Tag Archives: Russia

Stuck in Soccer Limbo, in the Shadow of the World Cup

“An odd thing happened in December when soccer fans in Crimea, the disputed Black Sea peninsula annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, began trying to buy tickets to the World Cup. Some ticket seekers trying to make purchases through FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, encountered error messages on their computers. The problem, the president of Crimea’s soccer federation told reporters, was that FIFA still recognized Crimea as part of Ukraine. Fans on the peninsula feared that World Cup tickets had joined cellphones and credit cards on a list of imported items banned by international sanctions.” NY Times

Russia stun Spain with penalty shootout win to reach quarter finals, Iago Aspas and Koke miss from the spot

“It started as one of Spain’s typical grand passing rondos, it grew over 90 minutes and then 120 into one of the biggest mountains of possession amassed since World Cup records began, and by the end it felt like this great generation of players had run out of fresh ideas. This was the remnants of the great world champions of 2010 passing the ball 1,114 times in a match but unable to score more goals than a Russia team who refused to be passed to death in the way that so many opponents have in the past. By the end Andres Iniesta looked close to tears, Gerard Pique and Sergio Ramos had been beaten again and the masterplan that had seen Spain dominate the first decade of the century looked more than a little tired.” Telegraph

Tiki-taxi for Spain as style becomes vice against Russia’s rearguard
“Tiki-taxi for Spain. On a slow-burn, increasingly wild afternoon at the Luzhniki Stadium the outstanding team of the age produced a quietly extraordinary performance, exiting the World Cup with surely the most statistically dominant losing game ever mustered up. At the end Spain’s players sat drained in the centre circle, ranged like red pegs in the same static formation that had seen them pass and move and pass and pass their way through the previous 120 minutes.” Guardian

World Cup 2018: Russian city Samara, football and the space race

“Where the Sputnik stadium used to stand there is a housing block, Orbita’s pitch is now wasteland and the old Voskhod ground, named after a space rocket, is crumbling into ruin. These are just some of the old football arenas in Samara, the Russian World Cup host city that is most famous for helping drive the Soviet Union’s space race with the United States. About 1,000km south east of Moscow on the Volga river, Samara has so far hosted three World Cup matches, including Uruguay’s win over Russia on Monday.” BBC

Spain, Portugal Survive Simultaneous Madness; Uruguay Roughs Up Russia at World Cup

“Day 12 of World Cup 2018 is done, and the drama reached a peak level. In Group B, favorites Spain and Portugal couldn’t manage three points against their game foes (Spain 2, Morocco 2 and Portugal 1, Iran 1) but still advanced to the knockout rounds, even though Iran made it heartbreakingly close late against the Portuguese. Earlier in the day in Group A, things were considerably less dramatic, as Uruguay beat Russia 3-0 to win the group and leave the Russians in a we’ll-take-it second-place spot.” SI

In St. Petersburg, Managing Sleep and Soccer

“ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — This is one of the world’s great cities, a magical mix of colors and canals that sparkle, especially in June, when the sun does not dip behind the Baltic Sea until around midnight. Visitors and residents wander the streets and embankments through the small hours of what is night during the rest of the year but these days is just a brief dawn. A favorite, middle-of-the-night activity is strolling to the harbor, where thousands pack the banks of the Neva River to watch the bridges rise so boats can enter. The nearly uninterrupted light this far north acts as a kind of human power plant, continuously fueling millions of bodies but preventing them from getting the signals they need to begin the daily wind down that eventually leads to sleep.” NY Times

Russia Is Not This Good — Right?

“Before the 2018 World Cup kicked off last week at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, much had been written about why Russia was so bad at soccer. A convincing 5-0 opening match win over Saudi Arabia — Russia’s first win at the tournament since 2002 also matched its largest margin of victory at a World Cup — surely helped to allay some of those criticisms. But there was still no looking past the fact that the host nation ranked 70th in the FIFA world rankings and was looked at by bookmakers as a relative long shot to win the whole thing.” FiveThirtyEight

Moscow – Between darkness and light

“MANUEL VETH uncovers the storied history a football city that never sleeps, and of the Russian capital’s big clubs, from the Soviet era to the days of wealthy Oligarchs. Moscow has always been a city of progress. The pace at which it has developed since the collapse of communism has been breathless. In a sprawling city, there exists a patchwork of classical Tsarist architecture mixed with Stalinist skyscrapers, Khrushchev’s brutalism and post-communist extravagance. All of this is visible from the viewing platform on the Sparrow Hills. This viewpoint, located next to the Moscow State University, one of the Seven Sisters, which are seven skyscrapers built by Stalin in a mix of Russian baroque and gothic styles. From Sparrow Hill one can see the remaining six of the Seven Sisters, the Moskva river that gives Moscow its name, the towers of New Moscow’s financial district, and most importantly for football fans, the gigantic Luzhniki Stadium.” Football Pink

The World Cup Is Fun. Except for the Russians Being Tortured.

A banner read “World Torture Championship?” at a protest in Moscow in advance of the World Cup.
“MOSCOW — Have you enjoyed the first week of the 2018 World Cup? Good. Some of the games have certainly been very exciting! Now read the words of Dmitry Pchelintsev as they appeared in MediaZona, a small independent online publication focused on police brutality and the prison system in Russia: ‘The man in surgical gloves cranked the DC generator with wires attached to my toes. The calves of my legs started contracting violently, I was paralyzed with pain. They threw me on the floor, pulled my underpants down and tried to attach the wires to my genitals. I clenched my teeth so hard that my mouth was full of blood and shards of broken teeth.’ Mr. Pchelintsev, a 26-year-old anti-fascist activist from the industrial town of Penza, told his lawyer about this in February — and then, he has said, he was tortured again to make him disown his statement.” NY Times

Russia Continues to Surprise, While Japan, Senegal Earn Landmark World Cup Wins

“Day 6 of World Cup 2018 is done, headlined by Russia’s 3-1 thrashing of Egypt, which gives the host nation six points and brings it to the cusp of a place in the knockout stage. The headliner was preceded by a pair of notable victories: Japan’s historic 2-1 win over Colombia (for reasons explained below), and Senegal’s 2-1 win over Poland, which was the first victory by an African team in the tournament. Every nation has now played at least once in Russia, where there has yet to be a scoreless draw, though there have been five own goals and a number of VAR interventions.” SI

Slavery, Racism and Homophobia – The Future of the World Cup

“The 10th of December 2010 won’t seem like a particularly important date to most football fans, but it was the day when FIFA announced the hosts for the next two World Cups. Russia and Qatar were awarded footballs showpiece event which at the time was controversial.” PogMoGoal

How Russia’s counter-attacking showed pointlessness of possession without purpose

“There will not be many occasions when Saudi Arabia’s players have enjoyed 62 per cent of the possession on the home turf of a European opponent and yet for much of the first half, as the world watched Russia kick-off its own tournament, the team in green had the ball. This is the way that so many modern managers aspire to play, and when they watch the best teams in the world it is easy to see why. Possession football is well established as the game’s purest form – the right way to win and perhaps even the right way to lose.” Telegraph

The Goal That Sealed Russia’s Latest Victory on the World Stage
“Watching the first game of the World Cup, an entirely lopsided affair between Russia and Saudi Arabia, burdened with the knowledge that the U.S. national team had not qualified for the tournament, I couldn’t help thinking that this was a sports-world reiteration of our country’s broader failures on the international stage. As was recently revealed in a detailed report from The Ringer, America’s absence was the product of factors that, these days, ring familiar: blithe incompetence (especially in the former manager Jürgen Klinsmann’s seeming inability to manage the personalities on his team) and an institution-wide focus on everything but the common good.” New Yorker

Pomp, absurdity and goals galore get Russia’s show off to a delirious start
“Take that! On opening night in Moscow the World Cup turned a full-flush red, setting off like a train inside a periodically delirious Luzhniki Stadium. Every tournament needs a fully functioning host nation. The fear had been that an ageing, stagnant Russia team might bleed a little life from the World Cup right at the start. In the event it all went off like a dream. There was the required grimly magisterial speech from your host for the night, Mr Vladimir Putin. A commendably short opening ceremony played out like a homespun Saturday teatime TV oddity.” Guardian

Russia 2018 World Cup: the complete guide to all the stadiums

“All you need to know about the 12 venues for World Cup 2018, including history lessons and the hitches along the way.” Guardian

Fifa’s Gianni Infantino hits rocky ground on 2018 World Cup eve

“The World Cup in Russia has sailed into view with a new Fifa captain at the helm, two and a half years since Sepp Blatter’s presidency crashed on the rocks of corruption and ethics breaches. Gianni Infantino seemed a callow, unlikely president when he was elevated to succeed the banned Blatter in February 2016 as, his tie slightly askew, he tapped his heart in wonderment at winning the vote of the Fifa congress.” Guardian

World Cup favourites choosing defensive-minded midfielders over deep-lying playmakers

“The most fascinating tactical development over the past few World Cups has been the increased popularity of the deep playmaker. Having nearly become extinct around the turn of the century, it’s notable that recent World Cup winners have generally depended upon a great creative influence from deep.” ESPN – Michael Cox (Video)

The Network: Russia’s Odd, Brutal, and Maybe Invented Pre-World Cup Terrorism Case

Russian security forces prepare for the World Cup, to be held in St. Petersburg, where several young men have been jailed and tortured for an alleged plot that seems never to have existed.
“On the evening on January 23rd, Viktor Filinkov, a twenty-three-year-old software engineer, was at the departures terminal in Pulkovo Airport, in St. Petersburg, waiting to board a flight to Minsk. From there, Filinkov planned to catch a connection to Kiev, where his wife, Alexandra, was living. He never made it. Filinkov was approached by several men who identified themselves as agents from the F.S.B., a successor agency of the K.G.B., and took him to a waiting dark-blue minivan. What happened next, according to Filinkov, was a five-hour-long torture session, which ended with Filinkov in jail, awaiting trial on charges that could send him to prison for up to ten years.” New Yorker

World Cup Preview 2018: Messi vs. Ronaldo, Magic Cats, Iceland!!, and the Entire Emotional Context in Which Much of Human Life Transpires

“Ladies and gentlemen, start your psychic octopuses. The biggest and strangest sporting event in human history resumes next week in Russia, where thirty-two men’s national soccer teams will begin the monthlong competition for the strangely un-cup-like trophy given to the winners of the FIFA World Cup. For many of the world’s best soccer players, the tournament offers a chance to become legends in their home countries and icons in the history of the game. For billions of soccer fans, the tournament offers a chance to participate in modernity’s most sweeping collective frenzy, a spectacle that will shape the emotional context in which much of human life transpires for the next few weeks. For the United States men’s national team, which did not qualify, the tournament offers a chance to feel gloomy while eating Cheetos on the couch.” New Yorker – Brian Phillips

Who’s the Best No. 10 at the World Cup?

“In Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics, Jonathan Wilson describes the symbolism of the no. 10 as “the ‘free-spirited epitome of the artistry of soccer.’ And while free-spirits have become fewer and farther between as more money’s been poured into the game and managers have systematized their tactics, the no. 10 is still typically given to the most creative player on the team. Or, in Poland or Nigeria’s case, it’s given to a defensive midfielder best known for his ability to make tackles and pass the ball sideways. But each team has its reasons, and so with all of the World Cup squad lists now officially released, we each ranked all the nos. 10 set to play in Russia this summer, tallied the results, and came out with the following list. No. 1 is obvious, but that’s about the only spot we came close to agreeing on. Yes, someone, who shall remain nameless out of our sheer fear for his safety, didn’t put Lionel Messi first.” The Ringer

How Russian Meddling Gave Us This Year’s World Cup

“In the spring of 2010, Christopher Steele, a former British spy with a shock of graying hair and a quiet, understated manner, received some alarming news: Vladimir Putin, a lifelong ice hockey fan, had taken a sudden interest in soccer. This was years before Mr. Steele compiled his now famous dossier on Donald Trump, with its references to clandestine meetings in Prague and, of course, ‘the pee tape.'” NY Times

World Cup groups A-D preview – Football Weekly

“Max Rushden is joined by voices from around the world to preview World Cup groups A-D, including Danish royalty, Peruvian vigour and the prospect of a tournament without a French meltdown.” Guardian (Audio)