Image via @LaczyNasPilka on Twitter
Footballers being forced out of international fixtures by injury is hardly anything new, and it is definitely sometimes convenient for the club of the given player. That being said, there is no doubt in my mind that Nicola Zalewski, Łukasz Skorupski and Kamil Grabara are genuinely injured, and thus there are at least two decisions that Fernando Santos might well be forced into that he hadn’t expected.
Obviously, this set of injury dominoes was sparked by the news that Zalewski and Skorupski had been injured in the course of the last Serie A matches they played for Roma and Bologna respectively, and were to be replaced in the squad by Paweł Wszołek and Kamil Grabara.
Then, we have the news one day later that complications from Grabara’s facial injury last year have flared up and Marcin Bułka has instead come in to replace him. Given Wojciech Szczęsny’s current problems keeping him out of the Juventus squad in the past fortnight, we may be at a situation where one of Bułka or Bartłomiej Drągowski starts for Poland in one of the games against either the Faroe Islands or Albania.
Calling up Wszołek as another option at the wing-back position, which Santos will most likely be employing again in these next two games, is particularly interesting to me. It is deserved on balance, given his consistent performances for Legia, rather than the more recent attention-getting performances of Tymoteusz Puchacz and Przemysław Płacheta. You do wonder though, if Santos might have been better served calling up one of the two younger options over a player who hasn’t had a senior appearance for Poland in six years. On the other hand, it’s nice to have another Ekstraklasa representative in the squad, perhaps proving to younger players you don’t need to jump at the first chance to play abroad.
What Zalewski’s absence in particular means is that we’ll probably get to see one of Jakub Kamiński or Michał Skóraś start on the left-hand side. Despite not playing regularly for their clubs at the start of this season, both wingers are undoubtedly talented and possess a great deal of speed with and without the ball. The trade-off is that they are not as defensively disciplined as Zalewski, who is more used to that wing-back role.
Unfortunate as injuries are, they do give the opportunity to players like Wszołek and Bułka the opportunities to be included that they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and as long as it doesn’t lead to dropped points, perhaps the more players being used by Santos the better.
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