Nawawka planned and organized everything but the team game. “High invoices from the salon”

Everything indicates that Adam Nawałka will become the new manager of the Polish national team and will lead it in the play-offs for the World Cup in Qatar. Will return to work in three and a half years. Despite the fact that he said goodbye with a terrible performance at the world championship, and then he failed in Lech Poznań, for Cezary Kulesza he is the safest and least risky option. Tailored to the circumstances. But knowing the players and the national realities is one thing. In a broader perspective, it may be more important to learn from recent failures and find shortcomings in your work. Both on the offensive and on the defensive.

The fire department watered the field, an assistant measured the cupboards and the photographer had to remove the photos

The perfectionism for which the selector was famous, over time, was more often ridiculed than admired. When he left the Polish national team, Mateusz Klich compared him with the new coach: “Jerzy Brzêczek does not wear scarves”. For the staff, this simplicity and uncomplicatedness was a nice change. And Nawałka landed in Poznań with all his inventions. And he tightened the screw. He only worked for four months in Lech, he led him in only 11 matches, but he left anecdotes and stories told with a pinch of salt, as if he had been there for years.

In Belek, Turkey, where Lech has been preparing for the spring round for years, after a year the club’s employees would point their fingers at “Nawałka’s table”. The coach chose a place at the hotel bar and spent the whole night there with his staff. There was no end to discussions about which players should share rooms with each other. The coaches analyzed: “This player is talkative, so we will let him growl him. And this one characteristically fits this”.

Nawałka got up in front of everyone and went to sleep after everyone. The assistants had to adapt; those who worked with him in the national team were already used to it. On the other hand, the coaches joined to the staff by the authorities sometimes caught their heads about the absurdities of the discussions. The fundamental issue was to lay artificial grass on a short distance between the hotel and the pitch, so that the players would not have to walk on the concrete.

Lech authorities tried to meet the coach’s requirements. So they chose hotels large enough for the whole team to sleep on one floor – placing them on two floors was absolutely out of the question. For away matches behind the bus with the team there was a car with stationary bikes, which were sometimes not even used, but Nawałka liked this form of training. At the Lech stadium, the turf was replaced, which was later cut with millimeter accuracy. During the training camp in Opalenica, when the grass could not be poured because the pipes were frozen, the fire brigade was called. She came and watered the pitch because the grass had to be wet regardless of the conditions.

Journalists of the Meczyki.pl website reported that in the cloakroom in Gliwice, Nawałka’s assistant had to measure the depth of the lockers. It is not known if the coach was looking for the reasons for the failure in them. We heard the care with which Zając took care of his boss’s comfort. On the bus, he was supposed to ask if he should bring Nawałka a blanket to cover his legs. It did not make him serious in the eyes of the players. Speaking of the bus – the famous U-turn ban, which applies to all drivers taking Nawałka, also functioned in Lech. According to the coach, turning back is unlucky. When the driver missed the temporary entrance to the rebuilt stadium before the game in Zabrze, there was no exception. The players had to go a long way.

Nawałka cared more for his image than for their legs. As he got off the plane and one of the photographers took a picture of him, he asked him to remove it. He was tired of the journey, it did not come out favorably. – His own image was in the first place for him. Very high textures came from the fashion store – we hear at Bułgarska Street. Pretty soon these requirements of Nawałka became tiresome for everyone: from the gardener to the manager. And the effort was not compensated by the results.

Manager syndrome. “We train standing up, we don’t run and you can see it later in the match”

Already at the end of his work with the staff, Nawałka was to remain deaf to the opinions of others and lose himself in the conviction of his own infallibility. The clash with the reality of the league turned out to be painful. Besides, Nawałka was not the first to return from the representative salons and collided with the wall. Most of them worked on it – from Jerzy Engel, through Paweł Janas, to Franciszek. Waldemar Fornalik also started up after some time. Because being a manager changes the coach. It is different to have contact with the players every few, and sometimes several weeks, another to manage them day in and day out. All the more so – like Nawałka in Lech – in the middle of the crisis.

The advantages of the coach turned into disadvantages, because what could be endured for a few days at the national team camp was unbearable in everyday work. Nawałka showed up at Bułgarska St. to get the players to work, not to let him get on his head and to put the team in order. It was supposed to shorten the leash and rule with a hard hand. To have more authority than its predecessor -. But the players quickly got the impression that Nawałka was building this authority in an artificial way. Another prohibitions and orders.

The players were to be at the club from morning until late afternoon. However, many of them recognized that it was art for art’s sake. Another requirement that does not improve the team’s form and performance. After a few weeks, one of the main players was complaining: “Even in the juniors I didn’t have such a poor coach.” The classes were to be mostly tactical, monotonous and boring. “We train standing up, we don’t run and then you can see it in the match” – you could hear. “There were workouts where I touched the ball twice for an hour and a half,” said one of the offensive players.

There were jokes that Nawałka had planned and organized everything but the game of his team. He led her in 11 games (balance sheet 5-1-5) and none of them showed that she had a clear idea of ​​how she wanted to play. The trainer made decisions that were difficult to explain. He himself answered most of the questions about the selection of specific players: “I see players in training, it has a big impact”.

It was during training sessions that Nikola Vujadinović, Piotr Tomasik, and Rafał Janicki, players who have already been given a cross by the Lech authorities and who are no longer in the club today, won the first team. Nawałka – on the contrary. He bet on them as consistently as if he wanted to earn the opinion of a magician who would disenchant the already lost players. It would be spectacular – if it could work.

In fact, none of the players can be said to have gained anything under the watchful eye of Nawałka. Lech did not start playing more ambitiously or inventively. It’s hard to say what the team worked on during the training camp in Belek, where they lost four out of five sparring matches, and then transferred the form of these matches to the league fields. He had better results before the camp than after it. It is possible that Nawałka did not have enough time to influence the team more clearly. But it was Nawałka himself – other requirements that the bosses considered senseless – that reduced their patience.

The bosses of Lech Poznań were fed up with Adam Nawałka

The relationship between the authorities and the coach was strained from the beginning. It started during the negotiations, during which – to put it mildly – there was no chemistry, but we managed to get along. Lech was against the wall. It didn’t work out with the coach-pupil, so he invited the biggest coaching star. – We were struggling – later admitted president Piotr Rutkowski.

It was even worse in winter when it was time to talk about transfers. The club wanted to buy, while the coach preferred to work with the players he had. He considered the reinforcements unnecessary, he did not want Zoran Arsenic or Jesus Imaz from Wisła Kraków. Activists heard that the defense is covered, and he is already playing in the Spaniard’s position. Later at the conference, the coach said that he is not satisfied with “half measures” and prefers to spend the saved money in the summer. But he barely lived to see spring.

Nawałka wanted to extend the contracts of Gajos, Trałka, Vujadinovic and Janicki, i.e. the players the club had selected to leave. The coach did not want the personnel revolution, which the authorities were absolutely convinced of (and which happened in the summer – without Nawałka). The activists were also irritated by the removal of Kamil Jóźwiak or Joao Amaral from the game.

When the media announced the purge planned for summer, the club did not deny this information. Nawałka himself had to confront them at a press conference. The trainer dodged, saying only that he would not comment on “media facts”. And for the next match, he put up a line-up composed mainly of players unwanted by the authorities. So there appeared Janicki, Trałka, Gajos, Vujadinović and Tomasik, withdrawn from the reserves and not playing for a few matches. It was like stamping your foot and shouting “I’m in charge of the team.” A day later he was released. And that, in turn, was like the answer: “And we run the club.”

Since then, Nawałka has not worked and he did not appear in the media very often. But the bosses of Lech talked about parting with him for a long time. They think they made a mistake in hiring him. He was a symbol of their confusion and taking the easy way. Nawałka was then a better selector than a coach. A man spoiled by the Polish Football Association, wasting energy on side matters. He had plenty of vigor, he worked non-stop, but he organized trainings more representative than club training.

This is not the worst news for Cezary Kulesza. It is easier for bosses and footballers to cope with Nawałka seeing each other once every few months, for a few days, than every day at the club. Above all, however, Paulo Sousa’s successor is an intelligent man, and such people usually learn from their failures.