded and will face Greece, Russia and the Czech Republic, with all three matches played on home soil in Warsaw and Wroclaw. The FIFA ranking of sixty-fifth seems low for a seeded team, but it reflects their recent form. Getting out of this modest-looking group is the minimum expectation from a hopeful home support. For Smuda, anything less could see his popularity plummet even further. The first test comes against Greece.