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Andrey Arshavin |
The unorthodox Russian gameRUSSIAN football – wasn’t that all about tricky awayday assignments on frozen pitches with orange balls, monolithic stadiums where you could hear the fans but hardly see them through the snow?
Turns out, it’s actually all about match-fixing allegations, government interference, the odd bit of racist abuse and the impossible riches of oil baron oligarchs. The age of Barry Davies spluttering commentary down crackling phone lines is well and truly over.
Journalist Marc Bennetts, who has spent the past decade in Moscow, chips through the ice in this examination of football in the former Soviet Union. It’s timely largely because the Russians are over here and playing as an intriguing a part in our own national game as the Frenchmen, the Brazilians and the Dutchmen who have for the last decade already made the Premier League their own millionaire’s playground.
Andrey Arshavin, a virtual unknown for 26 years of his life, has suddenly worked wonders at Arsenal. Roman Pavlyuchenko has done his best to do the same at Spurs.
And towering above London football is that other Roman, Roman Abramovich, a man who Bennetts points out has split Russian opinion.
While he ploughs a small fortune into a once-forgotten corner of west London turning Chelsea into chequebook champions, there are understandably those back home who wonder why he doesn’t use more of his wealth to help those stricken by poverty.
Others are proud of a “Del Boy” who rolled with the punches to build an empire the western world has been forced to listen to.
More intriguing in Bennetts’ book is the suggestion that the national game in Russia is riddled with corruption and match-fixing.
He is warned by shadowy club chairmen to leave the subject alone and his accounts sound like a spy novel, as if James Bond needs to be despatched to stop the Moscow derby from ending in a score draw.
If he hadn’t spent so long over there, he might be accused of drawing stereotypical caricatures. Yet this is the sometimes sinister world of Russian football, crammed with so many coincidences, strange occurrences and cigar-puffing moneymen to suggest the allegations he is investigating are rooted in truth. Every division appears to have some level of riggery-pokery and Bennetts is told that every club in Russia is “tainted” at some level.
Perhaps perversely, what shines through is that even if it all is set up to keep the same teams at the top – then the fans charmed by this universal sport don’t seem to mind. It just reflects, Bennetts argues, everything else in Russian life and is to be expected.
Before we think that’s condescending, a scan at our own league shows that the same three clubs have won every championship for the past 14 years. No wonder are new friends feel at home.
RICHARD OSLEY
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