To Beard A Boyar In Muscovy

A bickering world, quite rightly, gets Russia, the commonest bete noire, as host of its cup of life. Ah, but we mustn’t cavil. It might turn out to be fun after all.

- Saptarshi Ray

RUSSIA 2018 is the World Cup the world deserves right now. We have been naughty, we have been dictatorial, a bit too warmongering, a bit too Twitter stormy, to get the jubilant tournament we all dream of. Instead, we end up with a host nation that stands accused of everything—from poisoning dissidents to rigging elections. You’ve been bad, world.

But rather than being sent to bed without dinner, the powers of football—the celestial ones, not the disgraced, earthly ones like FIFA—decree that the usual glory and zest experienced by the globe once every four years, shall this time take place in the nation suppopsedly guilty of being a global nuisance. And that the tournament itself, inst­ead of offering relief from the murk of real­world politics and finance, shall actually reflect it.

First up, we have a host accu­sed of poisonings and hacking elections—most of it denied, some of it simply mocked. When the British foreign secre­tary, Boris Johnson, threatened to boycott the tournament after the ongoing Salisbury case—in which Moscow has been accu­ sed of poisoning a former KGB agent and his daughter in south­ west England—scarcely anyone in the UK believed him, let alone the Russians. It is simply too big a party to miss out on, and they know it. And so, Russia beckons the flag­waving fans into its bosom, offering less of paparazzi shots of glamorous wives and girlfriends shopping, and more of hooligans offering punches and the odd FSB agent armed with radioactive sushi and nerve­gas condiments.