My specialty is football.
City where football clubs constantly die
Nizhny Novgorod is one of the most important millionaires in the country. Argentina, England, Croatia and other top teams will soon arrive there, and then one of the quarterfinals of the 2018 World Cup will take place. At the same time, clubs are regularly buried here: an outrageous project with the first legionnaires in Russia, and a team full of aging stars, and a lamp team named after the region. Alexander Plekhanov went to Nizhny Novgorod and figured out why such a fragile region has such a fragile football.
“Do you know what“ Russian roulette ”is? This is when you are given the task of taking the sixth place, and otherwise you threaten to disperse the whole team, ”said Valery Ovchinnikov about the goals of the Nizhny Novgorod Lokomotiv. He was engaged in the team from 1989 to 2002 – at first he only coached, and then became the club president. Continue reading
I saw the Champions League final from the inside. It was magical
Any trip to a match for a journalist begins with an accreditation. But the Champions League final is a special procedure. You need to fill out a bunch of documents and leave detailed information about yourself, after which the UEFA spokespersons make inquiries about the existence of the media and people who want to be accredited. Anyone can both refuse and confirm the application. The answer has to wait about a month. All this time you live impatiently from waiting, and every day, convulsively, 10 times a day, you check the mail, where the answer should come from just one main word: confirmed or rejected. This is something like a childhood at school, when you are waiting for a test grade or exam and are afraid that the teacher will say loudly to the whole class that you are not satisfied.
The distribution of elephants begins one day before the match in the Kiev Palace of Sports. Continue reading
