The Russians are making up for lost time after years in the wilderness,
says their coach.
Ian Hawkey
It is nearly two decades since England played the Russians
in a competitive match. It was a red-letter day of sorts and the Reds
walked it. These pages and others peppered their accounts of another England
defeat at the 1988 European Championship finals with references to 'Russia',
though the victors were properly known back then as the Soviet Union.
Soon enough, the term Soviet would fall into antiquity. The West was already
warming to Mikhail Gorbachev and knew what glasnost meant, while in Moscow
a young entrepreneur called Roman Abramovich was sizing up opportunities
offered by something called perestroika.
In Frankfurt, 53,000 watched Bobby Robson's England humiliated, losing
three out of three. The Soviets scored after a mere two minutes, and a
gratifying virtuoso goal it seems to have been for one Sergei Aleinikov,
who would record in his autobiography how he 'stole the ball from the
arrogant Glenn Hoddle in midfield, saw the English defenders back off,
trying to second-guess me, feinted past Dave Watson and beat the disoriented
Chris Woods'.
Contemptuous stuff. Brian Glanville's Sunday Times match report was scarcely
kinder. England had been 'shameful, inadequate, gutless'. The Soviets
would waltz on to the final, beating Italy 2-0 in the semis and denied
a second European championship by the Holland of Gullit, Koeman and Van
Basten.
That was not strictly the glory year of Russian football. First, because
the Soviet Union had triumphed in a thinner version of the tournament
in 1960. Second, because only two of the 1988 team actually came from
Russia, the rest from the socialist republics who would soon become sovereign
states. Over the next 18 years, as Russia would have its borders reaffirmed,
its football would be reshaped and have billions of roubles pass through
it, and come out of the other side rather bruised.
That, at least, is the view of Guus Hiddink, the Dutchman who has just
begun his second year as head coach of Russia's national squad. 'The postSoviet
years have been very hard and Russia lost time,' Hiddink said ahead of
qualifiers against Macedonia last night and England on Wednesday. 'I'm
not talking about just the national team, it's the whole process of rebuilding
the infrastructure, modernising stadiums, training centres, developing
new players and coaches. But this country has so much tradition and history
in football it deserves to be among the elite.'
Among football's modern elite are some very active Russians. But they
tend to be businessmen, not superstars. Abramovich's wealth has remade
Chelsea, sometimes arousing envy at home. The mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov,
once accused Abramovich of 'spitting at Russia' by investing so heavily
elsewhere. But some of his bounty may also have boosted the esteem of
football in his native land. He is said to have made resources available
for the Russian Federation to employ Hiddink on the terms the Dutchman
wanted.
Abramovich's then oil company, Sibneft, also sponsored the CSKA Moscow
club with about ?30m over three years from 2004. The following May, CSKA,
aggressive in the transfer market, won the first serious European trophy
for a Russian club, beating Sporting Lisbon in the Uefa Cup final in the
Portuguese capital, a success billed as a milestone for the sport.
Abramovich sold Sibneft a few months after CSKA's big night, another step
in his journey closer to English culture than Russian. Other oligarchs
and oilmen have become interested in Russian clubs, often with political
motivation, sometimes with a large cheque, and the Russian Premier League
now packs a predatory punch in the international market.
Within a year of Porto winning the European Cup in 2004, three of their
best players ? Maniche, Costinha and Derlei ? had been signed for a combined
?19m by Dinamo Moscow. The previous summer, Spartak Moscow had set a record
by paying Boca Juniors ?7m for striker Fernando Cavenaghi. The league
imports foreign footballers voraciously and has acquired sufficient projection
that good players can go there ? for handsome wages ? without slipping
off the radar.
When Brazil's head coach, Dunga, wants to check the form of his strikers
ahead of announcing a squad, he sends someone to fetch recent CSKA videos,
or travels to Moscow to see for himself the striker Vagner Love. Dunga
does so instead of going to Milan to look at Ronaldo or Adriano. The imports
have a downside, there as in England. They hide the good Russians. Hiddink
has, though, been respectful of local standards. He prefers to staff the
centre of his midfield with footballers from Zenit Saint Petersburg, Spartak
or CSKA than to call up Alexei Smertin, a Premier League itinerant. His
choices up front include the Sevilla forward Alexander Kerzhakov, though
he has become used to waiting in the queue behind Roman Pavlyuchenko and
Dmitry Sychev, both based in Moscow.
The Hiddink formula worked well enough to give Russia a point more from
their first seven matches in Group E than England, though nobody kids
themselves that this is the best postSoviet Russian side there has been.
Two years after the USSR lost the final of that European championship
in 1988, a group of young players including Andrei Kanchelskis and Alexander
Mostovoi won its equivalent at under21 level. Talk of that 'Lost Generation'
can cause Russian followers to go a little misty-eyed. The New Russia
travelled in hope to the 1994 World Cup in America and left it prematurely,
squabbling about money and assorted other complaints. Russia made it to
the 2002 World Cup but left after the first round. Ditto Euro 2004, where
their qualifying efforts ? they beat Wales in a playoff ? had been stained
by the midfielder Igor Titov testing positive for a banned substance.
Titov, banned for 12 months, has not had an international career under
Hiddink. Others with difficult pasts have. Sychev, once the bright young
thing of Russian football, looks bright again, after a ban ? for infringing
transfer rules ? and an unfulfilling move to Marseille. Konstantin Zyryanov
was as a surprise pick when Hiddink first put him in midfield, his career
having dipped after a personal tragedy five years ago, his wife falling
from an upper storey of an apartment block.
It is a squad young and spiky enough to have Hiddink thinking further
ahead. 'I would love to stay and finish my work here,' he explained, 'whether
we qualify or not. It will take time so if I stay, let's say until 2010,
it would be like completing a cycle. If I leave before that, my job would
not be complete.'
, September 9, 2007
Russian ladies dream about happy marriage.
Click on a photo...
