Poland vs Lithuania preview: nothing less than a win will do to start World Cup qualifying

Image via @LaczyNasPilka on Twitter

November’s Nations League disappointment for Poland feels like a long time ago now, a good four months on and with a couple of fresh faces around the squad (although not, I should add, as many as I’d have liked to see).

We had the big headline news that Matty Cash was coming back into the squad after a year away, and the equally big news that Piotr Zieliński would not be available thanks to injury. 

In the time between the squad being announced and this first game of the qualifiers this evening, both Sebastian Walukiewicz and Nicola Zalewski have also had to withdraw through injury, to be replaced by Mateusz Skrzypczak and Dominik Marczuk. 

An interesting point around Zalewski’s withdrawal is that his club coach at Inter, Simone Inzaghi, was reportedly not best pleased that Zalewski was called up by Michał Probierz given he hadn’t featured for a few weeks in Inter’s Serie A or Champions League games due to this injury.

Long overdue however was Skrzypczak’s inclusion. One of the Ekstraklasa’s finest defenders this season, he was called-up but had to pull out through injury back in the autumn. I sincerely hope we see him get some minutes given how heavily Poland are favourites in these first two World Cup qualifiers.

That being said, Lithuania will be no pushover, even if we all expect Poland to win. I’m always hesitant to say this given some of the high profile failings of the Fernando Santos period back in 2023, when on paper you’d say Poland would have no trouble earning a victory and ended up losing or dropping points. 

According to Tomasz Włodarczyk, Michał Probierz will field a strong starting eleven tonight, something along the lines of the below:

We already knew that Łukasz Skorupski is going to start, as confirmed by Probierz yesterday, and that Paweł Dawidowicz will not be fit. For what it’s worth I would hope Dawidowicz will not start too many more games for Poland in the coming months given the errors we’ve seen him commit for the national team in the last 12 months.

Personally speaking, I'd have preferred to see Krzysztof Piątek in the starting line-up, and Jakub Piotrowski's first start since the Euros is not something many would've predicted should it come to pass.

I’m a little hesitant about the likelihood of Kacper Urbański being dropped from starting this game, but given the frankly disastrous season he’s suffering in terms of his individual development it makes a lot of sense. That said, this same time last year we saw how important Nicola Zalewski and Piotr Zieliński were made to feel by Probierz despite being on the fringes at club level, and I’m hoping the same could now be true for Urbański (and Jakub Kiwior for that fact).

In any case, I think healthy optimism should be encouraged ahead of tonight’s match, especially given the strength of the predicted line-up. I’ll be covering the game over on Twitter so make sure to check-in over there later today.

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