Roger Alton Roger Alton

An epochal, joyful, brain-churning World Cup

Like most people with any taste, I like the odd vodka, I love Crime and Punishment, I enjoy Turgenev and Chekhov, and who doesn’t like to listen to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov? Their national anthem’s not bad either. In other words, Russia’s quite a place, give or take the odd poisoning or country takeover. And as this epochal, joyful, brain-churning World Cup roars into the last lap, let’s look back at what some of Fleet Street’s finest were predicting just a few weeks ago for the land of Dostoevsky and Stravinsky.

Ignoring the admirable advice to steer clear of Nazi references, this was the Observer’s Nick Cohen: ‘If you wonder how you would have reacted to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, look at how you are reacting to Putin’s 2018 World Cup and learn something about yourself and the nature of sport. Russian abuse will be directly in the fans’ line of vision. Our gaze will not be able to shift from it. Blind though we are to everything outside the game, we may not be able to escape politics when it is staring us in the face.’ Not sure it felt like that to the millions watching England on TV, or any of the tattooed giants (and that’s just the women) slinging their beer around the Croydon fan zone.

Here’s Ben Rumsby in the Telegraph reporting a top copper warning that England supporters could be subjected to an ‘extreme level of violence’ at the hands of Russian hooligans. In the Guardian, Patrick Wintour reported the (then) foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, predicting that Vladimir Putin ‘will revel in the World Cup in Russia this summer in the same way that Adolf Hitler did in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936’.

And on and on.

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