Mother Russia has a new fan
ARE you feeling spontaneous? That’s the question that triggered my almost 4,000km journey to Moscow via St Petersburg for the business end of the World Cup at a moment’s notice.
An unexpected trip brought about some unexpected events, I ended up couchsurfing with locals in Moscow, saw grown men cry as their Cup dreams came crashing down, and gatecrashed an exclusive party with the Qatari ambassador.
On Sunday evening, a day after Croatia had beaten Russia on penalties to secure a semi-final clash with England, I was at my desk working for what was supposed to be the first of five consecutive days, when my friend sent me a message from Russia. ‘I’ve a spare ticket to the semi-final, are you feeling spontaneous?’ 24 hours later I was drinking vodka with him and roaming St Petersburg. Thankfully I have football-loving bosses who couldn’t bring themselves to deny me the chance to go.
After four hours sleep I took a high-speed train to Moscow where English fans had begun to arrive in advance of their semi-final clash the following day. I had no place to stay, but after few requests through my CouchSurfing app, a local woman, Anna, agreed to put a roof over my head for the night.
Usually with CouchSurfing you sleep on a couch, sometimes an inflatable bed or, if you’re really lucky, a spare bedroom. This time I it was a camping mat on the kitchen floor. Oh well, it’s not the quality of the bed that makes CouchSurfing appealing, it’s the experience that staying with a local brings.
This time that experience came in the form of VDNKh park which was only a few metres from my host’s apartment. It dates back to the Stalin era and has monuments to agriculture alongside displays of military strength and space exploration – including the spacecraft that brought the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.
Walking around the dimly-lit park in the dead of night had an eerie appeal. There was construction work ongoing, so many of the street lights that guide the way weren’t working. We wandered through the pitch black park, from monument to monument, each one bathed in a glowing light.
In the morning, I left my host and returned to the city centre where Football’s Coming Home could be heard around almost every corner. Not to be outdone, the large numbers of Croats in the city weren’t long finding their voice.
On the Metro en route to the stadium, I was squeezed into a carriage between both sets of fans. There was no hostility, but the decibel level was deafening and the carriage somehow stayed on its tracks as the Croatians jumped up and down and pounded the ceiling with their fists as they chanted.
The English seemed a bit overwhelmed and went silent for most parts. As I ascended the escalator of the Metro I was surrounded by a sea of red and white – both teams sharing the same colours
English hearts would be broken inside the Luzhniki stadium that night, and a nation full of optimism slumped into a miserable state of realisation that they had been beaten by a superior opponent.
Being from Mayo I know the feeling of entering a stadium with such hope and leaving with crushing agony, except usually with the ultimate heartache of losing the final. It really is the hope that kills you.
The Croatian fans had travelled in large numbers, but the level of visible French support was notably low. In Red Square a few choruses of Allez Les Bleus rang out, but there was no sea of delirious French fans on any of Moscow’s streets.
Despite the shattered diplomatic relations between Russia and the UK, on the streets of Moscow relations seemed to be at an all-time high as Russians wore English jerseys and chanted with their newly found UK pals on Nikolskaya Street – where fans from different countries recited their own anthems as festival mode took hold.
Security cordons were in place at the entrance to all of the streets that act as tributaries to Red Square, something that happens for all big events in the city. Given the level of terrorist threats that had been made by ISIS, nothing was being taken for granted. The fear of Russian hooligans terrorising supporters never materialised and there were no reports of any violent clashes between fans.
Funnily enough, I didn’t see any homeless people – until the day after the tournament. A strange coincidence that.
Flights for last-minute travellers leaving Moscow the day after the final were expensive, so I decided to stay until Tuesday.
On Monday night I was drinking in the city with a Russian friend. We entered an upmarket bar and went upstairs, past a preoccupied women holding a clipboard.
There was a party in full flow. I went to the bar and ordered two drinks which the bar man duly served before turning and serving the next person without asking for any money. It didn’t take long to realise we’d stumbled into a party with a free bar.
The drinks kept flowing and were followed by endless amounts of finger food, which ranged from salmon with wild rice crisps and avocado sauce, beef tartare with avocado and mustard sauce, to smoked eels with kohlrabi and beetroot carpaccio.
WALKING AROUND THE DIMLY-LIT PARK HAD AN EERIE APPEAL... OUR COVER STORY WAS THAT WE WERE GUESTS OF THE AMBASSADOR! A fit of spontaneity took Craig Hughes to Moscow for the World Cup, where the locals treated him like an old comrade
A DJ was playing a mixture of funk and house music, a taste too sweet for a corporate event I would have thought, but I guess you can buy anything these days, even the illusion of trendy taste!
We were worried our cover might be blown as we indulged in all the delicacies the party had to offer when the speeches began. The CEO of the company hosting the party – a hospitality company that seem to work at each World Cup – was the first to take the stage for what would be the most boring 10 minutes of the night.
Then he handed over to the Qatari ambassador to Russia. It was at this point we decided our cover story if questioned was to be that we were guests of the ambassador! Surely no one would dare to question a guest of the ambassador.
Our cover was never blown and after two hours we continued the night in less corporate surroundings.
I don’t mean to paper over the glaring flaws and human rights abuses Russia is guilty of, but what the World Cup successfully did was bring people together. People who never would have come to Russia were greeted with open arms. For example, when I arrived in Moscow I asked a woman at the train station where I needed to get the Metro for Red Square. She walked with me for five minutes to the Metro station, helped me buy a ticket and walked me to the platform and told me how many stops I needed to wait before disembarking. That was the level of Russian hospitality on offer.
Security was naturally bumped up for the World Cup but any locals I spoke to said the city centre is always safe to walk in. One man joked: ‘Putin is paying us 1,000 rubles (€13.66) a day not to fight tourists or rob their phones.’
It was my first trip to Russia, and exploring Moscow you get such a sense that you are walking around the capital of a superpower. Looking across at downtown Moscow, skyscrapers drive into the sky to give it an almost Manhattan-like feel. In the old part of the city some of the Stalin-era architecture is just as impressive, like the seven sisters group of skyscrapers, all topped with Soviet stars.
The city is littered with parks and statues of men who have countless reams of history pages written about them, such as Lenin, Marx and Stalin. The statue to Marx is the most central, a few hundred metres outside Red Square.
The process of extending the visas of the fans who attended the World Cup has started in the Russian parliament. I won’t take much convincing to come back.