Accreditation is a small quest: an email, a confirmation, a list, a passport. At the end you get a PRESS card with your surname handwritten on the back in marker; in the age of Face ID and Fan ID there is something touchingly analogue about it. On the reverse are the stadium zones from zero to nine; the press get three: the "stadium grounds", the stands and the press centre with its box. The digits 0, 7 and 9 on the card are your route for the evening.
Then come the corridors and the journalists' working room: desks, sockets, wi-fi. Half the people are charging equipment, the other half are already writing and watching, even though kick-off is an hour and a half away. People say hello and chat, but quietly all the same, almost like a reading room; you can feel that one way or another everyone is saving their words for the evening.
Borscht
Now for the main discovery of the evening, and it isn't Offor.
In the press canteen at the VEB Arena the food is free. The borscht comes in a plastic bowl with a plastic spoon, without any ceremony, and it's delicious. Rich, with beetroot and carrot, not "red canteen soup" but the kind you get praised for at home.
Borscht is in fact the main topic of small talk here. Everyone around was asking each other, "Going for borscht?", "Had your borscht?", like a password and countersign. On the same table lay a slightly tired sheet of paper, the club's press release. While reading it I caught myself thinking that the phrase "keeper battle" from the announcement of Akinfeev's children's tournament sounded almost like what Borisko and Torop would be doing a couple of hours later.
I came for the football, and my warmest feelings towards CSKA are now gastronomic. 🍲😋👌
That's not a trifle, by the way. A journalist on the road lives on a schedule of "train/plane/taxi - stadium - deadline", and a hot meal before the match matters more than a handsome facade. My respect to the club for the canteen is sincere.
The people I read as a child
The strongest impression of the evening isn't the view from the box. It's the neighbours in it.
A couple of seats from me sits Boris Levin. Legendary, no exaggeration: I read his pieces as a schoolboy, when the newspaper was bought with money saved from the school canteen and passed round. And if football isn't your thing, you know him anyway, as a regular on "What? Where? When?". It's a strange feeling when a man from the newspaper pages and the television suddenly turns out to be a living neighbour who squints into his laptop and grumbles at the game just like you.
Maksim Kvyatkovsky, another byline from the same childhood, I met downstairs in the journalists' room and later in the canteen. We had actually crossed paths before, at the presentation of an award for local bloggers, and exchanged a few words. Not sure he remembered me, though 😁 Life works in funny ways: first you read a man as a child, then you say hello to him.
Next to me in the box are writers from Championat and other papers and outlets, the ones you usually see as a line under a headline, and now you hear their live versions of incidents before they become texts. A little further along are representatives of the Media League, and that's a sign of the times in itself: ten years ago only newspapers and websites sat in the press box; now whole leagues sit here.
There's no pomp in this row. Everyone is doing the same job: watching, noting, arguing under their breath. It's just that some have three seasons of experience, and some have three decades of your life. And one of them is me 😁.
The view from above
The VEB Arena itself, and this was my first time here too, isn't the eighth wonder of the world, but the impression is pleasant. Compact, everything close and convenient, the logistics make sense.
But the press box here got lucky: you sit high up in the centre, and the football lays itself out like on a tactics board. From the stand behind the goal I felt the game; from the sofa I watched replays; from here you see the structure: how Baltika's back five squeezes together, how Krugovoi finds free metres, how the zone in front of the own goal tears open a second before the pass.
If you thought journalists up there sit in expensive armchairs, smoke cigars and are surrounded by monitors and team sheets, they don't. I honestly thought roughly that myself. In reality it's a plain little chair and the rule "what you bring is what you've got". Come with a phone, and a phone is what you'll sit with.
And here's the interesting thing: people do support in the press box, just differently. Goals are celebrated, only with restraint: nobody chants, nobody whistles, the atmosphere is businesslike. My personal exam in restraint was failed in the 35th second, when Gassama laid it off and Offor hammered in the first goal of the season. The away end exploded, a short murmur rolled through the box, and I sat there rejoicing, shaking my little fists in joy and at the sheer unexpectedness of it.
The man in the next seat
My neighbour was genuinely pleased with Offor's goal too. We didn't know each other. "That's Buloichik's coaching," he said. "His Shinnik scored two goals out of three from set pieces as well."
Then came the best coincidence of the evening. The neighbour turned out to be Aleksandr Simbirsky of Championat, the man who has interviewed Buloichik more than once. The very interviews I'd linked to in my piece about Buloichik and Baltika's set pieces. You quote a man in your texts, and then you sit down in the seat next to him and break down the first goal of the season, not yet knowing each other's names.
That's how the press box works in general: everyone here has read everyone. It's just that not everyone knows it.
The press conference
I went to the press conference without questions; the first time, it's more important to study the atmosphere. It could be read from the faces: the CSKA coach was joking, ours was in a worse mood. Understandable: one had the first win of the season, the other a good performance without points.
People said coaches here often have to count to ten before answering, because the questions can be frankly stupid. This time it went almost without the classics of the genre, although Igdisamov's "if you'd watched the game carefully" and Talalaev's silent bafflement at the wrong number of defenders bought that came up in the questions did make an appearance. But I won't criticise my colleagues: who knows what I would have asked; perhaps the orderlies would have led me out by my lily-white arms 🚑
What remains afterwards
After the press conference I wandered a little more around the almost empty stadium. There were fewer and fewer people, the corridors could finally be looked at without hurrying, and the staff were already starting to pack the match they'd just lived through back into an ordinary working day. It all ended unexpectedly fast: a moment ago the stands were roaring, journalists were arguing and coaches were answering, and now all that was left was to find the exit and call a taxi.
I left the stadium with a lost match and a strangely good mood. Because there are things the scoreboard can't cancel: you sat where the texts are made that once made you. Twenty years ago I read Levin and Kvyatkovsky over breakfast. Now we watched the same football from the same row. It's a pleasure to sit beside the masters of journalism.
The score was 2:1 to CSKA. By my personal feeling, more of a draw.
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