England v Poland: 'clown' Jan Tomaszewski has the last laugh 40 years on If Tomaszewski has not exactly been dining out on these anecdotes for four decades, then the recollections come clearly and fluently, almost as if he is reading from a script. Oct 17, 1973 has become one of those defining dates in the history of English football; the moment when the warm glow of World Cup triumph finally faded into black and white. The equation was eerily familiar: only a win at home in their final qualifying game would suffice. Standing in their way were a Poland side who travelled partly in hope and partly in fear. "Yes, everyone was afraid," Tomaszewski says. But because of that, more strength also arrived in us. If there's a fire in your house, you take your things out, and then after it's extinguished, you think, "Jesus Christ, how did I lift that?" That's exactly what happened here. It's just that fright which brings out additional strength in a person. That gave us what we needed to win. He does this a lot: referring to the 1-1 draw as a "win." Perhaps, given the circumstances, it was. It certainly felt like a defeat for England. The coach left, the team broke up, and you guys needed eight years to build a team again! Tomaszewski smiles. If there is still a certain triumphalism in these words forty years on, it is a testament to the depth of feeling within them as they took the field. "We had very mixed feelings about the English," he reveals. When Wales and England came to Poland, they both lost, because we were playing such hard football. And the journalists started writing that we were animals. "I was called a "clown." Grzegorz Lato was called an "ant." Jerzy Gorgon was a "boxer." So when we came to Wembley, people started yelling from the stands, "Animals! Animals!" " The early stages went by in a blur. Sometime around the second minute, I caught a very easy ball. All of a sudden, I see Allan Clarke three metres away, I dropped the ball, and he kicked me in the hand. The fear was so great that I didn't see Clarke, two metres tall, three metres away from me. After the match, my hand was in plaster for three weeks. A string of fine saves enabled Poland to trudge into the break level. Then, on the hour, they scored, from virtually their first attack of the match. Norman Hunter missed a simple tackle, Jan Domarski lashed a hopeful shot at Peter Shilton's near post, and the man who would go on to become England's most capped player dived over it. "Shilton was very full of stress," Tomaszewski explains, "because for 57 minutes he was standing in his goal, looking at what's happening. Why haven't they scored yet? So when he was attacked, he was so stressed out that he didn't exactly know whether to block with his leg or his arm. In the end, he didn't block it. Later, when Clarke was shooting a penalty, Shilton turned around. He couldn't look at it. And that goes to show that he was completely eaten up by the stress. What followed was a half-hour that nobody who witnessed would ever forget. Poland's goal became a coconut shy as England pressed desperately for a winner. Tomaszewski flew in all directions, keeping out whatever he could reach, his defence keeping out whatever he could not. "I'm not the one who stopped England," Tomaszewski says. It was the whole team. Shilton says you were lucky. "Yes!" he agrees. Just luck! For England, there was a certain comfort in the fact that Poland went on to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup in West Germany the following year, with Lato winning the Golden Boot. "But the reason we got so far in that tournament," Tomaszewski insists, "was because of England. Conquering Wembley opened up the world for us. It gave us wings. So what has gone wrong with Polish football since? After another World Cup semi-final in 1982 came three decades of desert. European championships at youth level in 1993 and 2001 did not materialise into anything more substantial. Last year, at Euro 2012, Poland suffered the indignity of elimination in the first round of their own tournament. For Tomaszewski, one of the problems lies in an issue that is currently inflecting the debate over the England team. The MP for the populist right-wing Law and Justice Party has been a vocal critic of naturalised Poles, such as French-born Eugen Polanski, being assimilated into the team. In fact, last year he was suspended by his party for a month for saying he would not support Poland at Euro 2012 because it was "not his team." He is unrepentant. Instead of taking people who have not achieved anything in their national team, isn't it better to give Polish players the opportunity? After what happened last year, it turns out that I was right. We had four players who were really good, and a 12th player in the fans. And we came last in the weakest group. It was shameful. What's the motivation for a young Polish player to play well? Why should I take away the hope that he might play for the national team? Are you taking players from other countries and giving them British citizenship? There follows a protracted digression during which I explain Adnan Januzaj to him, and which is far too uninteresting to repeat here. Yet Tomaszewski remains optimistic. France [Euro 2016] is the next one. If we are able to get some goals at Wembley, that will serve as the basis of a team that can play for the championship in France. The Polish team deserves to be better than it is right now, and it will be. Watches are checked. Almost two hours have passed. I proffer an apology for having occupied so much of his time. Tomaszewski, however, is having none of it. "It's a great honour for me to know that what we achieved 40 years ago is somehow remembered by the English," he says as we part. That is everything for us.