No cold like Katowice: GKS Katowice vs Arka Gdynia

Words: Alex Webber

Images: Alex Webber

Let’s not kid ourselves, many of the games we attend can be locked in a vault marked ‘file and forget’. That’s football. Yet through the mists of mediocrity, every now and again a classic match blazes through the disappointments like a passing comet.

Yet what defines such a Hall of Fame entry? A confluence of factors. For some, an epic derby triumph is more than sufficient, or perhaps a heroic giant-killing in the mud and rain. For others, a basketball score and a flurry of cards. Then, for the connoisseur, there’s freak force majeures such as a pitch invading canine or a mascot in meltdown.

For those of us on the continent, the check boxes broaden to include, possibly, a world-class tifo show that blows the mind or a reenactment of Agincourt – and so much the better if either of those occur inside a retro stadium condemned for demolition.

All of the above please me, but as a self-confessed storm chaser, my criteria usually err towards the latter. The start of December, however, found me chasing a different storm altogether – a snowstorm, the kind that brings to mind images of the Arctic.

More of a survival weekend than a football match, those that attended GKS Katowice versus Arka Gdynia would have been forgiven for expecting a delirious naked scientist to appear out of the tundra like in the TV show True Detective: Night Country.

©Alex Webber/ Terrace Edition. GKS Katowice vs Arka Gdynia.

This wasn’t what I had gambled on. The week previous, rumours had swirled that GKS fans would be celebrating the 20th birthday of their organised group of Ultras. For their part, the visitors, Arka Gdynia, were mobilising to run a football special from the North of the country.

Adding fuel to the potential inferno was Arka’s ongoing pact of friendship with the followers of nearby Polonia Bytom – a nutty little side with an ongoing feud with the hosts GKS. Actually, just a couple of weeks previously I had seen this first hand when a convoy of Bytom fans had stopped in Katowice to engage in some old school adventures.

But if I expected fire, I got ice. And lots of it.

The forecast had been diabolical, but only as my train trundled closer to Katowice did the extent of the nightmare reveal its true face – from the window.

Poland’s ashen winter landscape slowly morphed into a complete and utter whiteout.

Could a match go ahead in conditions such as these? In Poland, why not.

Sure, football has been played on worse pitches, only for the most recent example you’d have to dial back to the England v Germany match held on Christmas Day in Flanders. That bad.

On the floor, players ploughed through the swampy, slushy quagmire, their hopeful aerial balls caught mid-air by whipping winds and flurries of snow.

Wild shots, skidding tackles, wayward passes and grunted curses. This wasn’t sport, but a test of endurance.

At one point, a santa mascot appeared with a deranged grin for the conditions but it’s hard to know whether it was real or a hypothermic apparition.

In the stands, other challenges awaited.

Reportedly turned back to Gdynia following an ambush at some unspecified point in their route, Arka’s core group never made it this far. In their place, a small handful of independent travellers appeared in the away end, shivering and singing in a hunched, little huddle.

Amid this madness, the thought crossed my mind to take a cab at half-time to funnel down a curry. But like everyone else, I remained frozen in place. This was football at its cruellest, football in its extreme.

Football at its most perverted and football at its grimmest. As if struck by collective insanity, all of us remained like prisoners of fate – as much part of the magical horror story as the players in the middle.

Classics come in many flavours, and a classic this was – a bonkers, bewildering afternoon to leave you floored.

This was something special. Something extraordinary.