“Zagrajmy w pilke” – “Let’s play ball”. That was the headline instruction, front and centre, on the Polish website gazeta.pl on Thursday morning after the tense, chaotic conclusion to Group C the night before. Poland had stumbled into the last 16 of the World Cup with a performance so devoid of ambition that the domestic media coverage seemed more like a postmortem than a celebration of reaching the knockout stages for the first time since 1986.
It should have been a day of jubilation. Instead, there seemed to be a wide sense of embarrassment. “We will not tell our grandchildren by the fireplace years later about how the Polish national team progressed from the group at the 2022 World Cup,” wrote Dariusz Tuzimek for SportowyFakty.pl. “When they ask about it, we’ll try to change the subject.”
