- The list of tasks to be completed by the goalkeeper includes four items
- Gikiewicz realized two of them, although not everything depended on him
- However, the Pole can talk about great success this season. Union said goodbye to him like a hero
The first task was to keep an account clean eight times in the season ended Saturday. He managed to do this in the last match against Fortuna Duesseldorf (3: 0). Earlier he could show off without a loss to SC Freiburg, Hertha Berlin, Borussia Moenchengladbach, 1. FC Koeln, FC Augsburg, Werder Bremen and SC Paderborn.
The Pole also planned to save two penalty kicks throughout the competition. He did it once: in Bundesliga’s 4th round he stopped Davy Klaassen from Werder Bremen. He had a chance to keep a clean elevation before, but in the 5th minute Klaassen beat him. Later, Gikiewicz has not managed to stop Marco Reus and … Robert Lewandowski yet.
The Polish goalkeeper hoped that he would be called up to the national team (as you can assume from the Twitter entry it was about Euro 2020). Here, the Covid-19 pandemic stood in the way and the tournament was postponed to the next year. Who knows if coach Jerzy Brzęczek would otherwise give him a chance to join the team this season …
The last task was to stay with the Union in the Bundesliga and this art was successful. As Gikiewicz claimed, this success can easily be compared with the German championship. Before the season, the Polish team was rather condemned to a dramatic struggle for livelihood, and few believed that they would succeed in this art.
In total, Rafał Gikiewicz played 6780 minutes in Union colors, during which he never lost the support of local fans. The most beautiful moment showing the fans’ attachment to the Polish goalkeeper was the behavior of the 80-year-old fan after information about the inevitable departure of the player. The Benjamin senior sympathizer waited a few hours to thank him with tears in his eyes for representing Union colors.
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