European Football Championship 2024: A story of suffering and exuberance: Poland versus Holland

This European Championship is fun: Another football holiday was celebrated in Hamburg on Sunday. 40,000 Poles live in the city of Hamburg alone, but they were not heard nearly as loudly as the 40,000 Dutch people who came to the Hanseatic city specifically for football.

They marched through the city center clapping and painted the St. Pauli entertainment district a bright orange. We went peacefully to the Volksparkstadion without anyone noticing that very close to the Holland fan parade a man with a pickaxe and a Molotov cocktail was threatening people. Because of a “threat situation,” police officers shot at the man, who was injured. He received first aid.

The 39-year-old German’s crime was considered to have a football connection police According to initial investigations, it is unlikely. Nevertheless, it was briefly apparent that exuberance and threat are always very close together at major events.

On the steep terraces of the Volksparkstadion, this moment of shock no longer mattered to the 50,000 visitors. People briefly checked out the breaking news on their cell phones, then turned their attention to what was important: football! Full pot!

Because both Polish and Dutch fans caused quite a ruckus, the opening game of Group C partially reached hurricane level. Record-breaking. And the match also had its charm. Poland, which only qualified through the playoffs, offered a great fight to the co-favorites Oranjes despite their limitations and stayed close to winning a point until the end. Co-favorites Netherlands had to give everything for the opening victory they had planned for. In the end it was 2:1 (1:1). Substitute Wout Weghorst scored the late winning goal with his first touch of the ball in the 83rd minute.

Previously, Biało-Czerwony, the White-Reds, had been particularly astonishing. Their superstar, Robert Lewandowski from FC Barcelona, ​​was missing injured, but his replacement at least represented him at the beginning of the game. In the 16th minute, a corner from the left flew into the Dutch penalty area and Adam Buksa, who usually plays for Antalyaspor in Turkey, rose highest and nodded the ball past everyone into the opponent’s goal: 1-0, even the cheering fans Poles looked at each other in disbelief. The underdog was in the front.

Memphis Depay, Virgel van Dijk and their colleagues from the well-known European teams stormed even more furiously towards the Polish goal, where Wojciech Szczęsny achieved a number of great deeds. The Polish three-man chain became a five-man chain and the focus was on preventing a goal from being conceded. But the resistance didn’t last too long: after half an hour, Cody Gackpo from Liverpool FC scored the celebrated equalizer.

Even after the break, it seemed only a matter of time before the Dutch would win the game, but suddenly the game turned sour. After the substitutions of attacker Sebastian Szymański (Fenerbahce Istanbul) and midfielder Bartosz Slisz (Atlanta United), the Poles unexpectedly created offensive actions that sometimes even put Holland in trouble. Jakub Kiwior missed the outsiders’ best chance in the 57th minute.

Things were no longer going smoothly for the Dutch, but they then made things clear. Shortly before the end, after coming on as a substitute, Weghorst made everything clear for the 1988 European champions with his winning goal. “We knew the Poles would be a difficult opponent. And that’s what they showed,” said Cody Gakpo, the equalizer who was voted Player of the Match after the game. The victory was very important and the winning goal in the final phase was “simply great.”

On Friday the Oranjes will meet the top favorites France in Leipzig. Poland, on the other hand, has to compete in Berlin with the Austrians trained by Ralf Rangnick. They remain hopeful: Robert Lewandowski is expected to be fit again against Austria. The world footballer of 2021 should fix it.