Football loses at Putin’s World Cup
After a Brexit-heavy few days, this Reaction daily email writer needs a short break from the fray. The grand opening of the 2018 football World Cup is definitely, definitely more important than the EEA-Grieve-amendment-future-new-customs-arrangement mess.
Comparisons with the Hitler Olympics may be overblown, but this really isn’t just another World Cup. And Russia is not just another country.
The fan experience will be odd for a start: on my last visit to Russia, I saw an enormous man waddling over Red Square. He wore a t-shirt with Krushchev and Putin emblazoned over the front, but with a crucial difference: Krushchev’s face had a cross drawn through it. I asked my (Russian-speaking) friend Angus what the captions were. He laughed: “Krushchev lost Crimea; Putin got it back.” Blimey.
Today’s opening ceremony in Moscow really stuck in the craw. After some deeply strange preludes, including a rip-roaring noughties throwback performance by Robbie Williams of ‘Let me entertain you’, Putin welcomed fans to “a splendid football feast” in “an open, hospitable and friendly country.”
Try telling that to Peter Tatchell, arrested this afternoon in Red Square for staging a solo protest against Russia’s treatment of LGBT minorities. He was holding a poster with the words: “Putin fails to act against Chechnya torture of gay people.” Normally, one-man protests are legal in Russia, but they have been banned for the duration of the World Cup, or “splendid football feast” as I now call it. Tatchell is right of course – for the last two years, the gay minority in Chechnya has been the subject of state-sanctioned and state-coordinated pogroms. That didn’t seem to bother Mo Salah who posed for photographs with Chechen premier, Ramzan Kadyrov, last week.
At the Reaction offices, we’ve tried to come up with some in-house predictions for the tournament (I mean, ‘splendid football feast’):
The Tartan army arrive only to lend vocal and committed in-stadium support to Tunisia, Panama, and then Belgium.
The French throw an almighty hissy fit after the group stages and sack their own coach.
Alexander ‘Nixy’ Nix makes his debut on the ITV commentating team as a Russian political strategy expert.
England do okay for once.
English and Russian hooligan groups club together to pay for a massive import of those white plastic chairs that proved such excellent ammunition for chucking at the Euros.
A sole member of the England football squad makes a Kim Philby-style defection to Russia: “The West is so very ugly and Yekaterinburg is beautiful in summertime.”
Erm, Germany win.
Alastair Benn
News editor, Reaction