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minute of a six-minute exhibition game. At that time,
there weren’t even any codified rules, not in Polish at
least, but again it would be a Lviv citizen, Kazimierz
Hemerling, who published this first translation in
1904. The first referee in the Polish game, Stanisław
Polakiewicz, was also a local, recognised as an official
in 1911 when the Polish Football Federation was
founded – in Lviv.
Here, too, Poland’s first professional football club,
Czarni Lwów, was set up in 1903. It later played in
the first stadium designed to host Polish football. Its
owner, the Pogon Lwow club, dominated the league
in the 1920s. As a boy, Kazimierz Górski, Poland’s
greatest ever national team coach and hero of the
international triumphs of the early 1970s, would have
watched his local Lviv teams between the wars, later
going on to play for them. During this time, four teams
from Lviv played in Poland’s first league, including
legendary Jewish sports club Hasmonea.
And it wasn’t only football. Lviv was the location
for Poland’s first ice-hockey match in 1905, its first
ski-jumping event two years later, its first basketball
LVIV FOOTBALL
FEATURE
JUNE-JULY 2012
WIZZ MAGAZINE
93
game and its first athletics meet. It even staged
Poland’s first rugby match, in 1922, and is the
birthplace of many a chess master.
Gradually, Krakow took over as the regional
powerbase for Polish football and other sports, before
Lviv was subsumed into the Soviet Union.
Yet even in the Soviet era, Lviv’s achievements on
the football field were notable. From their humble
beginnings, taking their green-and-white colours from
the Lvivsilmash crest, Karpaty Lviv may have been
playing lower-league football, but they still enjoyed a
memorable run in the Soviet Cup in 1969.
“Lviv was where Poland’s first
ice-hockey match took place
and first basketball game.”
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