This is about more than quarter-finals

Frantisek Smuda, the Poland coach, stares out from the front cover of the current Polish version of Newsweek, a look of impressive resolution on his face.

He is wearing neither the grey suit nor the red tracksuit top he usually sports. Rather he is wearing the blue-grey uniform of the inter-war Polish army, two fingers raised to the brim of his cap in salute — a homage to Josef Pilsudski, the statesman and army commander who halted the Bolshevik advance in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 — the so-called Miracle of the Wistula — and so preserved Poland’s independence until the Nazi invasion in 1939.

Tonight’s game between Poland Russia isn’t just about qualification for the quarter-finals of the Euros; it’s about historical pride and about Poland asserting itself as a nation in its own right, rather than just a flat fertile extended borderland between two historically aggressive military powers: Germany to the west and Russia to the east. As Lech Walesa said, for centuries Poland’s mindset has been one of resistance, fighting on both flanks to preserve its independence, and then opposing Communist rule when it was effectively a satellite state of the USSR.