It’s been a very football related week here at PzW. I make no apologies for that. There’s lots going in Polish football and now that I can read a bit more Polish, it’s nice to be occupying an even more niche location in the English language in Poland blogosphere and using that to good effect.
So this week I’ve brought you the continuing chaos over the opening of the capital’s national stadium, just across the river from my old cockroach infested flat in Powiśle. Then we covered the malarkey over whether the game between Legia, the local team here in Warsaw, and Wisła Kraków would go ahead.
Yesterday the Legia fans held a manifestacja to protest the cancellation. Your intrepid reporter, very much a poor man’s Ryszard Kapuscinski, went down to check it out. During the day time I had a bit of a sick anticipation in the put of my stomach. Would the Wisła fans, supposedly coming down to join the protest, kick off? Would the police provoke violence in order to demonstrate that fears over safety at the game were justified? (This has allegedly in a number of incidents in America recently). Would it really be sensible to stand around in temperatures well below 20c to hear a man with a megaphone sing anti sports ministry slogans?
Heading into the centre on the hunt for scotch bonnet peppers, wrapped up in hoody and indeed my Legia scard, I saw little knots of lads in Legia colours standing around. There’s a peculiar kind of acknowledgment that’s a kind of half way nod people give you in this situation. The Polish politician, Home Army member and author Stefan Korbonski wrote about the hours before the Warsaw uprising in August and said something similar. The little suppressed glance of those in the know.
Little did the lads I saw realise that I was not only not Varsovian, but would be coming to the protest as a blogger, which is the distant cousin to Legia fans’ most hated enemy, journalists! (Indeed, one cameraman was attacked during the protest, I read on Gazeta’s twitter feed)
Later, a curious knot circulating around my internals, I headed to the ground. From a distance the cracks and thuds of flashbangs (let off by fans on a regular basis but which sound like rubber bullet rounds) and blue flashing lights became apparent. Breathing in the crystal shards of the frozen air, I reached the stadium to find at most a couple of thousand people, mostly men but some families listening to Staruch, the Legia fan who used to lead the chanting at games but is now banned from the ground, addressing the protest.
There's a number of videos on the Gazeta page here if you like hearing men chant out of tune, which we all love of course.
A few chants, flashbangs, flares and cries of ‘War! War! War!’ later, he suddenly announced that everyone should go home peacefully. It was a bit of a damp squib but I sercretly grateful because it was really bloody cold. A smaller group then went to the stadium, escorted by a heavy Police presence, before dispersing.
Why is this important? Well it’s yet one more incident in the long running feud between Legia fans – many of whom, let’s be honest, can be quite unpleasant (hooliganism, unfortunately also racism etc.) Polish football fans in general and the government of Donald Tusk. As the country;s about to host a major football tournament, the confrontational nature of the relationship means that when the country hosts a million foreign football fans this coming June, the risk of violence and the damage that will mean for Poland’s reputation, is ever-present..
Also here’s Paddy’s key three pieces of advice for attending a Polish football protest in February:
- Wear thick socks and bring a) a thermos flask or b) a bottle of vodka
- If you don’t know the chants, put your hood up and mouth along as best you can (think John Redwood miming the Welsh national anthem)
- Don’t get caught taking notes or speaking into a Dictaphone, these are sacre bleu moments and make you liable to getting a tickle.
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