It's been a while since my last post, but then a lot has happened in the last few weeks.
As you may already be aware, I'm British. Just in case you've been spending your time of late under a sizable boulder in an especially remote part of Kamchatka, a large number of my compatriots voted in favour of Britain leaving the European Union last week. Cue resignations, recriminations and general turmoil, at least by our pretty tame standards. I have no doubt that the anxiety and uncertainty about the future that we’re experiencing in post-referendum Britain is still an extremely long way short of what Russians had to endure at various points in the 1990s, but that's about as close to those ordeals as I ever want to get.
With all this unfolding and taking up a fair amount of headspace, I have found it easy to forget that the European Football Championships are still going on, though now without Russia and England, neither team having exactly covered themselves with glory this time around. The Russians finished bottom of their first round group and England succumbed to underdogs extraordinaire Iceland in round two. Cue further resignations and recriminations, albeit a lot more trivial in this case.
If you’re a football fan looking to get over these disappointments, you may wish to transport yourself back to happier times, at least for the Russian team, via Marc Bennetts’ fascinating insight into the Russian game, Football Dynamo.
Originally published in 2008 with a revised edition coming out shortly after, following Russia’s rather more impressive showing at that year’s European Championship, it’s not exactly hot off the presses at this point.
Nevertheless, as discussed in my previous post, both English and Russian hooligans were involved in deplorable episodes of violence before, during and after their teams’ first match of this year’s tournament. The only upside of Russia’s failure to reach the second round as far as I’m concerned was that it rendered tournament organising body UEFA’s threat to expel the team from the competition a moot point.
As a consequence of these incidents, parts of the book are very topical indeed. In a dark and disturbing chapter, Bennetts explores Russian football’s hooligan subculture, even interviewing a couple of ‘practitioners’, one of whom waxes philosophical on the phenomenon and his own reasons for involvement, demonstrating just how much a person can resist the generalisations one may be tempted to apply to them. In this and many other instances I found myself admiring Bennetts’ boldness and gumption in tracking down and securing interviews with a range of individuals whose contributions are often illuminating.
As alluded to already, Euro 2016 has thrown up a few surprises. In addition to Iceland’s besting of England, Wales, in the first major tournament they have qualified for since 1958, have reached the semi-final stage. Football Dynamo has its own unlikely success story, charting Chechen side Terek Grozny’s rise, almost literally from the ashes, to win the Russian Cup in 2004. Full credit to Bennetts here though for not shying away from discussing the problematic and deeply uncomfortable aspects of this unlikely triumph.
Understandably, Bennetts works on the assumption that his primary audience won’t know much at all about contemporary Russia so the book includes a lot that will be familiar to anyone who has spent any significant time there. For me, there was plenty here that brought forth a wry smile, and occasionally a weary head shake, of recognition. One of my personal favourites was his observation that Russians will often meet bizarre, absurd or illogical occurrences with the simple utterance, ‘this is Russia’. I can most definitely confirm that this is the case.
Football Dynamo is definitely well worth searching out as Bennetts presents the game as an intriguing prism through which to view life in Russia during this century’s opening decade and delivers some memorable stories in the process.
