Rescued by a real Russian
World Cup lets people defy the oppression
ONE day last week, a colleague and I made a mistake. On our way to a press conference, we misunderstood an announcement and got off the train from St Petersburg to Repino, where the England squad are based, one stop early and in the middle of nowhere.
The next train was not due for another hour. We tried to call a taxi and failed. We tried to find a bus stop and failed. Soon, there was only about half an hour left before the conference started.
So my colleague suggested we hitchhiked. I’ve never hitchhiked anywhere in my life, but I wanted to get to the press conference. It was worth a try. I stood on one side of the busy dual carriageway and stuck my thumb out. My friend stood on the other. After 60 seconds, a white van stopped. The driver was a young man. He didn’t speak any English. We didn’t speak any Russian. We told him where we were going. He beckoned us to get inside.
He moved some of his belongings off the front seat so that we could
THE France forward, Antoine Griezmann, is a sublime footballer, so it is sad that his towering self-regard turned him into something of a laughing stock last week. His decision to turn his decision to stay at Atletico Madrid into a documentary called The Decision was a stupid miscalculation. LeBron James did the same thing in 2010 when he joined the Miami Heat. His boast that he was ‘taking my talents to South Beach’ became a running joke. Griezmann, sadly, failed to learn the lessons of history.
both squeeze in and took us all the way to Repino. When we got there, he did a U-turn so he could drop us off on the right side of the road and we didn’t have to brave the speeding traffic. It added another few miles to his journey. We shook his hand and offered our thanks. And then he was gone.
On Friday night, I walked out of the St Petersburg Stadium with Chris Sutton, the former Blackburn Rovers and Celtic striker. He had just seen Iran beat Morocco with an injury-time winner. He had seen their players fall to their knees, weeping tears of joy and disbelief, at the final whistle. He was still high on the emotion of it. He asked a band of celebrating Iran fans if he could have his picture taken with them. Nearby, a Russian television reporter was interviewing another Iranian supporter. The woman was almost incoherent with the exultation of what she had just seen. ‘Words cannot describe what this means,’ she said.
Women are not allowed to attend football matches in Iran but here she had been in the stadium as an equal. As she spoke to the reporter, she was swallowed up by tens of bouncing, cheering supporters in green and white.
Inside, the Iran manager, Carlos Queiroz, spoke about the difficulties his team had faced in the build-up to the tournament because of US sanctions. It wasn’t just that their supply of Nike boots had been cancelled. ‘No pitches, no camps, no friendlies, because of sanctions,’ said Queiroz.
‘ These players are not against anything or anybody. They just want to play football. It is my duty to come here and praise them.’
One morning last week, I went for a run around the Tsentralny district of St Petersburg and came upon Ovsyannikovskiy Gardens, a small park in the shadow of a black and white baroque church.
I took a couple of laps around it, amid the mothers pushing their babies in prams, a group of old men sitting on a wall eating their lunch and kids playing on climbing frames, enjoying the fun and the morning sunshine.
At the edge of the park, there were a few dilapidated concrete courts abutting the walls of a hospital. On one, a young woman had tethered her dog to a fence in the shade of a tree to keep him out of t he heat while s he di d a programme of exercises.
On the next court, four boys played football, dashing around and trying to shoot into goals with battered, torn nets. One of them scored and wheeled away, his arms spread wide like Cristiano Ronaldo. Another kid, watching from his perch on the hospital’s ground floor window ledge, shouted out something about Messi.
On Thursday night, I went to a bar on Marata Street, a couple of blocks from the apartment where Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, and watched Russia play Saudi Arabia. It was crowded. The place sold craft beers. There was a sign for London Pride. Some of the men knocked back shots. The atmosphere got livelier with every goal that went in.
There was particular rejoicing when substitute Artem Dzyuba, a round-shouldered striker, scored the third goal a few minutes after coming on. He’s a Zen it St Petersburg player, a local hero.
There was laughter and cheering, too, when the TV screens showed the Russia manager celebrating, pumping his fists manically, his face contorted with triumph and relief. We are like that everywhere, football fans. We love it when a manager feels it as much as we do.
Away from hooligans with MMA gloves, away from downed jetliners and homophobic bigots and Crimea and poisonings and racist abuse and all the ills and wrongs of a country, there is always comfort in ordinary people.
Great sporting events like the World Cup help us see that. They bring out the best in us. Look at the kind of welcoming Britain the 2012 Olympics showed us and then look at us now. It’s the same with this World Cup. It is about people, not governments. It lets us see each other, not as enemies but as brothers and sisters.