There is a reason to stress

The Russian national team at the home world championship got the most passing group

Winter came with a blizzard, and the draw took place in the Kremlin. As a result of the action, it follows that on June 14 at Luzhniki in the opening match, the team with the lowest rating among all participants will host the second team from the end of the rating. Russia will meet with Saudi Arabia.

And then it will go on the rise: on June 19 in St. Petersburg, Russia will play with Egypt, on June 25 to complete the group stage in Samara with Uruguay. It is hardly worth shouting that Group A is one of the most passable - Russia has never had any impassable groups in the final tournaments of the World Championships, and they have never made it to the cup round. So I’ll be careful not to give advances and complain in advance that if the first relegation match comes out, I’ll probably have to play either with Spain or Portugal - the clear favorites of the neighboring group “B”.

And in general, there is nothing more useless than to wish, and then rejoice at "convenient" opponents. Right during the ceremony, there was applause in the hall when the ball with Saudi Arabia was the first to be taken out of the fourth basket. That is, someone did not hide his joy, putting three points in the pocket of the Russian team in advance. But even in the deserts they know how to play football, as the Russians have recently seen in Qatar.

The former Chile coach Juan Antonio Pizzi will lead the Saudi footballers into battle, and he knows a lot about the game “from the knife”. The opponent also has a little-known to the general public, but a unique striker Mohamed Al-Sahlavi, who scored 16 goals in 14 matches of the qualifying tournament.

The Egyptian national team, by the way, is coached by one of the best, in my opinion, coaches in the world, Hector Cooper, who knows how to sculpt teams literally from nothing. And then there was just one of them - suffice it to say that the Argentine had at his disposal the leader of Liverpool's attacks, Mohamed Salah, and Egypt left the most difficult African group. The match in St. Petersburg will most likely become a key one for both teams, and in Samara Russia will be examined by Uruguay, a titled South American team, which has no equal in tenacity and assertiveness on the continent. And then there's Barcelona's number two attack leader, Luis Suarez, with the famous tooth bite, and Edison Cavani, arguing for the lead with Neymar in the French PSG, are both of the best goal hunters in the world. Do not forget that the most experienced and wisest Oscar Tabares coaches the Uruguay national team.

The Russians did not meet with any of the rivals. According to the coaching rating, group “A” is almost the strongest. And so the fours turned out to be more or less equivalent, hardly any can be attributed to the “group of death”. Here, the football stars who retrieved the balls - and the main part of the action was opened by the patriarch of domestic and world football Nikita Simonyan, who retrieved the balls from the first basket - did not let the organizers down. Diego Maradona, who looked surprisingly smart and stylish, like Laurent Blanc, Fabio Cannavaro, Cafu, Diego Forlan and Gordon Banks, had an easy hand for the favorites.

Unless two groups look stronger than others - under the letter "D" the draw brought together Argentina, Iceland, Croatia and Nigeria, under the letter "F" - Germany, Mexico, Sweden and South Korea. In the first cup round, the meeting of Uruguay with Spain, France with Argentina, Brazil with Germany, England with Poland is not ruled out, but before that it is even further than before the first starting whistle.

... I saw different draws. This one was supposed to be special - the chance that Russia will host the World Cup again in the foreseeable future is zero. Probably, she would have become like that, if not for the background against which the ceremony unfolded. And I don’t mean the Moscow snowstorm, but those clouds that come from Lausanne and are already hanging over sports Russia. Football is a distant holiday, although it has become closer. And the cars from the International Olympic Committee are very close. And even if FIFA President Gianni Infantino assured that even the removal of Russia from the Olympics in Pyeongchang would not interfere with the holding of the World Cup in Russia, this looked like weak consolation.

Vladimir Putin, in his welcoming speech, not without a hint of the situation, stressed that "friendship, sports, fair fight - these values ​​are not subject to any conjuncture." Who would argue.