Lukasz Fabianski has been casting his mind back to one of his early trips from his new home in south Wales – a picturesque spot on the Gower peninsula with beautiful sea views and stunning scenery – and recalling the moment when a cattle roadblock caused him to fall in love with the country.
“The traffic in Wales!” Fabianski says, laughing. “This was funny, I recorded a little clip and sent it to my parents. You try to go out of the village and you’re stopped by loads of cows and you can’t really do anything. If you beep the horn, they just look at you and don’t move. But that is the beauty of the place.”
East Cliff in Southgate is a world away from life in London, where Fabianski spent the previous seven years during a stop-start career with Arsenal, and a throwback to the days when he was growing up in Slubice, a border town in western Poland. “It kind of reminds me of my childhood,” Fabianski says. “There’s a lot of wildlife around, we had a river not a sea [in Slubice], but a lot of farms, very rural.”
Whether riding his mountain bike along the Welsh coastline to unwind or keeping goal for a club that has already achieved its highest ever Premier League points total, Fabianski could not be happier at Swansea and will return to Arsenal on Monday night without any trace of regret about the decision he made last season, when he told Arsène Wenger he would not be signing a new contract.
The killer statistic is that he has played more Premier League games for Swansea this season than he did in his entire Arsenal career. “I always had in my mind that whatever decision I will make it will be based on playing football regularly, week in and week out,” Fabianski says. “When I came to Swansea, no one said to me: ‘Whatever happens you’re going to be No1.’ But I felt I would at least have the chance to start or be given an opportunity and then it would be up to me to take it.”
Fabianski has done that and more. “Truly fantastic,” is how Garry Monk, Swansea’s manager, sums up Fabianski’s impact this season. He has kept 12 Premier League clean sheets, looks likely to win Swansea’s player of the year award and has taken over from Wojciech Szczesny, the man who stood in his path for so long at Arsenal, as Poland’s No1 goalkeeper. “I’m quite happy with the way things are going,” Fabianski says, with typical understatement.
A modest, affable man, Fabianski would rather play things down than talk them up, which is why the 30-year-old is not getting sentimental about going back to the Emirates Stadium for the first time. Fabianski has lots of affection for Arsenal and is looking forward to seeing some familiar faces, in particular his good friends Per Mertesacker and Tomas Rosicky, but he is not quite sure how the home supporters will receive him. “I don’t know … because I was part of the Cup they won last year, maybe I will get an OK reception.”
That FA Cup final appearance against Hull City, after Fabianski had saved two spot-kicks in the penalty shoot out victory over Wigan in the semi-final, was some way to sign off at Arsenal. Yet there were some tough times to endure along the way, whether sitting on the sidelines or being subjected to harsh criticism, including that cruel “Flappyhandski” moniker, which could not feel more out of place now. Monk signed Fabianski because he wanted a goalkeeper who could “command the box” and the Swansea manager says that he “can’t really remember him dropping a cross” this season.
Older and wiser, Fabianski feels those difficult experiences earlier in his career helped to shape him. “When there is a mistake in the game, or even half a mistake, I think I’m quite smart enough to know that I could have, and should have, done better in the situation,” he says. “The media aspect of it just adds a bit more oil to the fire. But me as a person, I kind of know. You make mistakes to learn from them. I think almost every goalkeeper goes through that period, the ones that do their homework will improve and come back stronger.”
With Szczesny enduring a difficult season at Arsenal and David Ospina taking over as No1, it is tempting to wonder if Fabianski could have staked a claim to be first-choice if he had chosen to hang around. “I don’t want to look at it that way because you can’t look at football wondering what could have happened if you made a different decision,” Fabianski says. “I’m just very happy with the decision I made and with how things have gone so far.”
Swansea felt like a good fit from the start but it was only when Fabianski watched Jack to a King, the documentary that tells the remarkable story of the Welsh club’s 10-year journey from the brink of extinction to promotion to the Premier League, that he realised he had joined somewhere special.
“When I had a first meeting with the chairman [Huw Jenkins], he asked if I wanted to ask him something more about Swansea, and I said: ‘No, I’m OK, I know you like to play nice football.’ But then when I watched the movie, I felt really embarrassed. I looked at it like: ‘Wow, there is much more to this club than nice football.’
“The story is beautiful, what this club has been through and how they’ve achieved the moment they’re in now, I think it’s very impressive. All the people are still around the club and have been with it through thick and thin. It’s an amazing story and I think every new player who wears a Swansea shirt should watch the movie to understand what is behind the club and see how much it means to the community. This movie has really opened my eyes.”
Fabianski praises Ashley Williams, Swansea’s captain, for being such a big help on and off the pitch and speaks highly of Monk, whose first full season as a manager has been a spectacular success. “I like the discipline that he has put into the players, the standards that he expects every single day, even when you walk into the training ground you see little pictures with phrases and sentences that, for example, you can just ask yourself if you have done enough today to improve yourself. You can’t really have an easy day during training, he won’t stand for that. But I really enjoy working hard so that fits with me.”
While reluctant to blow his own trumpet when it comes to football, Fabianski drops his guard a little when the conversation turns to basketball and goes as far as to say that he is “not bad” at the game he used to spend hours playing in the back garden with Bartek, his older brother.
There is a YouTube clip of Fabianski playing basketball with a couple of the Brooklyn Nets stars at the O2 Arena at the start of last year, when he was still an Arsenal player, and that impressive display had not escaped the attention of the celebrities he joined up with last summer to take part in a charity game hosted by Marcin Gortat, the Pole who plays for Washington Wizards in the NBA. Fabianski describes Gortat as a “legend” in Poland and admits to being a little star-struck when he received a text inviting him to play in the basketball match in Krakow.
“I have to say it was a really cool experience. The sports hall, I think it holds 15 to 20,000 and it was a sell-out crowd. I was on the team with Marcin, there were football players, another basketball player from the Polish national team, then the other people were celebrities; musicians, movie stars.
“Once I’d got into the place, I’d never met any of the musicians or celebrities before, but some of them are crazy about basketball and I think they have seen clips from me shooting with Brooklyn Nets. They said: ‘Wow, man, you’re sick!’ So I knew straight away they were going to be expecting me to be smashing it, so the pressure was on. I didn’t really shoot a lot, I think I took four shots, made three of them, two three-pointers, so I was just trying to keep it cool.”
Gortat has a reputation for being a little eccentric. He has been pictured holding a pig on a lead as well as arriving at a basketball camp in an armoured car. “He has done so many things,” Fabianski says, smiling.
“When we went to the basketball charity event, once we got to the arena he had some army cars with massive guns on, he said: ‘OK, guys, everyone sits on top of the car and once the music starts we’re just going to drive into the arena.’ And we did!”
Back in south Wales, Fabianski prefers to keep a lower profile, losing himself in the countryside on two wheels while waiting for those cows to come home.
“There are beautiful places to ride around,” he says. “So when I have time and nice weather, I think it would be stupid to not make the most of it.”
