Image via @BolognaFC1909en on Twitter
Although it is approaching three years since Kacper Urbański joined Bologna, it would be fair to say that it’s only really been this season when he has been coming to the fore. Getting regular minutes in a Bologna team challenging for the top four in Italy is something to be applauded, especially considering Urbański is still only a teenager.
Urbański is mostly being deployed slightly out of position as a left-sided midfielder or winger, rather than his preferred central midfield role. Despite this, he’s really thrived, especially when playing the full 120 minutes against Inter in the Coppa Italia just before Christmas.
Having a talent like Urbański coming through for Poland is something we need to get excited about, but as I have said before, it’s very easy to get carried away with ourselves. It was therefore with some dismay I noticed a few quotes being pulled out of an interview Urbański did with TVP Sport, in which he suggested he would be more than happy to go straight into the senior national side rather than the U-21s.
Now, a comment like this should be treated with context and caution. For one, the question was slightly leading in nature, and it’s not like Urbański is going to say something which would jeopardise any future call-up by Michał Probierz. Secondly, Urbański has accepted a call-up to the U-21 side in the recent past, appearing as an unused substitute against Estonia in September.
Unfortunately, comments like the one Urbański made tend to get made more of than is necessary by reactionary pundit-types. If Urbański goes on to flourish in a future scenario where he has bypassed the U-21s (or simply if the person making the comment likes Urbański), it will be treated as such that he has shown good ambition and a desire to push himself, and it was the right thing to say. If the opposite is true, Urbański is a chancer, trying to get out of working hard and proving himself with the age group sides, and it becomes a reckless comment.
This is very much one of the problems with any interview with any young player. Interpretation depends purely on a future which hasn’t happened yet, and your own personal feelings about the personality of the player. In my view, this is patently just a tactic to get people to engage, a model talk radio has honed for years.
Whatever is made now or in the future about a fairly innocuous answer Urbański gave, he currently looks like a player Poland will try to get into the senior side in a post-Euro 2024 environment, regardless of if Poland qualify or not. We’ve seen with the way that Probierz has handled other players having good runs of form in regards to either being called up or getting playing time for their country, so I think any potential senior cap for Urbański is still over six months away, barring a truly meteoric second half of the season.
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