Tomorrow the Russian national team will play against the Germans at Luzhniki

World Championship 2010

Tomorrow the Russian national team will play a key qualifying match for the 2010 FIFA World Cup at Luzhniki. In order to leave the fourth qualifying group in first place and save themselves from the need to make their way to South Africa through the play-offs, the Russians need to defeat the Germans, who are still one point ahead of them, and confirm that they are able to play games with the strong much better than with the weak.

Tomorrow the Russian team will meet with a special opponent. The German team has won the World and European Championships three times each and is the current silver medalist in both competitions. And its reliability in qualifying rounds for top tournaments is simply amazing. She failed to qualify for them only once. And this happened more than 40 years ago, when the Germans failed to qualify for the 1968 European Championship due to a draw with the Albanians.

However, optimism about the Moscow match in Russia does not seem to live up to the reputation of an opponent that everyone should fear. Polls on sports websites record a convincing - sometimes double - superiority of those fans who believe in the victory of the Russian team. Bookmakers reward her with higher odds. For example, William Hill yesterday set odds of 2.37 for the Russian team to win, and 2.62 for the German team. With Russian bookmakers, the difference in favor of the hosts is even more noticeable.

And there is nothing strange about this. There are several reasons why the Russian team's chances look good. Let's start with the fact that under coach Guus Hiddink, having become a semi-finalist of the European Championship and climbing to sixth place in the FIFA ranking, it rose, so to speak, in status to the level of the German, which in the same classification shares the fourth or fifth positions with the Italians .

The current qualifying cycle has so far given no reason to say that the Russian team does not correspond to it. She won seven out of eight matches. The only defeat that provided the main competitors with a tiny advantage before the meeting in Luzhniki came a year ago from the Germans on their field - in Dortmund. But even there she was extremely close to achieving a draw. The hosts were superior to the Russians only in the opening half hour of the match and during this time they managed to score two goals. In the remaining hour, the guests were at least no worse, they won back one goal, and in the end, the German national team, pressed to its goal, miraculously did not concede - thanks to the post, which Alan Dzagoev hit.

It cannot be said that before this meeting Guus Hiddink did not encounter personnel problems. They clearly exist. We are talking, for example, about Russian legionnaires. Since September, the Russian national team has the opportunity to field a base for the match, almost half consisting of players from elite clubs in elite leagues. But the other side of this basically pleasant fact is also already striking. Two of these five - midfielder Yuri Zhirkov and Roman Pavlyuchenko - settled in the reserve reserves of Chelsea and Tottenham and were virtually deprived of playing practice. Both are too important figures in Hiddink’s system not to worry about their downtime.

But Guus Hiddink's opponent, Joachim Löw, has equally compelling reasons for concern. For example, the state of the German attack - the most dangerous, it seems, judging by the loudness of the names of the footballers representing it, the line of the German national team - seems deplorable. Eight rounds were played in the German championship. And during this time, the four forwards chosen by Lev for the trip to Moscow - Mario Gomez, Lukasz Podolski, Miroslav Klose and Cacau - scored a total of four goals. Moreover, three of them belong to Gomez, of whom it is well known that he is effective exclusively in club matches, and in the national team he is famous for his ability to squander 100% chances.

There is another, perhaps more important, factor speaking in favor of the Russian team. The fact is that Russian football players, oddly enough, have always - even before the arrival of Guus Hiddink - been distinguished by their ability to play well against great opponents - at least in qualifying tournaments. She found herself in the same group more than once with teams of German caliber. And there was no case when meetings with them turned out to be a complete failure for the Russians.

This applies even to those cycles, following which the Russian team either did not win the right to participate in the final part of the tournament at all, or won it through difficult battles. It was not the favorites that spoiled her position, but the middle peasants or outsiders.

She missed the 2000 European Championship, sharing victories with the French world champions, but giving four points to the Ukrainians and three to the Icelanders. To go to the next one, she had to beat Wales in the play-offs. Then in the group the Russians took four points each in matches with the winners of the qualifying tournament - the Swiss and the strong Irish, but suffered one defeat each from Georgia and Albania, which was not taken seriously.

Of the entire performance of the Russian national team in the qualifying round for the previous World Cup, which was left without it, the first thing that was remembered was, of course, its humiliating loss - 1:7 in Portugal. However, strictly speaking, it was not he who dropped the Russian team to third place. The Russians, who played 0-0 at home with the powerful Portuguese, again stumbled against those who were not considered their equals: two draws with Slovakia, one each with Latvia and Estonia.

The first qualifying tournament with Guus Hiddink at the head of the Russian team - for the bronze Austrian-Swiss Euro - did not break the tradition. She made two goalless draws with the Croatians who looked great in the tournament and took first place. And her best match was the match against the most titled opponent: the Russians defeated the English in Luzhniki with a score of 2:1. At the same time, they gave four points to the Israelis, who had no real claim to leaving the group. And the defeat in Tel Aviv that followed the Moscow triumph almost wiped out everything that the Russian team had achieved with its victory in the crowded Luzhniki Stadium. Luckily for her, the Croats beat the English in London in a game they didn’t need - and the Russian football players went to the European Championship.

This cycle is the first in which the Russian team went through the middle peasants and outsiders in the form of the Finns, Welsh, and Liechtensteiners without losses. More precisely, it almost passed, because the group tournament does not end for them with a match with the “inconvenient” Germans, against whom the Russians have never won since the collapse of the USSR (two draws and three defeats), and tomorrow’s success is not a 100% guarantee of direct, without joints, ending up in South Africa. Now, in the euphoria that accompanies the “game of the year,” going to Baku on Wednesday seems like something completely insignificant. But, taking into account the specific psychology of domestic football players, it is apparently not worth forgetting about Azerbaijan, no matter how weak it may seem.

Alexey Kommersant-Dospehov

May you be lucky with the strongest