POLAND are ranked 65th in the world by Fifa, with 31 European rivals ahead of them. You can excuse a few places on the ladder because they have been playing only friendlies for the past two and half years but that does not explain everything.
So there is pressure on these hosts to be something more than party-givers. By the reckoning of their head coach, Franciszek Smuda, Poland’s spotlight moment has come at a bad time in the country’s football history, with talent production at a low ebb. A better time might have been about 30 years ago, when Poland finished third at a World Cup. In the past 20 years they’ve reached the finals of that competition only twice and on neither occasion survived the group phase.
What Poland do have is some useful individual gold medals to dangle, the ones gained by their Borussia Dortmund players in the 2011-12 German season. Dortmund won the Bundesliga and the German Cup, impressively. The striker Robert Lewandowski, the midfielder Jakub Blaszczkowki (they call him “Kuba” for short, and so shall we) and the adventurous right-back Lukasz Piszczek were all key contributors to Dortmund’s success.
Here’s a telling statistic: the German champions scored 80 Bundesliga goals in 2011-12 and at least one Pole was involved in making or scoring 53 of them.
Lewandowski struck 22, which makes him a good deal more prolific in club football than he is for his country — for whom he had 13 from his 40 caps going into yesterday’s friendly against Andorra — though his success abroad makes him the natural pin-up for this high-profile campaign. Kuba, if fit, will captain the team in their opening match against Greece on Friday, while Piszczek can assume he will be being watched by scouts from various clubs, including Real Madrid, assessing whether he is as disciplined in defence as he is energetic in contributing to attack.
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Even if the Poles do not record their best showing at a European championship — they won a single point at Euro 2008, their first finals — they have already won a important duel: the PR battle against Ukraine. It is the fate of joint-hosts of a big event to rub along awkwardly at times in the build-up.
Japan and South Korea frequently grimaced across the sea at one another at the 2002 World Cup; Belgium often felt patronised by Holland at Euro 2000. Poland and Ukraine have had their tetchy moments, too, but there is little doubt which nation is the more popular.
Many more of the visiting teams have chosen bases in Poland rather than in Ukraine, even if their group matches are in the latter, and what with the incarceration of the leader of the opposition and scrutiny of their ghastly record of stadium racism, Ukraine would appreciate a distraction. There is considerable doubt that the national team will provide anything like enough dazzle for that.
They appear at 50 on the Fifa rankings, though they were as high as 22nd after their most recent competitive international, a playoff defeat by Greece for a place at the 2010 World Cup.
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Ukraine have wretched luck with goalkeepers, injury having ruled out two — Olexandr Shovkoskyi and Andriy Dykan — and a drug ban keeping Olexandr Rybka out of all football until 2014. Whoever does play in goal will regard himself as fourth choice and will be lining up behind a rearguard without the injured Dmitri Chygrynsky, probably the most worldly of the country’s centre-halves.
There is murmured debate over how much the former AC Milan and Chelsea striker Andriy Shevchenko, the 2004 European Footballer of the Year, offers at centre-forward with his aching back and his 36th birthday coming up in September. Andriy Voronin, another veteran striker and once of Liverpool, at least registered his first international goal for nearly a year last week in the 4-0 win over Estonia. But there is youthful attacking talent, too, in Yevgeny Konoplyanka and Andriy Yarmolenko. Ukraine look better resourced in that sense than their co-hosts.
Home help
The only hosts to have failed to reach the semi-finals are those who have shared the tournament. Castrol Edge Performance data shows that Belgium (Belgium/Holland 2000), Austria and Switzerland (Austria/Switzerland 2008) all failed to even reach the knockout stages. Otherwise, hosts have always reached the last four at least, and won the tournament on three of 13 occasions.