Roman Trushechkin on how to treat dull pain from the game of Karpin’s team in Bishkek
Living through the present time, by common agreement – the worst in the history of our sport and our team, we will not lose sight of two encouraging considerations. Now we have something that we could not afford even in bad times.
Firstly, our national team is free from any plans and can give us a quick snapshot of all the most interesting talents of the current moment. Secondly, the Russian national team for the first time in history is a team in which only volunteers play and only for the idea. No career calculation. No “professionalism” as a desire to solve the task: pure game, pure friendship, pure faith – in its true sense of “confidence in the invisible.”
The dull pain from the game in Bishkek has a symptomatic treatment: let’s apply the plantain to our own expectations and understand that a team that was deprived of the chance to compete for the World Cup in one calendar year, and just the other day was also cut off from the selection for the Euro, is simply knocked off sense. The guys, accustomed in football to stepping up the stairs of tournament challenges from childhood, got stuck in a broken elevator. They do not know where to strive, what to expect, what to prepare for.
All week before the friendly match, the RFU released atmospheric videos about the team’s training, and day after day they were filled with calmness, gentle humor, good teasing, genuine excitement of the game. Where did everything go on the field? It seems that the “match mode” script automatically started working in the guys’ heads, in which the team is disciplined and motivated by a certain goal, close or distant. But it was not found, and football as a pleasure, apparently, did not pass customs control and remained in Novogorsk.
Friendly matches in the past were excruciating in the performance of our team, but now they look like the adventures of a person who “wake up – got up, but forgot to wake up”. Why get together then? And why should we look at it?
Beautiful moment team
Previously, the team was always preparing for something. Even as she was exempted from qualifying for the 2018 World Cup, she couldn’t afford to play friendlies because her schedule was filled with tests. Any “experiment” had to be quoted, because there was an inviolable backbone in the team, and any coaching samples were reduced to viewing those who could help the team achieve results.
Valery Karpin is the first coach in the history of the Russian national team who is free to form it precisely as a national team, and not as a club of old friends. After all, these two principles – to take the best right now or to take fighters proven by games for the national team – always accompany the national team with their dialectical struggle and unity.
The coach had to follow one principle, and not forget the second. And since an important match always loomed somewhere ahead, each coach of the national team turned it into a kind of “FC Russia”, a club where there are no vacancies in a number of positions – time-tested reinforced concrete candidates calmly sit in their places, winking at each other.
And now the national team can be an instant “screenshot” – a quick self-portrait of our football, adjusted for understandable limitations, such as the refusal to strain players from foreign clubs with difficult routes. Everything that we are interested in and like right now, we get in the national team, and even in its starting lineup. And these are not just newcomers who have appeared regularly before (although not 8 people per match, of course). For example: will the Rostov connection Utkin-Komlichenko work in the national team? Please watch. Or: we have a leader in the number of shots on goal for our club – Glushenkov. Give him the ball under the left!
Did the “new Zakharyan” play in Bishkek?
It would be very interesting to see the best in selections in action – the railway worker Karpukas. But it was decided to redirect him to the youth team, which played two matches at its Belarusian training camp, and he was provided with more serious practice there compared to the adult team, in which field players got a maximum of 45 minutes. But we saw in the case Samara midfielder Kovalenko. And his figure reveals to us another large and complex topic.
Once, before the next gathering of the national team, I met Valery Karpin in the baggage hall of the Sheremetyevo airport: they arrived in Moscow almost at the same time, I was from a business trip, he was from Rostov, to carry out the collection. I went up to the coach to say hello, he was our boss in the commentary department. Therefore, we talked informally: Valery Georgievich asked the fans who were eager to take pictures to wait, and together with him we took a few steps to the side. Then the talent of Arsen Zakharyan flared up, who, due to illness, could not perform at Euro 2020, and there was talk that he could succumb to persuasion from Armenia. I asked Karpin if we would have time to play Arsene for Russia. “Not [бойся], – Karpin answered with his characteristic rude simplicity. – Let’s play.
Therefore, when I see the 19-year-old Kovalenko in the main (!) composition of the national team, who is also able to go to the Armenian side, I, on the one hand, don’t think [бояться], and on the other hand, I understand that our team, even with completely dry diapers, can lose this player even now. If only because international rules are no longer a dogma and we can lose even Zakharyan. But in the case of Kovalenko, it will be possible not to break the rules: a friendly match does not oblige anyone to anything. But!
“Titmouse” Saba Sazonov and “crane” Kovalenko
Against the backdrop of Karpin’s words that it’s wrong to persuade someone to play for the national team, against the backdrop of our suspension from official matches, and also against the backdrop of the “Sazonov case”, who silently chose Georgia, the same Kovalenko comes to our main team and gets a place in start. We kind of say to him: we see you, we appreciate you, we invite you to the senior team, we let you play from the first minutes. This is your involvement in a team with a great past, a complex present and a vague future. You are an equal among equals here, and all you need to do is make the classic choice between a crane in the sky and a bird in your hands.
Whoever chooses Russia in this situation will show that he is connected with our football not just by situational everyday circumstances – he was born here, played in one of our clubs – but by stronger threads. This connection is simply of a different order, it is ideological. Able to now make a clear career sacrifice for the sake of an invisible perspective – truly faithful. And loyalty and ideology, in my old-fashioned opinion, are mandatory for the players of the national team.
Even if circumstances someday force Kovalenko to abandon the Russian national team, we should not abandon our current open position: do not forcefully be nice to anyone. This, by the way, is facilitated by the current soft legionary limit in the Premier League. Any Sazonov can easily choose a national flag for himself, he will not lose his place in Dynamo from this.
This will allow talented young guys associated with the republics of the former USSR to stay in our football. Its isolation from the outside world will inevitably force us to invest in our own reserves, and for every potential Russian-born player of the Georgian youth team, in any case, there will be five, or even more, potential collections for the Our Guys team. We need to understand: the easier it is for us to let players go away from us, the easier it will be for us to attract others who are bright and motivated.
