Life and times

The Telegraph’s football correspondent is in the thick of the World Cup action in Russia

Telegraph football correspondent Jim White on World Cup fever, Russian-style

THE OPENING of a World Cup is a wonderful thing to experience, a nonstop, rolling cavalcade of enthusiasm. This is the fifth tournament I have attended and this time I’m in Kazan, the delightful capital of Tartarstan, where Europe meets Asia. Here, they can never have seen anything quite like it. Hordes of football fans from around the world descending on their streets, chanting, dancing, and in the case of the Iranian followers, incessantly parping plastic horns. The locals look simultaneously bemused and delighted at the incoming rush of colour and noise. Mexicans, Colombians and Australians are being highfived by Russians on a daily basis. I saw a drunken Poland supporter who had fallen off his bar stool being assisted by a man in a Russia shirt. Poles being helped to their feet by Russians: as diplomatic exercises go, nothing beats a World Cup.

And what is so enticing about the early days is that everyone is suffused with optimism. Fatalism has yet to set in, resignation is nowhere in sight. I even met two Argentinian lads on the opening night who went to great lengths to tell me how, with Lionel Messi playing for them, they simply could not lose.

Yet in the whirligig of colour, I can’t help feeling there is something missing. The first World Cup I attended was in France, in 1998. And everywhere I went in the country I encountered Scots at the epicentre of the party. Indeed I had seen so many at the beating heart of the festivities, that for some time afterwards I was convinced that every municipal fountain in France came complete with a man in a kilt splashing about in the middle of it. That was the last time Scotland qualified.

DURING MATCHES at the last World Cup in Brazil, such was the seething discontent at institutionalised corruption that whenever a member of the government was pictured on the big screen sitting in the expensive seats, the whole stadium would unite in a cacophony of catcalls. It is not like that in Russia. I watched the opening game between the host nation and Saudi Arabia with hundreds of locals in a fan park in Kazan. When President Putin made a speech of welcome, everyone cheered and applauded. And when he was seen shrugging at the King of Saudi Arabia after the Russian team had scored their fourth goal, the young couple next to me fell about in appreciative laughter as if he were the Ricky Gervais of the steppes. Later that night, I was in a bar in town when a man dressed in a huge papier-mâché Putin head turned up. The locals lined up to shake his hand and take selfies with him. And the strange thing was, I found myself joining in.

I DON’T KNOW if it is always like this, or if the whole place has been subject to an industrial deep clean ahead of the World Cup, but I have never been to a tidier country than Russia. In Kazan there is not a speck of rubbish anywhere, the metro system gleams, graffiti is entirely absent; you could eat your dinner of barbecued foal ribs (a Tartar delicacy) off the pavement. Such is the level of cleanliness, I have taken to scouring the place in search of blobs of chewing gum or cigarette butts or apple cores to reconnect somehow with normality. But as yet, the only things I have seen littering the streets were my new Argentinian friends on a bench in the high street, the morning after a long night of drowning their sorrows following their team being hammered by Croatia.

Poles being helped to their feet by Russians: as diplomatic exercises go, nothing beats a World Cup