How Kasper Schmeichel, loans and a freak incident helped Jakub Stolarczyk achieve 10-year dream
While it may feel like Jakub Stolarczyk has emerged from nowhere to become Leicester City’s current starting goalkeeper, the journey to his Premier League debut for the club was a decade in the making.
With Mads Hermansen injured and Danny Ward taken out of the firing line, Stolarczyk started at Liverpool on Boxing Day, a week after his 24th birthday. Ten years earlier, as a 14-year-old, he had caught City’s eye in a test match in his native Poland.
The club did not forget him and once he was able to officially sign a contract aged 16, he said goodbye to his family and moved to England with the dream of starting Premier League matches. It’s a dream he’s now achieving.
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There’s been a lot of work to get to this point: plenty of youth team matches, three loan spells and one serious injury. So was he nervous when he stepped out at Anfield?
“I wasn’t,” Stolarczyk says. “I think it’s because I’ve improved a lot mentally over the past couple of years. I’ve worked so hard for this moment, through my life and career that I felt ready for it.”
Mentoring from senior goalkeepers and those loan spells have been most significant in preparing Stolarczyk. At City, young keepers train alongside their first-team colleagues, and so Stolarczyk spent plenty of time learning from one of the club’s greatest in Kasper Schmeichel.
Stolarczyk counts the Dane as a mentor and their early career paths are remarkably similar. Before his Premier League debut with Manchester City, Schmeichel went out on loan three times, once to Scotland and twice to EFL clubs, representing Falkirk, Darlington and Bury. Before he was promoted to the first team under Enzo Maresca last season, Stolarczyk had taken the same route, spending time with Dunfermline, Fleetwood and Hartlepool.
“I think every keeper has a different story to tell,” Stolarczyk says. “You can look at Kasper and the amount of loans he had to go through. Keepers are different. You can’t use one as an example.
“I think every single senior keeper I’ve had a chance to work or train with, every single one has said: ‘Always be open to going out on loan.’ Maybe at first I didn’t understand it. But after a few weeks, especially at Dunfermline, I straightaway realised what they were talking about.
“They (the loans) were all massive. Fleetwood, even though I didn’t play it was still a loan that helped me understand everything a lot more around senior football.
“At Hartlepool when I did play and we went down (the club were relegated to the National League), I still felt gutted. I didn’t even look at it like I was going back to Leicester.
“Every single loan and then stepping up to the first team last year, just helped me mentally to prepare for the last week. I don’t regret any decision or loan I’ve made.”
Stolarczyk earned a place as Hermansen’s deputy last season and played nine matches in all competitions, keeping six clean sheets. He may have been back-up to the Dane, and therefore made his Premier League debut a couple of games earlier, had he not broken his leg in the second week of pre-season training in the summer. Still, that time out also helped him to prepare for the biggest stage.
“It was an accidental and freak incident,” he says. “No-one when it happened thought I’d broken my leg. I felt it was going to be bad. I hoped it wasn’t.
“It was such a blow. It took me one week to get my head around it. Having my friends and family around after the operation, it helped me.
“But I decided to take it on the chin and use my rehab to be prepared for what’s happened this week. If there’s going to be a chance, I was determined to take it. If I hadn’t done the rehab the way I did, I wouldn’t have made my debut.”
After five months out, Stolarczyk played just one Under-21s match for City before he was included in the line-up to face the Premier League leaders. Then it was the reigning champions, and now it’s a trip to another big venue in Villa Park, where his opposite number Emi Martinez is a World Cup winner. A first Premier League win would be most welcome.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he says. “I’m excited for making my dreams come true, to improve, be better and help my team as much as I can so that we can stay up and play those games every week next season.”
