Michael McGuire: Russians have good reasons to be pessimistic about their World Cup chances

MICHAEL McGuire now regrets he didn’t go on to finish Russian at uni. In between wandering in bemusement through cavernous train stations in Moscow, he’s figured out something we have in common with the Russkies … pessimism about our World Cup chances.

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IT’S taken almost 30 years but I’m now regretting not paying more attention in my Russian classes at Adelaide Uni.

Taking Russian in the first place was one of those daft decisions you sometimes take in your late teens and early 20s.

Puffed up on a diet of Doesteovsky and Solzhenitsyn, it seemed like a reasonable step to take. Perhaps I had some romantic notion that I would be able to read Dosteovsky in its original form. Turns out — no.

My brain wasn’t ready for the complexity of a language where verbs can have moods.

Dropping it after a year was a decision I believed to be entirely correct until I landed in Moscow on Sunday. It’s a great way to feel remarkably stupid. Land in a foreign country with no knowledge of how to communicate, how to get around, how to do the basics you didn’t give a lot of thought to 24 hours earlier.

My Russian is almost non-existent. What little I did know back then has filtered away almost entirely into the void. Not many Russians speak a lot of English and there have been lots of conversations so far with two people looking at each other with no idea how to proceed. Luckily, and contrary to brusque Russian stereotype, all have done their best to help the idiot foreigner trying desperately to figure out which train station is which.

Russian spectators watch Socceroos training at their base, Stadium Trudovye Rezervy, in Kazan, Russia. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Except for the one bloke who did speak good English. Not that he was unfriendly, he just guided me on to a train going in exactly the opposite direction to the one I wanted.

I thought I’d at least push him for some local colour about the World Cup being held in Russia, thinking I could at least quote him in a story.

But he was off to the basketball finals and didn’t care about the World Cup.

Russians are pessimistic about their side’s chances in the World Cup.

With good reason.

Their world ranking is at historic lows and Friday morning’s opener against Saudi Arabia is seen as a chance for national embarrassment.

That was one of two wrong trains I caught that day. It was nearly three. I thought I’d figured out where I had gone wrong and was about to step on to another but thought I’d try to check with another local. Just in case.

After telling me “Nyet English” I told him the name of the station I was aiming for. He looked at me like I was a remarkable specimen of Western idiocy, and I thought my pronunciation was so bad he had no idea what I was saying.

Then he grabbed me by the arm, took me back to the corridor and pointed me to go back a long, long way and held up five digits to tell me the line I should be on. Still, I managed to see a lot of the Moscow Metro that day. And it is a truly spectacular sight. The old Communists didn’t hold back in building the stations.

Huge, cavernous platforms with giant stone pillars. If the ancient Romans or Greeks had train stations they would look something like these. And they are a long way underground. Only coal miners, Jules Verne and Barnaby Joyce have been in holes this deep.

The World Cup is Russia’s chance to open itself up to the rest of us a bit more, but there is still something of an old world feel to the place. But also the feeling that it’s running hard to catch up.

In my hotel, there are 20-odd TV stations, all in Russian, which sometimes makes little difference to understanding what is going on. Donald Trump with a Russian voiceover doesn’t make much less sense for example.

But the oddities are part of the fun. Where else would you find a man, this one looking like the stereotype of a dodgy Russian, trying to sell a razor-sharp retractable sickle in a train carriage? The other bloke selling magnifying glasses wasn’t quite as intimidating.

Still, that decision to study Russian all those years ago is having a little benefit. To the western eye the Cyrillic alphabet is an odd collection of letters, numbers and backward letters. But at least I still remember a “p” sounds like an “r”, a ‘C’ is an “s” and the backwards R is “ya”. The letter that looks like a croquet hoop is pronounced as a “p”. It makes figuring out the train stations that little bit easier.

However, “spaceba” (thank you) is also receiving quite the workout.

■ MICHAEL MCGUIRE IS IN RUSSIA TO COVER THE WORLD CUP