you mean current football or history?
Poland finished third also in 1974 World Cup (in Germany) beating Brazil 1-0 in the 3rd place match, Grzegorz Lato scored the only goal of the match and became best scorer of the tournament with 7 goals, from 1978 until 2002 (Ronaldo 8 goals), the best scorer of the World Cup had always 6 goals or less. In the first round they won vs. Argentina (3-2), Haiti (7-0) and Italy (2-1). Then vs. Sweden (1-0) and Yugoslavia (2-1), lost to Germany (0-1) and beat Brazil. Our goalkeeper, Jan Tomaszewski, saved 2 penalty shots (vs. Sweden and Germany), other Polish star was the midfielder Kazimierz Deyna.
We played for the first time in World Cup in 1938, with play-off system - we went home after the first round defeat against Brazil (4-4 normal time, 5-6 after extra time), Poland's Ernest Wilimowski was the first ever player who scored 4 goals in a WC match and it took 56 years till another player (Russian Oleg Salenko in 1994 vs. Cameroon) scored that many.
Wilimowski, who was Silesian, during the WWII decided to play for Germany and was one of their best players, but in Poland was labelled a "traitor" and almost wiped out from all sports history books.
We had waited till 1974 for another WC appearance, in 1972-73 qualification Poland eliminated, among others, England (winning 2-0 at home, and drawing 1-1 away, that's when the term "winning draw/tie" entered for good our sports language).
In 1978 we had arguably the best team in our history, but the WC in Argentina was a disaster, we finished only 5-6, and the disappoinment was huge.
In 1982 we started badly, draws with Italy and Cameroon, then they beat Peru (5-1) and in the second round beat Belgium (3-0, hat-trick by Zbigniew Boniek) then another 'winning draw" 0-0 vs. Soviet Union, when Poland clearly tried to avoid playing and Włodzimierz Smolarek (father of Ebi Smolarek, current national player) became famous, because he was running with the ball to the corner (on the Russian side) and could spend long minutes by the corner flag, not allowing the Russians to do anything, neither to take the ball away from him nor to kick it out. The Big Brother got pissed, and of course the game was nothing nice but for Poland (during the martial law, with imminent danger of Russian intervention) it was a very sweat match.
in the semifinal vs. Italy, we played without Boniek (got 2 yellow cards in previous matches) and we lost 0-2, beating France 3-2 in the 3rd place match
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