After seeing the Brazil game, Paul and I had a four-day wait for our next live action. At previous World Cups we had always seen matches at more than one venue, but this time we’d opted for a more leisurely stay in just the single location.
There’s plenty to do in Saint Petersburg though and we started off with a wander around an old barracks just across the river from our hotel. It had a church with a golden spire that I doubt would have lasted too long in Teesside.
On the same day we called in at a museum to see a collection assembled by one of the Tsars, Peter The Great. Pete seemed to have a bit of a scattergun approach to collecting, similar I suppose to my own where late evening post-drinking ebay sessions have seen me amass anything from postcards of Norton to houses in Bulgaria.
I’ve not yet started a collection of dead babies in jam jars though, or of two-headed calves. Still it’s probably just a matter of time and whilst some visitors politely feigned interest in stuff like the Red Indian clothing it was fetuses in formaldehyde and the cows that could drink and moo simultaneously that everyone was really there for.
There’s a much bigger museum in town, the Hermitage and whilst it didn’t appear to have any bovines blessed with multiple bonces it did have some Eskimo corpses that had been discovered in glaciers somewhere. Unfortunately the queues for tickets were too long for nothing better than icy Inuits and so the most we saw was the building and the big square outside.
All the culture fitted nicely around the three games a day routine with us mixing up the various pubs that we watched each match in. There were traditional Russian bars, Irish bars, a middle eastern place where the air hung heavily with smoke from hookah pipes and an English bar with a regal presence.
It was the Tower pub where we watched a quite astonishing first half performance from England against Panama. I remember being derided on a football message board as a ‘Southgate apologist’ for defending Gareth during his spell at the Boro. No doubt the same people were the ones later describing him as an ‘FA suit’, employed only because he was a ‘yes-man’. My current interest in England’s national team is mainly because of his Boro connection and it’s great to see that our Carling Cup captain has well and truly silenced his critics.
In addition to the bars, there was also the Fan Fest. I’m not usually that keen these days on loud, drunken crowds, but the atmosphere around Saint Petersburg was so good that we thought we’d have to give it a try one afternoon.
Thankfully there was a Russian alternative to Budweiser and it was enjoyable to sit in the shadow of The Church Of The Spilled Blood and watch Belgium and Tunisia play out a nine-goal game of what my Mam might describe as ‘shotty-in’.
By Tuesday it was time for our second live game, Argentina against Nigeria. It was make or break for both teams and after a few drinks in a city centre Irish Bar watching a Denmark game featuring ex-Boro players Martin Braithwaite and Viktor Fisher, we took the subway up to the stadium.
There were an abundance of Messi shirts among the crowd, that might quite easily have been two-thirds Argentinian.
The process of getting in to the stadium was as easy as it had been for the Brazil game, although this time our seats were on the dugout side of the ground and so we had to walk around almost all of the stadium due to the one way system that was in place.
We had a couple of beers and then took our seats among what is probably one of the noisiest crowds I’ve ever been in. I had to shout in order to make myself heard to Paul in the next seat. There were small pockets of Nigerian fans around the stadium but it seemed as if everyone else was cheering on Argentina.
Messi, perhaps stung by the “Messi, Ciao” chants that had been randomly breaking out wherever we had been over the previous few days set Argentina off on the right foot, but after Nigeria equalised from the spot it was difficult to see how the South Americans would come up with a necessary second goal.
Nevertheless, the Argentinian support never wavered, particularly from the bloke behind us who seemed to know no other word than ‘Puta’ and who struggled to keep his beer within his plastic cup. Their support was rewarded with a late winner that sent Argentina into the next round and despite us having to lap the full stadium to get to the subway we managed to get ahead of the celebrating fans and were away before the volume of people brought things to a standstill.
It was a great week, in a city where I could quite happily live. The media had been putting out the scare stories prior to the tournament in the same way that they did before South Africa and Brazil and if it were down to me I’d lock up some of the editors and proprietors for their lies and the worry that they caused. The reality was that the claims could not have been more wrong and not only did we see no trouble, but the people we met could not have been friendlier. Well done Russia and roll on Qatar.
Trail of the Lion King 