Bring on Brazil: World Cup fever grips disbelieving Russia | The Daily Star
06:37 PM, July 02, 2018 / LAST MODIFIED: 06:44 PM, July 02, 2018

Bring on Brazil: World Cup fever grips disbelieving Russia

Russian fans danced in the streets of Kaliningrad on the Baltic and kissed strangers in Vladivostok in the Far East after their team defied all expectations to reach the World Cup quarter-finals.

In the Black Sea resort of Sochi, thousands of fans with Russian flags draped around their shoulders watched a giant screen transfixed and cars in central Moscow honked from dusk till dawn.

A mixture of disbelief and jubilation is gripping the host nation after their team pulled off one of the biggest World Cup upsets in recent memory, sending 2010 champions Spain packing after a penalty shootout decided their last-16 tie.

"It's great. Unbelievable. We are champions," 27-year old Muscovite Anna Glazkova said after Sunday's match. We believe we will now be in the final with Brazil."

The penalty shootout turned goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev into a national hero after a backs-to-the-wall performance in which they had just over a quarter of possession.

"What is there to hide, we were hoping for penalties," Akinfeev admitted to reporters.

It is the type of honesty that is endearing this rag-tag team of journeymen to a nation unused to celebrating its football team.

Russia is at heart an ice hockey country in which the beautiful game is played -- but not necessarily very well.

The chant often filling Russian stadiums during matches is "shai-bu!" -- the word for "hockey puck" -- a teasing reminder to the footballers that their hockey counterparts know how to score.

But the roar of the 80,000-crowd packed into Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium -- the same word echoing in bars and metro stations and shouted in Komsomolsk-on-Amur 6,000 kilometres (3,800 miles) to the east -- was "Ro-ssi-ya!" over and over again.

"Hurray!" Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev tweeted from the International Space Station after watching the match streamed live on a floating laptop.

"I always knew we could do it," a shaman from Siberia told the national Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

 


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