On a warm July night in Montreal almost 11 years ago Bartosz Bialkowski thought he might feel like this forever. He had just made a brilliant reflex save in the last minute of Poland’s Under-20 World Cup match against South Korea, guaranteeing the point that took his country into the knockout stage. It was some way to celebrate his 20th birthday and back in the dressing room he was a hero, hoisted aloft by a team that had already defeated Brazil and felt giddy at the prospect of a crack at Argentina. “We thought we could do whatever we wanted to do,” the Ipswich goalkeeper remembers of a summer that resembled a coming of age. “It was like we were the gods now.”
As it turned out, deific status was not that easy to attain. The career Bialkowski had in mind seemed light years away by 2012 when, going nowhere at Southampton and grievously unfit, the prospect of dropping into non-league seemed scarily real. Bialkowski, though, has turned everything round. He is adored at Portman Road, won a first call-up to the Poland senior team in March and, having been named in the preliminary World Cup squad, stands on the verge of realising a dream that had been fading rapidly.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2sqzc03
No comments:
Post a Comment