The Russian team is real, even without tournaments. And now we need to build the future!
Roman Trushechkin on how to treat dull pain from the game of Karpin’s team in Bishkek
Living the present time, by common agreement, is undesirable in the history of our sport and our team, without losing sight of two encouraging goals. 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 flight of all the most interesting talents at available points. Secondly, the Russian national team for the first time in history is a game in which only volunteers participate and only for the idea. No career calculation. No “professionalism” as a desire to install the set dishes: pure play, pure friendship, pure faith – in its free meaning 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 expectation and catch that the team that we recommend was deprived of the chance to compete for the World Cup in one calendar year, and just the other day they were also cut off from the selection for the Euro, just bewildered. The guys, accustomed to football since childhood, were striding up the stairs of tournament tests, stuck in a broken elevator. I don’t know where to strive, what to expect, what to prepare for.
All week before a friendly match, the RFU released atmospheric videos about training teams, and day after day they were filled with calmness, gentle humor, good teasing, and genuine excitement of the game. Where did everything go on the field? It seems that the “comparison mode” script automatically started working in the guys’ heads, in which the team is disciplined and motivated by a certain goal, close or distant. Apparently, he did not pass customs control and remained in Novogorsk.
Friendly matches were excruciating in exceptional cases for our team, but now they look like the adventures of a person who “raise – raised, but forgot to wake up.” Why get together then? And why should we look at it?
Beautiful moment team
The team is always ready for something. Even exempted from qualifying for the 2018 World Cup, it could not be used for friendly matches because its rules were delayed by the control ones. Any “experiment” took place in quotation marks, because at the beginning there was an inviolable backbone, and any coaching tests were reduced to viewing those who could help achieve the result.
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 friends. Indeed, right now these two choices – to take the best now or to take the proven games for the team of fighters – always accompany the national team of their religious struggle and unity.
The trainer should follow one concentration and not get sick with the second one. And since an important match always loomed somewhere ahead, each coach of the national team played a kind of “FC Russia”, a club where there are no vacancies at the complex of placements – time-tested reinforced concrete candidates calmly sit in their places, winking at each other.
And now the national team may turn out to be a quick “screenshot” – a quick self-portrait of our football, adjusted for crossing the border, like refusing to strain players from exotic clubs that meet with routes. Everything that we are interested in and like right now is in the national team, and even in its starting lineup. And these are not just newcomers who have appeared regularly and previously (although not 8 people per match, of course). For example: will the Rostov connection Utkin-Komlichenko work in the national game? It is possible to watch. Or: we have a leader in the number of shots on goal for our club – Glushenkov. Give him the ball to command!
Did the “new Zakharyan” meet in Bishkek?
It would be very interesting to see in action and the best selection – the railroad worker Karpukas. But it was decided to redirect him to the youth team, which played two matches at the 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 Samara midfielder Kovalenko in the case. And his figure reveals to us another big and complex topic.
Once, before the next gathering of the national team, I met in the baggage hall of Valery Karpin’s Sheremetyevo airport: they arrived in Moscow almost at the same time, I was from a business trip, he was from Rostov, I had a meeting. I went up to the coach to say hello, he was the official head of the commentary department. Therefore, we talked informally: Valery Georgievich, who were eager to take pictures, asked for a few steps to the side. Then a conversation broke out about the talent of Arsen Zakhar, who, due to illness, could not perform at Euro 2020, and it was said that he could succumb to the Armenians from Armenia. I chose Karpin, will we have time to “play” Arsen for Russia. “Not [бойся], – Karpin used with his characteristic rough simplicity. – Let’s play.
Therefore, when I see mainly (!) part of the national team, 19-year-old Kovalenko, 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 the absolute arrest of diapers, can lose this player even now. If only because the release of the rules is 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 he persuaded anyone playing for the national team incorrectly, against the backdrop of our suspension from official matches, and also against the backdrop of the Sazonov case, which chose Georgia, the same Kovalenko arrives in our main team and gets a place at the 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 minute. This is your involvement in viewing with a great past, revelation and a hazy future. You’re happy here among the average, and all you have to do is make the classic choice between a pie in the sky and a tit in your hands.
Anyone who takes Russia in this situation, it seems that he is connected with famous football not just by situational everyday events – he was born here, played in one of our clubs – but by stronger threads. This is just a connection of a different order, it is ideological. Able to now make a clear career sacrifice for the sake of an invisible prospect – truly sure. And loyalty and ideology, in my old-fashioned opinion, are mandatory for the players of the national team.
Kovalenko should not give up on defending our open position. This, by the way, and the current soft legionary limit in the Premier League. Any Sazonov can freely choose a national flag for himself, he does not lose this place in Dynamo.
It is probably for talented young guys, detained with the republic 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 on every prospective Russian-born player of the Georgian youth team aged from a few years to five, or even more, an example of a collection for the Our Boys team. It is necessary to understand: the easier it is for us to let go of the players, the easier it will be for us to attract others to ourselves – bright and self-motivated.
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