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Monday Samara
The walls are shaking. Fireworks pop. In Samara, where England have just defeated Sweden in the quarterfinals, Sunday morning is marked by the last strokes of Saturday night. Russia and Croatia play late in the game and I came back from the stadium to the bar at the bottom of the tower of my apartment. Here, the mood is a mixture of hysteria shaking his head and Russian stoicism almost parodic. While Croatia scores the winning penalty, everyone moves away without a word. Three hours of sleep later, I leave Moscow via a connection to Mineralyne Vody, a dusty and dry place somewhere near Georgia. But not before taking the breakfast options at the airport. "Dried horse" says the sign above slices of brown matter sold by weight. Well, it's honest. On the front. And a little salty.
Monday Moscow
England is in the semifinals. Semi-final in England are. The final of the half-England is in the. No matter how you express it, the day is still spent trying to adapt to this state of affairs. That's my excuse for what follows, anyway. It's the night of my guardian colleague Jonathan Wilson's birthday dinner. My job is to find the embarrassing surprise cake with candles and sparklers. I find a theme on football between plays 1,400 words on England. I'm at the restaurant 10 minutes late. Except that nobody else is here. They have no record of a Wilson reservation. Hmmm. Oh. By checking the long chain of emails, I realize that we are meeting in a restaurant of the same name in … St. Petersburg. I am in Moscow, less than 450 miles
Well, we all did it. I'm sending Wilson a photo of the cake at the corner of the street where my colleague Stuart James and I have a last farewell meal in Moscow. Four weeks ago, we became unconscious in a foreign city without any idea of Russia. Now here we are clueless in a foreign city with a very small idea of Russia. What a trip he has been.
Tuesday Moscow
And so at the Luzhniki Stadium for the last press conference of England before the semifinal. It has been fun to see the evolution of Gareth Southgate from friendly, slightly left former payer to dreamboat, sage and mainstream mainstream star. The press room is running out of steam as it approaches. The cameras roar, the necks are bent. Gareth looks impeccable, in balance, all the more remarkable as, at this point, the traveling press begins to fray and grind, four weeks of bad meals on the hoof and levels personal grooming down.
By the end of this week, I will not have seen any of my Guardian / Observer football colleagues attempting to launder their clothes with dishwasher pads. And no dishwasher tablets neatly disguised. Dishwasher tablets with "dishwasher tablets" written on them. Neither Stuart James nor Nick Ames would like me to name names at this point, so I'll be silent about who exactly.
Wednesday Moscow
Nothing happened Wednesday
Wednesday Redux
OK one or two things happened. England played its semi-final, a 21-hour start that left an endless amount of day to move to Moscow. The key to all of this was the purchase of appropriate snacks for late-mailing. Local Arbat supermarkets are surprisingly good, with whole Serrano hams, a million kinds of cheeses and a friendly and friendly staff that will humor you even when you have no idea what you are doing and what you have just walked around atmosphere. Later, England will lose 2-1 in injury time to a maniacally committed Croatia. Football does not come home in a triumphal way by open bus. It never really was.
Thursday Moscow
A walk to Gorky Park to see the installation of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, which turns out to be a scary black cube moored on the river with flashing lights and lights. space installations. Moscow tends to throw up these strange sights anyway. It is a city of vast striking buildings, with a warm, sometimes hidden street life. Even the long and thin park near the seven-lane highway outside our apartment is bubbling with activity. In the evening, courting couples appear, teenagers who sit on the benches, talk chastely, hold hands and enjoy the twilight. At 1 am, night service is in place, drunkards without shoes and groups of homeless people who use the benches to sleep. There is an integration between the different groups. At breakfast, the local babushkas sit on benches in front of the hangover men and eat their rolls. As dusk falls the teens are back and the place is transformed back into a little touch of the small town of the 1950s in America. I must say that no one mentioned it in all that preceded the tournament: he was beaten, tapped and jailed.
Friday Moscow
The World Cup is dying. At this point, even the stadium staff seems exhausted. Journalists wander like last minute zombies of George Romero, chatting about flights and escape routes. In Moscow, Fifa President Giani Infantino appears at his last press conference, ostensibly dressed in a World Cup hoodie. Infantino receives 1.4 million pounds a year, plus benefits for the management of football. Volunteers from Russia are not paid. No prize for guessing who has had the pleasure of traveling during the last month and has been relentlessly patient and helpful. Clue: this is not the bald Swiss guy who says he personally oversaw "the best World Cup".
Saturday Moscow
Third place. England is in St. Petersburg to play in Belgium. I'm in Moscow for the final, with a chance to do this rare thing, actually watching a game in England without wildly typing on a laptop at a deadline. It turns out that they actually have a second half to these things. Who knew? It's just France and Croatia from here. It was a wonderful World Cup on a grand scale, but with a sense of end-time too. At this moment in the winter absurdity of Qatar in four years …
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