Any tournament tensions
The police and security services around Repino are hyper-alert, so the players are not in an environment where they might head out in ones and twos to explore the forests on mountain bikes.
In St Petersburg, entering a shopping centre or metro station requires you to put your bag through a scanner. And in that city, which is visible from Repino first in the shape of the immense Gazprom tower, England’s players could visit the Hermitage – probably the world’s biggest museum – the Winter Palace, where the Bolshevik revolution took symbolic hold, or the Dostoevsky or Faberge museums.
They could learn of Peter the Great, Stalin’s purges, the 900-day siege at the hands of the Nazis or Putin’s rise through the St Petersburg KGB to become president.
Some will take parts of this in, but the pattern most days will be hotel, training ground, hotel, before trips to Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod and Kaliningrad.
Already, you can see this is a World Cup of logistics and language barriers and moderate expectations when it comes to a social life for the participants (though World Cups have a habit of transcending such limits).
Ivanovna, with her proximity to England training, is not familiar with Trent Alexander-Arnold or Nick Pope but thinks Gareth Southgate’s team will be “strong”. She says: “I’m not really a football fan but, of course, I’ve heard of David Beckham, Zidane and Pele.”
Ivanovna says “we’re going to support our guys” and if Russia go out, “we’ll support one of the other countries, maybe Germany”. Not England?
“They were a great power but now their politics have become so petty.” We elect not to pursue that line of logic and instead stick to peonies and how to call a taxi back to St Petersburg. Southgate’s players – and the FA’s staff – will need to fall back on their own resources in Repino and accept that trips out will be low key and probably uneventful, with a view of the Gulf of Finland from dark sand beaches providing plenty of time for contemplation.
Or they could try the Hotel Casablanca near the main cluster of resorts. Of all the gin joints in all the towns, England have walked into this one. It could be a lot worse. (© Daily Telegraph, London)