Notes from a Polish Football Match
TS Podbeskidzie vs Ruch Chorzów, 22nd August 2017
The kick-off wasn’t until a quarter to nine, but even so I left home shortly after seven in the evening and sat at the bus stop waiting for the number 15 that would take me to the stadium. The soft patter of rain played upon the top of the bus shelter; I knew that more was to come, which was one reason why I’d headed out so early. But minutes later the heavens opened and the roads became like rivers; the sky turned as dark as the Baltic in winter, and it was lit periodically by flashes of lightning, the bolts accompanied almost instantaneously by the deep rumble of thunder. In short, it was a typical late-summer storm in the mountainous south of Poland.
I toyed with the idea of not getting off the bus when we reached the stadium; I could easily have headed into town and written off the match as a bad idea. The wind had picked up, and knowing what I did of the stadium I worried that it would carry the rain into the terraces, rendering the roof useless as safe cover. But I decided to brave the storm; I ran across to the InterMarche opposite the stadium, and sheltered there with a dozen other fans decked out in the blue and white of the local team.
I was going to only my fourth or fifth match for the team known as TS Podbeskidzie. Today they were playing Ruch Chorzów in the Polish I Liga, hardly a major competition within Europe, but big enough that they have their own sponsor, which is Nice. When the rain abated slightly I crossed the road and joined a queue to buy a ticket. The cost of admission is still very low, despite what inflation has done to the country, and for 20zl, a fraction of the cost of the equivalent ticket in the UK, I was in. Security was tight; I had to present photographic identification on purchasing my ticket, presumably so that, if there was trouble in my part of the ground, I could be matched against the surveillance footage. Then, on passing through the turnstile, I was patted down by a security officer missing two front teeth; he explained that my bottle of soda could not be taken into the ground, but unlike at an airport where the liquid had immediately to be abandoned, I was given a plastic cup into which my beverage could be transferred. Evidently here the bottle was a greater threat than its contents.
Security generally was tight; marshals and stewards were posted every few metres around the perimeter of the stadium, and their presence was most notable in the vicinity of the away fans. But I’d never seen any trouble at a match here. It was like something Dostoevsky might have said: without the stewards policing the fans, there could have been clashes between the opposing factions, but with them present there seemed no likelihood whatsoever of a fight breaking out. In fact, this was relatively family-friendly territory. Many parents had brought their kids along for the fun, and I saw youths as young as five or six sporting TS Podbeskidzie scarves and scampering up and down the empty rows, taking what fun as they could from the evening.
The feeling that this was a family-oriented place went further, right down to the concessions stand. I had been chilled by the wind and rain, and even though I had dried my hair in the washroom downstairs I could feel the shivers coming on, so I joined the queue to buy some coffee. The little bufet served food as well, and the prices were all reasonable. There was none of the gouging that you would expect at a British football stadium; even the beer was good value. However, given the number of away fans that had rolled into town for the match, the stadium authorities had decided, wisely I would say, to cut off the taps; I heard one patron ask if it was just this one bufet that had no beer, or all of them, and her response incorporated a wonderfully sly eyebrow raise that suggested he was a fool for even asking.
I went in search of my seat. I’d not been given much choice in the selection when I was buying my ticket, but then, considering how much rain was soaking through my clothes at the time, this was one occasion when I was happy to abdicate the responsibility for choosing. The young girl in the ticket office had given me a seat in Sector 15G, high up towards the corner of the stadium. It offered a great vantage point, though I was fortunate not to find myself closer to the steel stanchions holding up the roof; it was amazing to think that a stadium built so recently could still contain such flaws as could entirely block the view for some spectators.
The bucket seat was not terribly comfortable, but it was dry, and for the time being I had no nearest neighbour to knock with my elbow, so I could sit back and relax until the kick-off. I watched the Podbeskidzie players warming up; some, close to the touchline, were passing the ball back and forth, but with as much enthusiasm as somebody who had recently twisted their ankle; others, loitering around the edge of the area, were taking potshots at goal. I admired their accuracy; with a carefree ease they were doing a fine job of picking out the spectators at the rear of the lower gallery, managing to lift the ball over the net behind the goal and yet able to bring it back down onto the unsuspecting heads of those browsing on their phones. What good this skill would do them in the match itself I couldn’t quite fathom, but it was certainly entertaining to watch.
The TSP mascot was making his way around the terraces, bumping fists with those whose hands were not encumbered with a cup of coffee and a book, as mine sadly were. He looked like a mountaineer of the Tyrolean kind, with a big black hat sporting red tassels, and a buckled-up shirt to match. After every fist bump he would turn to the pitch and bow deeply; or so I initially thought, thinking that here was somebody with the greatest of respect for the team he served. Actually, the poor chap inside the full-body costume could not see anything directly in front of him, and the bowing only served to show where the steps were; the drop was precipitous, and the slightest stumble here would have seen the mascot rolling head over heels all the way down.
I took a moment to look around the stands then, taking in the spectacle of the other spectators. Many looked as you would expect, their heads shorn of hair, their tattoos devoted to nationalist symbols, their jackets — where worn; I saw some braving the elements in no more than shorts and t-shirt — emblazoned with references to the Warsaw Uprising in the Second World War. The older fans were variously dressed, and some had even kitted themselves out in the same alpine uniform as the mascot; they looked curiously at home here, confident that nobody would be sniggering behind their hands at the way they looked.
To my right, in the upper section behind the goal, the TS Podbeskidzie Ultras were beginning to gather. They would provide much of the soundtrack to the match. At the front there were two youths whose jobs demanded that they utterly ignore the game being played behind them. One would beat a large military drum, and the other would exhort his compatriots to belt out the next song on their list, his voice carrying furthest thanks to the mobile PA unit he’d brought with him. I couldn’t follow the lyrics of the songs at all; the most common refrain, an anthem the Ultras often returned to, began, “La la, la la la la — la, Pod, bess, kid, ya!” before losing itself in some more complicated, mumbled lyrics. At a previous fixture the Ultras had sung a modified version of ‘Go West’, but this they did not repeat today. It was a shame, for I liked the irony of a group of near-hooligans, never noted for their liberal perspectives, singing a tune made famous by the Pet Shop Boys.
However loud the TSP Ultras were, in the event they were no match for those who had come to represent Ruch Chorzów. Chorzów is a town not far from Bielsko-Biala; practically a suburb of Katowice, it wouldn’t have taken more than an hour for the fans to have made the journey, and so many had chosen to that their number nearly equalled those who had turned out for Podbeskidzie. They belted out their tunes with so much gusto that at times they nearly flattened the opposing Ultras. I felt sorry for the local hoodlums; there were so few of them that their number was almost an embarrassment, and I was certain that there’d be some form of inquisition later on to determine where their kinsmen had disappeared to. Had they been put off by the rain? You could never tell.
With only a few minutes to go before the match was due to kick off, a delegation arrived on the pitch, headed by the President of Bielsko-Biala, Jacek Krywult. I don’t honestly know what the difference is between the President of Bielsko-Biala and its mayor, and despite a rigorous search I have found nobody able to answer my questions either; regardless, Mr Krywult was here to make a short speech that nobody listened to, and since he directed himself towards the few television cameras and the press box above the tunnel, he was able to ignore ninety percent of those in attendance. We were all on the far side of the ground from the esteemed speaker, so the pleasure of admiring his walrus-like moustache was one we missed.
Finally, as if the match was an afterthought, the two teams ran onto the pitch. The cacophony of applause reverberated around the bright white concrete of the stadium; beyond the floodlights the stars in the night sky were indiscernible, and enveloped in this cocoon of blackness I felt as if I was in a cheap render of a football game engine from ten years ago.
The players’ names were announced, but here I was cast adrift in two ways. First, I have never been more than a casual observer of the affairs of TS Podbeskidzie, and all of these names were unknown to me. And secondly, the squad numbers bore so little relation to the potential position of each player that I could not in my mind’s eye figure out who was likely to play where.
This problem dates from my childhood. My first season was 1988–9, when my father would take me to watch Leicester City under the baleful reign of David Pleat. In those days you wore the shirt that aligned to your position, and as Jonathan Wilson has explained so eruditely, the numbers were traditional: goalkeepers wore number 1, right-backs number 2 and left-backs number 3, up through midfield and to the central attackers in numbers 9 and 10. Add all the numbers in the starting line-up together, and you’d get the grand total of 66. Simple. But the left-back today, a fellow by the name of Moskwik, wore the number 92 shirt. Across the pitch, his fellow full-back, Oleksy, wore 91. And they were the rule, not the exception; added together, the shirt numbers amounted to the mind-bogglingly inflated figure of 375. Why? Why was it this way? I could understand the centre-back, Malec, wearing the number 8, especially if he’d originally been cast as a midfielder; when his legs gave out it would only have been fairness worthy of Solomon to have retire to the back line. At least the centre-forward, Tomczyk, was in the right shirt, the number 9 lending him a prestige his skills would not live up to for the seventy-six minutes he was engaged in the match.
But it was not just Podbeskidzie; Ruch Chorzów were run by obsessive bingo callers too. The goalkeeper was in the number 33 shirt — was he therefore their third choice pick? And if so, what did it mean to be third choice at a club in the Polish I Liga? The centre-back Trojak was devilish in 66, the centre-forward sported the zebra-stripes of the number 77. Clearly something was at play, and when the game settled into its rhythm of wayward passes and poor first touches, the problem gave me something to dwell on.
The teams assembled, ready in their overly-defensive formations, the back lines crowded with identical-looking faces. I didn’t see any trace of nerves — that would come later. For now, the rain having moved off to pastures new, all I could detect was eagerness, and when the whistle blew and the game kicked off, the players launched themselves at Ruch Chorzów as if they’d been waiting for a store to open on Black Friday. The visitors were overwhelmed, the ranks of blue flooding incessantly forward. The pace was frenetic, and almost all of the chances created in the game came in those luscious first ten minutes. Again and again Podbeskidzie caught their opponents on the back foot. Angled through balls sliced through the defence, making a mockery of the Ruch formation — they were playing with four across the back and two midfielders loitering deep, but such was the brilliance of the early TSP attacks that it seemed as though everybody was clustered simply where the ball was not. Podbeskidzie, then, were playing with the gusto of schoolboys trying to fit their entire game into a ten-minute recess, and sadly it could not last.
Ruch weathered the storm, not as I had done by diving into the nearest shop, but by nothing more sophisticated than a combination of luck and hopefulness. Luck was on their side, for sure. Whenever the ball was hit in the direction of their Slovakian goalkeeper, Hrdlicka, you just knew he’d need at least two takes to get a clean catch. And so it was; there was a cross from the right, a glancing header, and the ball squirmed out of his grasp. Sadly for Podbeskidzie there was nobody there to collect the dropped ball. Likewise when a shot by the industrious Sobczak proved too slick to handle at the first attempt — where was the number 9 to take advantage?
The hope didn’t die — not in those ten minutes. There’s a reason that Podbeskidzie occupy such a lowly position in the table. Tomczyk, the lone striker, was possessed of a touch so heavy that passes rebounded off him like they would off an anvil. He was put clear through more than once, but instead of getting his angle right and sprinting into the box, he allowed the ball to get away from him and the danger soon passed of its own accord.
But Ruch were not exactly doing themselves any favours either. Their defending from the bottom to the top of the pitch was woeful at the start. It was as if the Podbeskidzie assault had so shocked them that they had forgotten the basics of the game. They played as if the referee had commanded no man to approach more than two feet from the player on the ball. On one occasion this reluctance to press yielded a fantastical weirdness; the ball came in along the ground on the edge of the box, and was collected by, I think, Iliev — a Bulgarian with the bearing of an angry monk, and who looked sufficiently like Diego Costa that biopic producers of the future could save themselves some money if they drop the guy a line — anyway, the ball settled at Iliev’s feet; he controlled it, looked up, saw that the two defenders closest to him were as static as if they’d formed a wall to defend a free-kick; he looked first to his right and then to his left, saw that nobody was moving there either; he glanced inquiringly at the referee to see if the whistle had gone; he took yet another touch, and now he looked lost, like a young boy who can’t quite bring himself to quit the playing field but knows it’s time to go home and it’s his ball to take with him; and then finally, after what seemed like the better part of the first half had gone by, he launched a shot towards the goalkeeper’s left post that looked for all the world to be on its way in; but no, Hrdlicka was equal to it, and, after a quick fumble — well, now — he gathered up the ball and looked for an outlet at the other end of the pitch.
And so did those ten minutes go, and I was on the edge of my bucket seat, thinking how well I’d done in choosing how to spend my evening. I was soon made to eat my words. Ruch woke up. Their own incursions into enemy territory became more frequent, and now it was Podbeskidzie who needed to keep on their toes. Both sides began to press more, to harry their opposite numbers — where possible, given the whole calamity with the shirts — and the game descended into a squabble for possession, the teams taking on the roles of siblings arguing over something neither of them really seemed to want.
It looked less and less likely that the ball would go where it was meant to — into the back of one of the nets. The two teams had form in this regard; the past five meetings had produced a paucity of goals, with no game ending with more than two scored. After twenty minutes the game had nil-nil written all over it, and of course such was my confidence in this prediction that only four minutes later Podbeskidzie were preparing to take a penalty.
What happened was this: instead of trying to kick the ball far enough away from the Ruch defence for the speedier Podbeskidzie players to chase, the ball was moved sensibly up the left channel, the midfield working admirably in small triangles to bamboozle the Ruch full-back into submission, and submit he did — or somebody did. The ball had almost been played out for a goal kick when a swift Cruyff turn and a trailing leg combined to have a Podbeskidzie player on the ground; the referee seemed to roll his eyes at the ineptitude before blowing for the spot kick.
It was our old friend Iliev who stepped forward to take the kick; he strode up to the ball and calmly kicked it straight down the middle of the goal and into the back of the net. If he seemed disappointed that the goal had been scored so easily, one can readily sympathise. Perhaps living up to his ranking in the squad, Hrdlicka had managed to vacate the goal almost entirely by the time Iliev’s boot struck the ball; so eager was he to dive to his left in the vain hope that that’s where Iliev would be aiming, the Slovakian looked more like somebody who had mistaken the referee’s whistle for the half-time call.
Sadly, that was the end of the match as far as the contest itself went. With all the confidence of a team already engaged in a relegation battle, Podbeskidzie immediately decided that a one goal lead was worth defending at all costs, but that the risk of losing it was too great to allow for any real attack after that. It’s as if they were really playing one of the bigger sides in Poland, Wisla Krakow or Legia Warszawa for instance, and that the goal had been a sneaky, undeserved, and entirely fortuitous event. They forgot they were only playing Ruch, who were even worse off than Podbeskidzie. True, in the first four matches of the league season Podbeskidzie had managed to ship ten goals, with only two consolation efforts by way of reply, but Ruch were hardly doing any better and after suffering the indignity of a five point penalty for ‘Problemy finansowe’, they were firmly rooted to the bottom of the table.
I could understand now some of the complaints made by the locals about the building of this great stadium. The Stadion Miejski had only been completed in 2015, and at 15,000 it doesn’t offer a truly exceptional capacity, but it’s a big improvement over the Sunday League quality of what it replaced. My first experience of Podbeskidzie was watching them play in front of a small crowd in a ground that held about 3,000. The thing was, there weren’t really that many more people watching them now, and those who did were probably wondering why they bothered. When the stadium was finished — presumably its construction had been a requirement for the team’s continued presence in the top flight, the Ekstraklasa — the team were basically the Polish equivalent of Southampton, the sort of outfit that would never excel, but who you didn’t really expect to get themselves relegated. Then they became, for want of a better example, the Leicester City side that experienced so much hardship about a decade ago. They were relegated, and now they risk going down a level further; it’s conceivable that they could soon find themselves playing the other Bielsko team, BKS.
So back to those complaints: for the most part, Polish football exists in a vacuum. There are not many foreign players plying their trade at the teams around the country, and one doubts that this will change much in the future. Nor is there much foreign money in the game. There’s no Roman Abramovich, no Sheikh Mansour, no faceless Chinese conglomerate. But somebody has to pay the bills, and in a league where the players generally come cheap, the most sizable bill is the one to build the ground. The simple solution chosen by those in power in the city was to use tax-payer money for the stadium’s construction. Even if you love the club, and generally there are not so many that do, it’s hard to justify such a massive outlay from the public purse.
The least the players could do was to put on a good show, and now that they had what they deemed an unassailable one-goal lead, that was the last thing on their minds. The second half was dire. Attacking towards the home end, with the Ultras practically drawing the ball towards them with one concerted intake of breath, here was the opportunity for the team to repay some of that investment. Instead, a Podbeskidzie counter-attack became as unwanted an event as a political referendum. I felt sorry for Tomczyk. He wasn’t much good, but when he found himself one-on-one with the last defender and looked up to see his fellow players having a chat in their own half, it must have been hellishly disappointing. At best he could win a corner, but even then there were not many blue shirts in the Ruch box waiting for the delivery, which would float in a desultory manner befitting the team straight into the waiting hands of the goalkeeper. In fact, Hrdlicka’s confidence now that his goal was off the Podbeskidzie radar had blossomed, and for the most part he was able to actually hold onto the ball.
After another abortive attempt at an attack, Tomczyk was finally replaced by the Latvian Sabala. Now, little is known about this Pynchonesque figure, so greatly has he spurned the limelight. I don’t even know which is his native position. But as a striker, he was ruthlessly efficient. It’s just a shame that the efficiency of which I speak was not to his team’s benefit. Knowing that any attack on the Ruch goal was unlikely to be successful, Sabala decided that the best thing to do would simply be to return the ball to the Ruch goalkeeper, thus saving the dwindling energy reserves of the rest of his team. This tactic he pursued with great diligence, and each time his supposed through ball left the field of play or ended up in the grateful arms of the Slovakian, he affected a look of the utmost consternation, as if shocked that so bitter a fate could befall his so perfectly-aimed pass. To cap a fine display, Sabala was then needlessly booked just moments before the final whistle.
And then that was it — the match was over. The away fans were still chanting when the home support emptied grumpily onto the streets. Podbeskidzie had played so poorly that I could quite forgive those supporters who complained about the performance and nothing else, completely overlooking that these were the first three points they had collected all season.
But then, it’s hard to celebrate a victory when you can’t see where the next one is likely to come from. As for myself, I didn’t mind. Like going to a disco, this was a night out I’d enjoyed but was in absolutely no kind of a rush to repeat. The likelihood of disappointment was simply too great, and I knew that the morning would find me exhausted and unfit for work; and as a morning person, I frankly can’t afford the loss.
