France deliver the result a wondrous World Cup deserved
PUTIN’S GOLDEN TOUCH...AND HE’S NO WALLY WITH A BROLLY
At the end of it all, the heavens opened and one of Vladimir Putin’s stooges nervously extended a large black umbrella above him as he dished out the medals in the deluge.
French President emmanuel Macron was left to get drenched. they do hospitality very well in this country, but there are limits when the boss is around.
It was all rather awkward, with a stiff Putin, in white shirt and red tie, not quite sure what grip to assume for the handshakes with the winning team and some of them not looking entirely sure who he was.
Macron, meanwhile, embraced the moment and the political opportunity, holding the faces of his players in both hands as they stood in the deluge like characters in a romantic movie.
this felt like the real world barging back in. FIFA president Gianni Infantino cooed around Putin all night, just as he has at every opportunity these past four weeks. Protestors from the punk protest group Pussy Riot, who invaded the pitch dressed as police officers, were marched off after providing a reminder that Russia’s autocratic regime is homophobic and aggressive.
But the beauty of the last month has been the tournament’s refusal to adhere to a political script. Putin bought the tournament as part of his mission to parade Russia as a force in the world. But the Russian people and their visitors took it on to a different course, by discovering that their preconceived notions about each other were wrong.
each side discovered the other were very much like themselves, whatever the politicians would have them believe about the evils of the east or West.
‘Do you like Russia?’ asked a taxi driver in Volgograd, one of the host cities. ‘We are not the grizzly bear. Me and you — we are the same people.’ And so it came to be that cities closed off to the outside world — Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Kaliningrad — found themselves embracing a deluge of Peruvians, Colombians, Japanese, Argentines and a rainbow of other nations, and finding a spirit of mutual understanding: humanity.
It was the World Cup of Google translate, with the Russian taxi drivers precariously speaking into their phones to get their message into english while looking for a destination.
It was the World Cup at which the kokoshnik — headgear worn by women of pre-revolutionary Russia to signal they were married — became a cult fashion item for fans of virtually every country.
It was the World Cup when Russians discovered what a permissive society looks like, with impromptu street parties, cheerful police officers and public gatherings that did not need to be approved by the authorities a week in advance.
the chanting of ‘ Ros- si-ya’ — synonymous with aggressive Russian nationalism when Crimea was being annexed — became the joyful soundtrack of fans with a smile on their faces.
Putin kept away from most of the games. he did not materialise after the opening game and, despite the extraordinary Russian journey to the quarter-finals which further enhanced the party, he left the last-16 and quarter-final games to his deputy, just in case the team suffered the indignity of losing.
the host nation’s progress, against all expectation, belonged to the other narrative of this extraordinary carnival — the winning through of small teams at the expense of the superstars. Almost everyone could dream. Last night’s denouement — with its drama, heroism and as many goals as the last four finals had delivered in their entirety — was entirely in keeping with all that had gone before.
It was Croatia, a nation of four million people, who filled Red Square and the Moscow Metro with the noise which had been absent since the South Americans following Neymar and Lionel Messi were sent packing.
the world had been told to look for Kylian Mbappe, though in the pivotal early moments of the second half you thought that it might belong to Ivan Perisic, a 29-year-old who spent his mid-20s at Wolfsburg. he ran at the right side of the French defence like a guided missile.
At the end of it, all the thousands of Russians here lingered, looking to squeeze the last drops from an event which has transcended all expectation.
‘A country changed’, stated a headline in one Moscow paper in the past few days, waiting for life to resume as it was before.
‘Now we fear the letdown.’ But a genie is out of the bottle. the World Cup turned out to be a ‘festival of freedom’.
Putin might have his apparatchiks waiting with umbrellas but Russia has changed and there is no going back to the fortress mentality.
Behind the politics and schmoozing there was a real World Cup. No one can rain on that parade.