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Euro Heartbreak: We Spent the Night Talking Brexit with Polish Football Fans

"If you lived in Poland for ten years, would you like to be told to go back to your country?"

Getting involved at the White Eagle Club in Balham. All photos Luke Montgomery

Set back from Balham High Road in South London, with an army recruitment centre and a church within spitting distance, the White Eagle Club is not the kind of money-soaked, flat-whites and Wi-Fi type joint that feels increasingly out-of-step with the rest of the country.

Instead, the club, with its restaurant, large assembly hall and bars, is a home away from home for this area's Polish community – a community that feels unsettled following last week's EU referendum vote and the spike in racially-motivated incidents that has followed. Last weekend, racist graffiti was daubed on the Polish cultural centre building in Hammersmith, West London. A few hours after the Brexit vote was announced, laminated cards saying, "Leave the EU. No more Polish vermin", were distributed in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. 331 hate crime incidents have been reported to the police site True Vision since last Thursday. The weekly average is 63.

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In the face of this, more than 300 Poles – and the odd non-Pole – came together last night to watch their national football team try and reach the semi-final of an international tournament for the first time since 1982. Standing in their way were the Portuguese and their bronzed God of a hair gel salesman, Cristiano Ronaldo. On the conversational agenda: Brexit and the number of tears Ronaldo would cry following his defeat at the hands of the mighty men of Eastern Europe.

Michael, who's lived in Britain for 15 years

Standing on the steps outside the front of the club, wrapped in a Poland flag, Michael told me that he came to Britain 15 years ago looking for work and looking for an adventure. For 12 years, he has worked in a pub, which he refers to as his "comfort zone". This is a place he intends to leave soon: he and his girlfriend are planning to travel across Asia, after which they are not sure whether they will return. "I believe Britain might be a racist place now", he said. "I have Polish friends who have children who were born here. They've grown up here and now they are being told at school that it's not their country. Anyone would find that difficult".

Having been in Britain for longer than five years, Michael could have applied for a British passport, which would have given him the right to vote in the EU referendum. But with the freedom to move and work guaranteed by the EU, he never thought he would need to. Of the 30 or so Polish people I spoke to last night, none voted in the referendum because none had British passports. Almost all of them said they paid tax in the UK and most of them had been here for longer than five years, but none of them were British citizens and none of them had been able to vote.

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Out in the club's garden, I got chatting to Dominik as he had a smoke. As we chatted his girlfriend Michalina came outside to have a go at him for stealing fags and going AWOL.

Dominik and Michalina

They told me that a day after the referendum, they were chatting in Polish on a bus in central London when an elderly woman asked them why they couldn't speak English to each other. The woman kept on insulting them but the Poles refused to retaliate. "She was being racist to us, but I've got manners, I wasn't rude to her", says Dominik, who came to the UK when he was 11 and now works as a chef at Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Having gone to school and college in Britain, he points out that, "When somebody tells me to go back to my country, I'm kind of confused… I would be lost in Poland. The last time I was there was nine years ago".

Dominick, Michalina, Justyna, who works in a dental practice, and a whole bunch of other people in their early twenties, seem to be truly both British and Polish. Their accents are a hybrid of London and Poland, they are here because their parents were able to come to Britain after Poland joined the EU in 2004 and they have grown up in the schools of suburban south London. They riff on stereotypes: Polish boyfriends are the most jealous; a lighter has disappeared from the table and someone makes a joke about how at Polish clubs, you have to keep a close eye on your stuff.

Over the course of the evening, more than one person asks me a version of this question: "If you lived in Poland for ten years, would you like to be told to go back to your country?"

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Inside the club's large hall, hundreds of fold-up chairs are lined up in front of an enormous projection of the game, being broadcast by Polsat, with commentary in Polish. A table on one side serves food. I eat three Polish sausages, some potatoes and coleslaw. With the Tyskie already flowing, everyone stands to sing the national anthem, phones filling the air to record the moment. When Robert Lewandowski puts Poland 1-0 up two minutes into the game, the place erupts. At the front, rows of stacked blokes stamp their feet and as the room joins them, it feels like the walls might cave in. Every time Ronaldo appears on screen, he's jeered.

Narmin and Phillip

Some people tell me they are scared because of the Brexit vote. Everyone tells me that the White Eagle Club is a special place, a place to come together, have fun and feel safe in. "This place is very important", said Narmin, the Indian girlfriend of Polish engineer called Phillip. "It they went out to a pub, they might be afraid".

Not everyone was horrified at the result, but if anyone at the club actually supported Brexit, they weren't telling me. Gregor, a web designer who splits his time between southern Poland and London, told me that some Polish people probably would be happy with the vote because it meant "less competition for the people here already. The ones that got on the boat will be happy it's not going to be more crowded". He added that he'd come across "some Poles working on building sites complaining that Romanians were taking over their jobs because they can do it for a pound less an hour". Global capitalism is a vicious beast.

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As the game ran into extra-time then penalties, things got both edgier and more jubilant. With Jakub Blaszczykowski's missed penalty leading to a victory for Portugal, the screen flashed from the game to the words of a sad, old song that precedes Poland's independence. People sang and called out thanks to their team. Goalkeeper Łukasz Fabianski – once nicknamed "Flappy Handski" by Arsenal fans because he couldn't catch a ball – had his name chanted. "They're our heroes", said Anna, a lawyer who thinks that, post-Brexit, she will now return to Poland. "I feel heartbroken".

The club spills out onto the street. Two security guards survey the scene, joking and chatting with punters. One of them is from Portugal and is in a good mood. The other is from London. "A lot of people feel they aren't wanted anymore", he says. "I'm black and I've dealt with racism all my life, so I know how they feel".

I meet another Łukasz. I ask him if he feels hopeful about the future, hopeful that things will get better. "There's good people and bad people", he says. "And we hope the good people will win".

@oscarrickettnow / lukemontgomeryphoto.com

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