Catching Up with Polish Football, Part 2

We continue our look at Polish football with Part Two of Catching Up With Polish Football. Last Week Maciej Slominski took us through the top 8 teams of the Ekstraklasa at the halfway stage of the season.

This week we look at the bottom half of the table to see who's fighting to avoid the drop. There are a few big names drifting towards the bottom, including reigning champions Lech Poznan, Widzew Lodz and Ruch Chorzow.

Let's see what Maciej has to say...

9. Slask Wroclaw – Slask have been friends with Lechia since 1977, which means it is apparently the longest running fan friendship in Poland. Prime Minister Donald Tusk is a Lechia fan while his deputy is from Wroclaw and they play football together in their off time (do they really have any?) so this is the sole reason why the country works so well!! Slask started this season badly and coach Ryszard Tarasiewicz, an excellent midfield player in the 1980s and early 1990s was fired. The old fox Orest Lenczyk took over and the team began winning. Sebastian Mila (ex-Valerengen) and Kaz (Ex-Boavista and Porto) currently play for them. Wroclaw will host games in Euro 2012 and a new 40k+ ground is currently being built. However the building has not been without delays as the Greek construction company who won the tender couldn’t handle the project and our lovely neighbors from Deutschland duly stepped in.  Wroclaw is a nice city to visit and has a proper nightlife, which I would say is even better than Krakow!!

10. Zaglebie Lubin – Lubin are a case similar to Belchatow. A small city in the Lower Silesia region (near Wroclaw), the club is sponsored by the State copper company which might be the reason for their very bright orange kits. The sooner they get relegated the better.

11. Lech Poznan – Lech are the reining Polish champions but they are playing on the Amica Wronki license, a fact which rival fans constantly remind them about. The whole region called Wielkopolska (sometimes translated as Greater Poland) supports them so that is why they can draw over 40k for Europa League games v Man City, Juve or even Salzburg. I have noticed that Man City fans now try to do a “Poznan” jumping up and down with their backs turned to the pitch. Not big and certainly not clever!! For league games their crowds are only around 20k. The people in Poznan spend their money carefully. Are they as mean as the Scots are meant to be? This part of the country is always said to be run by reasonable people, very efficient and sometimes even too careful. However their football club is not the best example of that efficiency as it went bankrupt twice in the 1990s only getting away with name changes etc.

12. Widzew Lodz – “The Reds” fans of Widzew were nowhere to be seen in the beginning of the 1980s which was their most successful decade, when Boniek, Smolarek, Mlynarczyk etc played for them and when they eliminated Juve, Man City and Man United from various European cups. Fans from LKS (with a crossed L at the beginning, which is pronounced “W”) Lodz fans (their local rivals and now leader of Div 2) made up their hard core following. Widzew’s international success increased their support across the country and even to OTF (Lodzubelieveit…).  The last time they were any good was mid 1990s when they twice won the championship and they were the last Polish side to play in Champions League in 1996 coached by current national team manager. Widzew was recently denied promotion to Div 1 twice on grounds of their involvement in the match fixing scandal.

Lodz is not the prettiest of cities with its textile industry dominating. In fact that’s why Lodz was once called the Polish Manchester. Any film about the Warsaw Uprising from 1944 can be shot any day without any improvisation and although it can’t be argued the city has a specific industrial climate it probably made David Lynch choose to film one of his sick movies right here.

13. Polonia Bytom – They are a club founded by refugees from Lvov, hence their name and colors. The club is located in deep Silesia and my wife’s father comes from Bytom and told me that the locals did not support Polonia while those who settled here after migrating from the East chose Polonia as their team. Nowadays they play in the first division against all odds. They made the progress from Div 2 with an annual budget of something like 250k Euro and were recently managed by Jan Urban who once scored a hat trick for Osasuna at the Bernabeu. He just resigned due to ‘family reasons’ and has been replaced by the women's national football team coach.

Polonia’s transfer policy is easy to translate….they get players from lower leagues for nothing then try to sell those who can play for a profit. Polonia plays at a ground which is crumbling even by Polish standards.

14. Ruch Chorzow – The “Blues” are 14 time Polish champions and are from the most Silesian part of Silesia. Ernest “Ezi” Wilimowski who scored 4 goals against Brazil in WC `38 played for them before switching sides and scoring goals for the Third Reich during WWII. Another Blue legend is Krzysztof Warzycha who scored lots in the Polish league and for Panathinaikos. There is Gerard Cieslik who scored a brace against the Soviet Union in 1957 and made a huge political statement even then.

The area is really rough, the Silesian dialect dominates plus there are the Blue Psycho Fans with machetes so the whole place is intimidating or “nawtee” as Danny Dyer would say. Not only because all people in the ground eat drupes of sunflower during games. Their famous Omega clock has been classified as a monument.

Since the decline of communism many mining places have shut down and traditional powerhouses like Gornik Zabrze and Ruch Chorzow have struggled financially. Ruch is in a  particularly bad condition nowadays, after finishing 3rd last year with even their TV money taken by bailiff.

15. Arka Gdynia – They have played all their matches at the National Rugby Stadium which holds….wait for it….3 thousand people. In addition to this their pitch was astro turf which helped them get 15 of their total 17 points. Away from home they have failed to score a single goal this season. They will soon have a new 15k ground built in the place of an old one which wasn’t exactly theirs but it’s a long story, perhaps for another day?

Our neighbors from across the city like to claim they were founded in 1929. They were clever enough to start their home games at 19.29 in 2009 to honor club’s 80th anniversary.

While there might have been some football played back then the Gdynia name wasn’t present in league tables until the 1970s and their colors were white-blue instead of current yellow-blue. Despite hailing from a city of around 250k they had a proper naughty gang in the mid 1990s but then went into a massive decline. They were also deeply involved in a match fixing affair and were relegated to division 2 as a result. They escaped relegation on the last day of the season for the last two years. I do hope they won’t get relegated though as it means an easy 6 points for Lechia as we have beaten Arka in the last 5 consecutive games.

16. Cracovia – During communism they were mostly in the 2nd and 3rd division. This is possibly a punishment for their sins in the 20 years between the wars and being the team of bourgeoisie etc

After the end of communism their fans started using knives and not just for dinner. Their fan base was traditionally found in certain districts of Krakow but the situation became 50/50 with Wisla in other districts all of a sudden. Many Wisla fans were so afraid they started following Cracovia. While they were the club of Pope JPII I don’t think the Dog Hunters and Jude Gang (their two notorious hooligan gangs which claim they are er Jewish) read all his works about being kind to each other!! Cracovia don’t travel away in big numbers much preferring their guerilla urban wars with Wisla and at least a couple of people are stabbed each year as a result. They will almost certainly go down this year.