Sunday, March 20, 2022
Gadocha, Ayala and the Apples, Part 1
In the history of World Cup "surprise packages", the Polish team of 1974 occupies a very high place. They may not have been total unknowns; after all, they had eliminated England in the qualifiers, and had won the Olympic gold medal in 1972 as well (albeit in the period of Communist-bloc domination of the tournament, due to the "amateur" fiction). But they had not appeared in the World Cup since before the war, and yet they defeated Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Sweden and Yugoslavia on the way to third place. In the opinion of many, including West Germany's Paul Breitner, they would have won their "semi-final" against the hosts had the pitch been in better condition.
Cameroon 1990, Senegal 2002 or Costa Rica 2014 may have scored higher in the "minnow" stakes, but in terms of impact on the tournament, it's hard to go past the Poles of 1974.
They were a tight-knit, cohesive unit; all based at home, all in their twenties, they had formed a bond which would last through the decades to come. Reunions were regular, and memories golden. But thirty years after the event, there was a bombshell. A revelation which ensured that one member of the squad - one of its brightest stars, who had contributed enormously to their success - was shunned and publicly excoriated by his former team-mates.
That player was Robert Gadocha, and the story is a deeply sad one.
Gadocha was, by the time of the 1974 tournament, one of the team's senior figures. A short, stocky winger with fine ball control and an impressive "engine", he was also the team's dead-ball specialist. His forward-line companion Grzegorz Lato may have stolen the headlines in Germany with his seven goals, but Gadocha was the provider for many of them.
Along with his clubmate Kazimierz Deyna, Gadocha had been at the forefront of Legia Warsaw's notable runs in the European Cup in the late 60s and early 70s. With Gornik Zabrze reaching the final of the Cup-Winnters Cup in the same era, it appeared that Polish club football was making serious progress. But this was, on the whole, a flash in the pan.
So when they beat England at home in the qualifying tournament for 1974, it was something of a surprise. Most pundits still believed England would progress, partly because the Poles had lost their most celebrated player, Wlodzimierz Lubanski, to a long-term injury during the match. But, in a famous encounter at Wembley, Poland shocked Alf Ramsey's men with an early goal, and despite pressing madly for much of the evening, the home side could only manage an equalising goal in return. Poland had made it to Germany.
They landed in a tough group. Their opponents would be Italy, beaten finalists from 1970, and Argentina, along with unfancied Haiti. Chiefly for reasons of pedigree, Italy were the group favourites, and therefore the first-up encounter between Poland and Argentina was widely seen as the crunch game. The star player in the Argentina side was the long-haired Atlético Madrid winger Ruben Ayala...who plays an important role in this tale.
To be continued in Part 2.
