Saint Petersburg

Actor Mikhail Boyarsky almost officially holds the title of the main fan of St. Petersburg Zenit. Not counting, of course, the Kremlin fans, who rarely appear at the stadium. During the most important match for Zenit in the last 23 years - against Saturn in Ramenskoye near Moscow - Boyarsky, as he himself believes, “made his small contribution to the victory,” and therefore to the long-awaited championship. A ball hit him in the stands at the end of the game. Vadim Evseev from Saturn should have thrown him out of touch. “I threw the ball onto the field, and Evseev laughed and threw it back to me. We spent seven seconds on this!” - Boyarsky laughs. Seven seconds in Ramenskoye were incredibly important for Zenit: the St. Petersburgers were leading 1:0, but Saturn pressed them to the goal and almost scored. However, Boyarsky’s modest help, of course, cannot be compared with what high-ranking fans did for the team, wooing it to Gazprom.

Gazprom not only made the dream of a big city come true - it also changed the club everyone loved in St. Petersburg beyond recognition. The first championship since 1984 turned out only partly as the St. Petersburgers imagined it. This, of course, was a “victory over Moscow”, over all its five clubs and hundreds of officials who exist only to prevent St. Petersburg from taking first place. But it was not a victory of good over evil - as the championship would have been perceived two years ago. At that time, St. Petersburg was proud of the “ecological purity” of its football: the low-budget Zenit played only honestly, used either its own players or cheap ones, and therefore was always inferior to the allegedly completely corrupt Moscow.

The confrontation between St. Petersburg and Moscow in the ideological sense ended not with the victory of the northern capital, but with its transformation into Moscow. There were even fans in St. Petersburg - most often after local failures - who were ready to agree that their favorite team, which suddenly received the largest budget in Russian football, would use the most shady “Moscow methods” for the sake of the championship. And now many Muscovites are reproaching Zenit for “shady games”.

However, in any case, there was little romance in Zenit’s victory. There is much more of the signature pragmatism of the gas monopoly. According to Vlastimil Petrzhela, the coach of that pure and reckless Zenit of two years ago, the club played the decisive match with Saturn in a completely “cowardly” manner. Boyarsky, an experienced romantic, also agrees with Petrzhela - they played, in his words, not according to the principle of “one for all and all for one,” but according to the principle of “taking the ball anywhere.” But this assessment from the former idol and main fan, of course, did not prevent the football-mad city from going a hundred times more crazy for a few days.

"THE HEART IS IN THE RIGHT PLACE"

Petrzela can even be accused of being extremely jealous. The merits of Gazprom, which fired him, are obvious, but there is little left of the team he built in St. Petersburg. A good half of Zenit's championship squad consisted of players purchased by the new owner over the past year: Dominguez, Tekke, Tymoshchuk, Lombaerts, Ricksen and Pogrebnyak cost the team a total of approximately $50 million, according to estimates. Each of them " Zenit began to earn much more: almost all players received an average salary increase of four times. Tymoshchuk and Arshavin completely broke Russian records for salaries: according to one of the agents, they receive €3 million per season. And for winning the championship, the source adds, Arshavin will be paid another 50% of his annual income.

But in the match with the same “Saturn”, the city received a clear refutation of the fact that Gazprom brought with it “Moscow methods”. A minute before the end, the opponent hit the post - what kind of bribery and “Gazprom’s hand” can there be here? No - pure luck and a well-deserved championship.

But the team representatives, not having time to properly celebrate the victory, began vying with each other to respond to the spiteful critics. “They talked a lot about Gazprom - they say that it has enough money to buy matches and to buy judges. Don’t believe this, because Gazprom won’t do this, it’s too dangerous,” Zenit assistant head coach Cornelius Pot gave Newsweek an ironclad argument.

The Dutch head coach Dick Advocaat himself refuted the thesis about Gazprom’s unconditional victory on the financial front. According to him, Moscow clubs spent even more on purchasing new players. “The only difference is that if Zenit needs to spend money, we go to the management of Gazprom and explain how much and why. This happens openly, everyone will immediately know about it,” explains the Advocate. And Muscovites, they say, do everything almost in secret.

The transition of St. Petersburg residents from the category of “poor but honest” to the rank of leaders of Russian football was painful. At first, money only spoiled the team: in the spring, scandals broke out in the club one after another. First, during a friendly pre-season game, midfielders Radimov and Riksen fought right on the field, then, on the night before the most important meeting with Spartak, a youth group of Arshavin, Denisov and Anyukov went on a spree. By the summer, a full-fledged opposition had appeared in St. Petersburg - not only to Gazprom, but also to coach Advocaat.

“It’s great that there were problems,” Cornelius Pot says now. - A team always needs a hierarchy: you need to find out who the leader is. And at the beginning of the season, the players did not yet know each other. All these fights, it was interesting and useful for the coaches to see how the team behaves in such extreme conditions.”

In the spring, however, neither Pot nor his boss could calmly talk about the situation in the team. And in the summer, the current hero of St. Petersburg Advocate could have been fired altogether, admits Zenit sports director Konstantin Sarsania, “if the club had lost 2-3 more meetings.” And then the Dutchman refused to re-sign the contract for the next season - he took the fans’ hatred to heart. In addition, says a source in the club, Zenit did not offer him a salary increase and set a firm condition - to take a place no lower than second (in the summer such a result was a big question). The lawyer was offended and, according to the source, signed a preliminary contract with the Australian Football Federation.

Vulnerability, oddly enough, is the main character trait of the Lawyer, say people who know him. He plays disciplined and schematic football for all his teams, but deep down he is “a very subtle and sensitive person.” So after the match with Saturn, a Newsweek photojournalist noticed tears in Advokat’s eyes. “His heart is in the right place,” Pot concluded pathetically.

A source in the club's management confirmed to Newsweek that Zenit must now "very seriously apologize" to the offended hero. And in addition to the salary increase, Australians will also have to pay a penalty.

But the club’s management is confident that Advocate is worth the money. After all, the fact remains: there are many rich sponsors in Russia, but never before have investments in football worked so quickly. Thanks to this circumstance, Gazprom won the “vanity championship” over its competitors - large companies that sponsor other football clubs.

DUTCH 4-3-3

Lawyer's ill-wishers were nicknamed PJ-philes - in honor of the Czech merry fellow Vlastimil Petrzela. He played beautiful, sharp-attacking football for Zenit, but he couldn’t rise above second place, and recently, before his dismissal last spring, he showed much worse results. Now the Czech is coaching Neftchi Baku. On Saturday, the day before Zenit’s championship game, his club played in the Azerbaijani championship, and the fans, according to the coach, chanted throughout the match: “Zenit is the champion!” “It was nice,” Petrzela sighs.

Cech was reproached primarily for Zenit's lack of discipline and, as a result, stability - the club could win enchantingly against the leader, and then lose mediocrely to an outsider. For Advocaat it’s the opposite: the club did not often show emotional play, lost many key matches with the leaders, but defeated outsiders in a disciplined manner. “Zenit under Advokat plays less aggressively and much slower than under Petrzhela, but much more organized,” Saturn coach Gadzhi Gadzhiev assesses the competitors.

According to Konstantin Sarsania, the coach’s work can be assessed by another criterion: almost all the players under the Dutchman’s leadership have seriously improved over the season. The most striking progress is made by midfielder Konstantin Zyryanov: “They hired him as a replacement player, but he ended up as the best player in the championship,” says Sarsania. “Tymoshchuk began to play much more competently in tactical terms, Pogrebnyak also played quite well: he scored 11 goals, despite the fact that he did not have a permanent place in the base,” Sarsania lists.

The lawyer built a complex tactical scheme, says former Moscow coach Leonid Slutsky. This is a modified classic Dutch 4-3-3, only two extreme forwards (Dominguez and Arshavin) play rather an inside role, and one of the defensive midfielders (Zyryanov) plays closer to the attack line. Such a subtle scheme, the coach notes, requires “a long grind,” because in fact, eight players participate in defense and eight attack.

This process took the Lawyer six months. During this time, Radek Shirl has transformed from a skinny winger into the most aggressive defensive midfielder - and Sarsania calls his personal growth the most significant. Maybe because it was Shirl who made St. Petersburg happy by scoring the only goal for Saturn.

TWO DAY HOLIDAY

In happy St. Petersburg, as many as two citywide celebrations took place - in Moscow there would not have been one. On Sunday, immediately after the game, the football players flew into the city. They were immediately taken to the crowded Petrovsky stadium. Then - for a holiday “for our own”. Almost none of the players slept that night. “About four o’clock in the morning, having already felt very tired, I started calling everyone in a row - just from the phone book [of my mobile phone],” one of the Zenit players told Newsweek. - Many did not answer. To those who answered the phone, I asked only one question: “Who am I?” And you know, no one told me my first or last name. Everyone said: “You are a champion!”

All the restaurants were crowded, and champagne was being drunk in the streets. A journalist from Radio Zenit came out to interview people. "What do you feel?" - his first and last question was heard on air to unknown interlocutors. And then - just a muffled scream: the fans began to throw the correspondent into the air in joy.

And the next day the most devoted fans returned from Ramenskoye - and the celebration had to be repeated. A column of 500 fans walked along Nevsky Prospect and turned to the Kempinski Hotel to personally greet the sensitive Dick Advocaat who resides there. The police cleared the way for the unauthorized march using flashing lights.

The demonstrators carried trophies with them: the main one was shreds from the net of the goal into which the golden goal was scored. And everyone who could still speak assured that this victory of St. Petersburg over Moscow was final and irrevocable. Governor Valentina Matvienko expressed the general opinion: “The football capital has moved to St. Petersburg.” Euphoria is still much more pleasant than romance.

The material was prepared with the participation of Chermen Dzgoev and Tatyana Kopylova