Date: 27 October 2024 / League: Polish eighth tier (I think!)
Final Score: 5-1 / Attendance: approx. 150-200
Experience
My apologies for the inactivity, but I tell you what, keeping this page updated is a right pain when you’re juggling gainful employment with football travels and an unbending pub habit. I’ve got a ton of posts on temporary hold, and I’m guessing that in many cases that hold will become permanent. Sunday’s trip, however, just can’t be put on pause…
The main event proved a banger, a crazy evening derby at KSZO Ostrowiec Swietokrzyskie – for that, though, you’ll need to wait until I find time to block the faces of the chaps that made the match so unforgettable. Instead, I present you Match No. 1 of the day, a sedate afternoon game featuring Protor-Dzik Skarzysko-Kamienna.
Making their league debut in 2022, there’s not much else I can say about Protor-Dzik other than that their club crest features a cartoonish wild boar. Usually playing in the knackered former home of Ruch Skarzysko-Kamienna, recent weeks have seen their home fixtures mysteriously switched to an even more decrepit ground – the base of the town’s principal side, Granat Skarzysko-Kamienna.
To reach there, I got ripped off by a train station cabbie driving a flashy Merc (FFS, yeah, I should have known better, eh), but never have I been happier to have been so brazenly robbed – if he’d stuck around, I’d have tipped him double, for the house of Granat is something fantastic.
For the people of Skarzysko-Kamienna, this stadium is an eyesore – a source of embarrassment and a damning indictment of the city’s sporting ambition. But I tell you what, for the football romantic, it’s better than a date for two with the ghost of Johan Cruyff.
Even the entrance is heavenly: a pair of abandoned ticket booths crowned by wing-like objects painted in the tricolours of Granat. Passing underneath these corroding relics, one reaches overgrown stairwells that take you to the rim of a vast, hollow bowl that’s all rust, rot and scraggy bushes.
Originally holding 25,000 when it was built over half a century ago, teams that have played here include Panathinaikos, then coached by Kazimierz Gorski, the manager that made the Polish national team a global force in the 1970s.
Now, it’s impossible to imagine that this stadium was once one of the best in central Poland. Little more than a derelict, decomposing bowl, it’s nonetheless a beautiful fossil with many points of interest – for example, a classic away cage that you would genuinely hesitate to use for pigs.
Then you have a main stand that is, in essence, a pile of benches stuck onto a steep, grassy slope. How precarious it is, the pictures do not illustrate, but I find it telling that most people stick around the top, rather than taking their chances descending the ‘steps’.
And there is more: a retro club house squirreled into one of the slopes; a concrete holder for an Olympic torch (sadly, Skarzysko-Kamienna was never awarded the Olympics); rusted gateways featuring Olympic rings (what’s this thing with the Olympics?); and other broken bits and pieces. Wow.
You could wander here for hours and never get bored, for this truly has to be one of the best throwback grounds in European football. And just when you thought it couldn’t get better, there’s the food.
Served alongside a stall selling boar-embossed club merch, find sausages the size of an infant’s arm dished up on a paper plate stacked with toasted garlic bread and a generous dollop of mustard. I’ve not eaten better at any ground in Poland.
Sadly, renovation awaits. When it will occur is anyone’s guess, but renderings show an unimaginative plan to transform this dirty diamond into a bland arena constructed from plastic. When that happens, my heart will break.
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