Being a connoisseur of sport in the former
Soviet Union, I was looking forward to seeing the Socceroos play at the Spartak
Stadium in the city formerly known as Frunze.
An article
in the antipodean edition of the Guardian
gives a feel of the essential post-Sovietness of the ground: dilapidated
seating, low-grade turf, and Cyrillic writing, the city’s residents housed in
rows upon rows of khrushchyovka. It’s
the sort of description calculated to repulse the (post-)modern globalised consumerist
Westerner, but it serves as a reminder that there was once another world, born
in revolt against capitalism and more real than our baudrillardien pottage of hypocrisy and hyperreality.
Both teams lined up in an alledged 4-3-3 on
a pitch that looked not so much post-Soviet as post-grass. The tone for the
match was set in the first minute, when the Socceroos attacked from the
kick-off, Mathew Leckie drawing a foul. The subsequent free kick was belted in
by Mile Jedinak, and the Asian champions had taken their first step down the
road to Russia in 2018.
Before they could get settled in, however,
the Snow Leopards came at them with all guns blazing. They had mounted two
attacks on Mat Ryan’s goal by the seventh minute, the suspiciously
European-sounding Edgar Bernhardt looking particularly dangerous. Indeed, the
visitors’ next half-chance came in the seventeenth minute. At one end, Mirlan
Murzaev hit the side netting; at the other, Nathan Burns had a penalty shout
turned down. By the half-hour mark, eight shots had been taken, three-quarters
of them by ак барстар.
Defender Daniel Tagoe was cautioned for his
challenge on Leckie, but i gialloverdi
could do little with the ensuing free kick-corner kick combo. The teams went
into the sheds with a 1-0 scoreline showing on the electronic scoreboard in
that 1980s alarm clock font, but the real stars of the show were the home side,
determined to take the game to their illustrious opponents, and the turf, whose
pot-holes and unpredictable bounce forced both sides to avoid the midfield passovotchka and engage in a relentless
end-to-end shootout.
After the break, the men in red from the steppes
showed that they had more tricks up their sleeve. Their tactic of
javelin-throwing the ball into the box at throw-ins almost resulted in Murzaev
doing a play-the-ball into the goal. Still threatening with three-quarters of the
match played, Kyrgyzstan would finish ahead nine to two on corners and nineteen
to eleven on shots. They had dictated the frenetic tempo of the match, and it
would be their undoing as a steal by Mark Milligan in the Australian half was
passed to a charging Tommy Oar on the left wing, who coolly slotted the ball
past the keeper.
To the credit of the Central Asians, they
persisted with their high-intensity game, their forcing of a pressured
clearance from Ryan just two minutes later nearly resulting in a goal for Anton
Zemlianukhin. They did get one back deep in injury time, when a corner kick
came off the head of captain Azamat Baymatov and was fully over the line before
appearing to touch the hand of substitute forward Almazbek Mirzaliev at the far
post. The other interesting occurrence came in the seventy-ninth minute, when a
piece of the advertising hoarding surrounding the pitch fell over of its own accord.
But these descriptions of who scored and in
which minute don’t do justice to this match. This was the most frenzied ninety
minutes I have ever seen: counter-attack upon counter-attack, long balls,
verticality, hurried clearances, powerfully launched throw-ins, pressing and gegenpressing. It was as if a new game
had been born, one devoid of the tedious passenacio
which has come to define modern football. And it was all thanks to a team
nicknamed, of all things, the Snow Leopards.
Kyrgyzstan 1 (Azamat Baymatov 92’)
– Australia
2 (Mile Jedinak 2’; Tommy Oar 67’)
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