48 Hours in Czestochowa: Warta, Lublin and Poland's Deepest Roster Test

GKS Katowice had just been promoted, and they swept Aluron CMC Warta Zawiercie 3-0 on home soil. I reopened the Warta team sheet three times after that match: Miguel Tavares at setter, Kamil Rychlicki and Bartlomiej Boladz at opposite, Tomasz Fornal, Bartosz Kwolek and Aaron Russell on the outside, Jakub Kochanowski and Mateusz Bieniek in the middle, Jakub Popiwczak at libero. A roster good enough to play a Champions League final, beaten in straight sets by a newcomer to PlusLiga. Four days later, Warta beat ZAKSA Kedzierzyn-Kozle 3-1 at home. This Sunday they travel to Czestochowa for the Polish Super Cup against BOGDANKA LUK Lublin, the league leaders after straight-set wins over ZAKSA and Energa Trefl Gdansk. I still make Warta favourites. And the reason sits somewhere other than where the crowd is pointing. Czestochowa hosts the first two trophies of the Polish volleyball season this weekend. Saturday brings the women's Super Cup between PGE Budowlani Lodz — national champions and Polish Cup winners — and DevelopRes Rzeszow, the defending Super Cup holders. It is a remake of last season's TAURON Liga final, which needed a fifth-match decider. DevelopRes sit unbeaten at 3-0 with Julita Piasecka, Marrit Jasper, Laura Jansen and Taylor Mims. Budowlani are fifth at 2-1, with Maja Storck, Romania captain Rodica Buterez, Slovenian middle Sasa Planinsec and Katarzyna Wenerska running the offence. Sunday belongs to the men: BOGDANKA LUK Lublin, the trophy holders, against Warta, the national champions. Lublin bring Wilfredo Leon, Bulgarian middle Aleks Grozdanov, Kewin Sasak, Marcin Komenda and the new Japanese pair Ran Takahashi and Tomohiro Ogawa. Beyond Poland, world volleyball runs on several fronts this week. In Japan, Denso Airybees Koriyama host Saga Hisamitsu Springs at Horaiya Bonds Arena across Friday and Saturday; both sit at 2-0. Denso won both away games against Saitama Ageo Medics, 3-0 and 3-2, through opposite Myat Yee Mon, Colombian outside hitter Amanda Coneo and Brazilian setter Roberta Ratzke. Saga beat Aleeza Aichi in Thailand 3-1 and 3-2, with Marta Levinska leading. Last season Saga won all four meetings with Denso, though the most recent went to five sets. The Japanese men's league enters its second weekend with Tokyo Great Bears visiting the Entrio to face Wolfdogs Nagoya. Great Bears feature Bartosz Kurek, Jan Kozamernik, Masahiro Yanagida and Luciano Vicentin. Nagoya finished fourth last season and won the Emperor's Cup, with Kento Miyaura, Hideomi Fukatsu, Norbert Huber, Jenia Grebennikov, Anton Brehme and Donovan Dzavoronok. Six meetings last season, split three to three. In Italy, Itas Trentino Trento open the second leg of the SuperLega against Cisterna Volley. Trentino swept Valsa Group Modena 3-0 away, with 23 points from Theo Faure. Cisterna shocked Allianz Milan 3-0 at home to climb to the top of the table, powered by 35-year-old Filippo Lanza and 19-year-old Noa Duflos-Rossi. Last season Trentino shut out Cisterna twice. A Super Cup does not measure form. It measures how ready a system is. Warta walk into the Lublin match as winners of five of seven PlusLiga meetings last season, including three in the best-of-five championship series. Seven matches is a sample large enough to describe a balance of power; one loss to Katowice is not. And the way Warta lost is the part worth reading: a roster of national-team players and high-grade imports entered the opening round without rhythm in serve reception. When Tavares has no feel for Fornal and Kwolek, every transition slows by half a beat, and half a beat is enough for a promoted side to put the block in the right place. Based on my experience watching PlusLiga matches last season, I keep one rule: the team that keeps its reception core wins cup matches. Warta kept Fornal, Kwolek and Popiwczak — the three men responsible for nearly all of the ball reception. Lublin changed exactly that department with two Japanese names. The transfer summer is a script nobody could write, because the filmmakers are too poor at their job — yet everyone keeps forgetting that the most important signing is the one you do not have to make. One thing must be said plainly: GKS Katowice beating Warta is no fairytale. Small PlusLiga clubs live on loans with purchase obligations, raising semi-finished players and selling them to the giants. A promoted side can win a single match because their roster was assembled from people who played together all summer, while the big club waits for imports to return from national-team windows. The opening round of PlusLiga is therefore the most unfair round of the year, and the round that produces the most misunderstood upsets. The same logic runs in reverse at Lublin. The straight-set wins over ZAKSA and Trefl Gdansk matter less than the reason behind them: Ran Takahashi and Tomohiro Ogawa did not come to Poland to score. They came to stabilise serve reception and cover the back court — the two things that decide a single-match cup tie. In volleyball, the set is the reason the story gets told; the scorer is only the name signed at the bottom of the page. On the women's side, last season's head-to-head says Budowlani won five of eight against DevelopRes, including one regular-season game, one Polish Cup semi-final and three finals. This season DevelopRes are 3-0 and Budowlani 2-1. The difference is structural: DevelopRes run on an import core that has been meshed since last year, while Budowlani depend on Wenerska distributing to Storck, Buterez and Planinsec — a system that needs touches before it clicks. A Super Cup is the worst possible match in which to test a system that needs reps. In Japan, Denso and Saga arrive with different stories. Saga won all four meetings last season, but the last one went five sets, a sign the gap is narrowing. Denso now have Ratzke conducting, with Coneo and Myat Yee Mon as attacking anchors — a different team from the one that lost four times. With both at 2-0 going into the double header at Horaiya Bonds Arena, last season's sample of four has stopped being a reference point. Nagoya and Tokyo, six meetings split 3-3 last season, offer the most honest number in this piece: two rosters built specifically to beat each other. Kurek and Yanagida on one side, Miyaura and Dzavoronok on the other, Grebennikov and Fukatsu dividing the defensive axis. The double header at the Entrio will not tell us who wins the title; it will tell us who found their rhythm first. In Italy, Faure's 23 points against Modena show Trentino have already chosen their terminal option. Cisterna are the opposite: a team living on Lanza's experience and Duflos-Rossi's nerve, fresh from a straight-set win over Milan that lifted them to the top. Trentino shut out Cisterna twice last season. And in Poland, the TAURON Liga organisers moved the round-11 fixture between Projekt Warsaw and Warta to next Wednesday, because Warta also play the Club World Championship in December 2026. The calendar is now a bigger variable than form. Where can I be wrong? Wrong in turning one defeat into a hypothesis. If Warta lose in straight sets to Lublin on Sunday, the Katowice result stops being an outlier — it becomes the rule, and everything above collapses. A single-match cup tie is the worst sample for judging anything, even when I use it to judge others. Wrong because I carry an obvious bias toward teams with a settled setter. I prefer systems to individuals, and that makes me undervalue teams that win on one player carrying the night. Budowlani beat DevelopRes five times in eight last season exactly that way. If Storck finds her rhythm early and Buterez plays well as the second option, my whole framework about systems needing reps is refuted by the result itself. And wrong because I have not said enough about Warta's weakness: serve reception under heavy spin. Every opponent has seen it since last season. My calls for the weekend: DevelopRes beat Budowlani 3-1; Warta beat Lublin 3-2; Trentino shut out Cisterna; Nagoya and Tokyo split the double header; Denso take at least one of two from Saga. People call me a hot-take writer; I call it a view the majority has not yet named. If Warta lose in straight sets again on Sunday, I will be the first to rewrite this piece. But I will keep the Katowice passage exactly as it stands, because a promoted club beating the national champions is a story Polish volleyball needs told more often, and stories like that get buried while everyone argues about which star got bought. When the whole stand argues about a metric, I print the stat sheet and draw a heart on it.