I had the privilege of witnessing Liverpool’s home Champions League opener of the season against Bologna, and thus had a close-quarters look at Łukasz Skorupski and Kacper Urbański, the latter on his full Champions League debut.
It was quite the baptism of fire for Urbański, slightly culpable as he was for Liverpool’s first goal of the evening. Alexis Mac Allister ran off the back of him to tap in past Skorupski, who could not have prevented a finish applied from mere inches out by the Argentine midfielder.
Pleasingly however Urbański, much like Bologna as a team, grew into the game. Indeed it was perhaps the young Polish international with his side’s best chance of the night, with Swiss winger Dan Ndoye nicking the ball in the corner of the Liverpool penalty area, cutting it back to Urbański, who attempted a placed finish into the far side of the net only to be thwarted by the gloves of Alisson at full stretch.
Hooked after an hour, Urbański did not look out his depth, save for the first 15-20 minutes when Bologna did collectively. Plenty of neat touches, good passes and some very nice play when it came to holding off opposition players. There were times when his decision making let him down, and Urbański was certainly skipped past once or twice by Liverpool’s midfielders, but on the whole it was a performance pleasing on the eye from one of Poland’s most promising players.
Indeed his compatriot Skorupski had a perfectly decent game as well, with neither of the two goals Liverpool fired past him at all saveable, with the aforementioned Mac Allister tap-in and the sumptuous far-corner finish of Mohamed Salah being a goal which almost no keeper would have been able to reach, such was the precision and velocity of the strike.
There was plenty from Skorupski last night which proved that even if Wojciech Szczęsny is now back from his brief sabbatical, the perennial back-up for Poland is a fine goalkeeper and he’s proving it more and more with each performance, even if the clean sheet was not there in this case.
In truth very few people will walk away from having watched Liverpool’s victory over Bologna thinking it was a memorable encounter, but both Urbański and Skorupski showed a level of quality which was not far below or even equal to their opposition counterparts, which speaking as a fan of both Liverpool and Poland brings me great pleasure to report.
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