Posted on September 9, 2010 - by Venik

Russia battle England once more – and this time it’s for the World Cup

While England promote their ‘safe’ option, Russia’s bid team for the 2018 World Cup want the tournament to be a historic moment

Vitaly Mutko is in a confident mood. Surveying Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, with its luridly green artificial pitch, Mutko recalls watching Russia beat England 2-1 here during their 2007 European qualifier. It had seemed like England’s night, he recalled. “Everyone was in a miserable mood at half-time. We were losing 1-0. I predicted we would score twice. And we did,” he says happily.

The next installment in Russia’s rivalry with England takes place on 2 December, when Fifa’s executive committee meets in Zurich to decide who will host the 2018 World Cup. Mutko refuses to make any hubristic pronouncements about Russia’s chances. “Self-confidence sometimes leads to tragedies in sport,” he says.

And yet with three months to go until Fifa’s secret ballot, the Russians appear quietly certain that they and not England will emerge victorious. Mutko’s optimism stems from a single powerful idea – that a Russian World Cup would be a more dynamic, more compelling, and more nation-transforming event than a ‘safe’, and possibly dull, English one. It would, in short, be a moment in history.

At a time when Fifa’s president, Sepp Blatter, is pondering his legacy to world football, the Russians are pledging to bring the tournament to the former communist bloc for the first time. Asked whether Russia’s bid might be more interesting than England’s, Mutko jumps off his feet, and sweeps his fist through the air with a triumphant and affirmative “Da”. “I would just grab this country Russia and say there will be so much done for football!” he says.

Mutko, Russia’s minister for sport, is clearly irritated by recent stories in the British press reporting how Lokomotiv Moscow fans celebrated Peter Odemwingie’s recent sale to West Bromwich Albion with a banner showing a banana and the message: “Thanks West Brom.” He is also rattled by reports suggesting widespread corruption in Russia, believing these themes have been deliberately overblown to sabotage Russia’s bid.

But it is the concept, and not the on-going Anglo-Russian information war, that Mutko believes will win over Fifa. Intriguingly, Sergei Fursenko, the president of Russia’s Football Union, talks about Russia’s 2018 bid in highly mystical terms. He says that many fans have only a vague idea of what Russia is like, and says that hosting the tournament would enable visitors who come to Russia to experience the “Russian soul”. “People are very hospitable and very open. The soul is all embracing, including of foreigners.” You have to be not scared of Russians.”

Russia’s well-organised bid committee – which hosted Fifa’s inspection team last month – talk about their ambitions in sweeping terms. They see a Russian World Cup as nothing less than an event of historical proportions, on a par with the second world war and the heroic defeat of the Nazis.

“England had everything,” said Alexander Djordjadze, the director of bid planning and operations. “You ruled the world. You invented football. You have the richest league. You are solid and strong as a cultural entity,” one committee member pointed out. “For us the entire 20th century was an immense sacrifice. We are now building a new country. The World Cup would help us make a different people and a new nation. For Fifa to give it to [post-communist] Russia would be a bold political gesture.”

Alexei Sorokin, Russia’s multi-lingual 2018 bid chief, believes that the influx of fans to Russia would transform the way the country is perceived by the rest of the world. It would help overcome what he views as a negative and unfair image of Russia, concocted erroneously, he feels, by the western media. “We would be perceived the way we merit to be perceived. It would eliminate this prejudice against us.”

The tournament would also showcase what Russia had achieved “in a record period of time” since the collapse of communism.

England’s stadiums and facilities are more or less complete – so much so that in August Blatter admitted it would be “easy” to hold the World Cup in England. Paradoxically, this fact may work to England’s disadvantage.

Russia, by contrast, is proposing a once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure, which would transform sport across the world’s largest country, and bring football to backward regions stretching from the Polish borders to the Pacific coast.

It has promised new stadiums, high-speed rail links between host cities, new airports, hotels and training pitches. Some of this is happening anyway. Russia is already building six stadiums and has promised to construct nine more if it wins the World Cup. Portraying itself as the meeting point between east and west – in fact the border between Europe and Asia runs through the potential host city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals – Russia plans to stage the tournament in clusters.

The final, a semi-final and the opening match would take place in Moscow’s Luzhniki, the venue for the 1980 Olympic Games. Other matches would take place in a northern cluster centred on St Petersburg, a Volga cluster along Europe’s longest river, and a southern cluster that includes Sochi, the balmy seaside resort that will host the 2014 Winter Olympics, and is a favoured chill-zone for Kremlin politicians.

Mutko points out that Vladimir Putin – Russia’s prime minister, who is travelling to Zurich for the Fifa vote – has personally guaranteed all stadiums will be built on time. The bill? For sporting infrastructure alone it will come to $6bn. Over the past decade, eight as president and two as prime minister, Putin has had an overriding mission: to restore Russia’s greatness after what Putin regards as a period of chaos and humiliating weakness under Boris Yeltsin. The later half of his presidential stint coincided with a dramatic downturn in relations between London and Moscow, and England’s bitter Luzhniki defeat.

A Russian World Cup would confirm that Russia’s is back as a great world power. And it would also be another defeat for England, the icing on Putin’s cake.

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