Lech Poznan must take the biscuit for being just about the most baffling team in European football at the moment. In the Europa League, the Polish side are sitting on top of what is regarded as one of the better groups, containing English Premier League moneybags Manchester City, Italian heavyweights Juventus and Austrian side Salzburg.
So what is to be made of a team which can convincingly beat Manchester City 3-1 recently and yet consistently fail to win against moderate Polish league opposition? In fact after 12 rounds of the country’s top flight, the Ekstraklasa, Lech Poznan find themselves just one place off the bottom of the table with 12 points.
In midweek, Lech were presented with a great opportunity to climb out of the basement, with a home game against an uninspiring mid-table Polonia Warsaw side. Furthermore, it was a chance for new coach Jose Maria Bakero to get one over on his previous boss Jozef Wojciechowski who had fired him only just over a month ago. And yet at half time the Railwaymen found themselves two-nil down, and it took a Europa League standard performance from the Spaniard’s men to simply claw back the deficit to 2-2 and gain just one point.
The next two weeks should prove crucial and with two home games, an unmissable opportunity to add six desperately-needed points, and rocket themselves not just out of the relegation zone, but up to where they feel they belong. If this chance is blown, then Lech Poznan could find themselves being led by yet another coach when they entertain Juventus in their next Europa League match on 1st December.
However, Lech’s stunning demise, together with similar poor-form from the other two of Poland’s Big Three, Legia Warsaw and Wisla Krakow, has thrown the Ekstraklasa wide-open. Three of the current top four teams, Jagiellonia Bialystok, Korona Kielce and Lechia Gdansk, have never even won the league. A changing of the guard could be on the way.
Lech Poznan’s Jekyll and Hyde form appears to have a parallel in the English Premier league, where Tottenham Hotspur are another club who only seem to turn it on in Europe.
Since the London side’s stunning comeback at the San Siro in October, when they pulled a four-goal deficit back to one, Spurs have lost two and drawn two Premier League matches. Yet in between they took Inter, the European Champions, to the cleaners with a brilliantly-executed 3-1 win at White Hart Lane.
For those who dream of a European League, this could be further ammunition towards their argument that such a set-up is long overdue.
