A full hall, popcorn and very soft seats
There were four of us - me and my son, a friend and his son. Popcorn, Fanta, very soft seats. For the first minute I wasn't sure I had come to watch football at all.
Then I looked around: an almost full hall, Baltika scarves, caps, someone wrapped in a flag. A stadium - just with cup holders.
Football is more honest in a cinema than at home. At home you can lie to yourself: "we're playing fine". In a full hall the lie doesn't work - the room reacts before you've had time to come up with an excuse.
For the first twenty minutes the hall was silent. Not because it was bad - because it was baffling. Rodina passed the ball around, Baltika stood in a back five and waited. On a screen the size of a house it looked odd: one team was playing football, the other was busy with something else.
Then Murid scored, and it became clear what exactly the other team had been busy with. It had a plan!
First half: 118 passes and three big chances
Here's the number that made the trip worthwhile. In 45 minutes Rodina produced 0.18 expected goals with 71% possession and 301 passes. Baltika - 0.90 from 118 passes. Big chances: zero for the hosts, three for the visitors.
One caveat straight away: here and below the numbers are from FotMob and Sofascore. Other providers classify shots and blocked attempts differently, so you may see different shot counts in someone else's match report - that's normal.
Three big chances in a half in which you barely touch the ball is no longer an accident. Baltika voluntarily gave up possession, shut down the space in front of its own box and waited for the moment when a handful of passes would be worth more than several dozen of the opponent's.
Murid's goal in the 22nd minute came at the second attempt inside the box. His personal 53 minutes: 0.45 xG, 15 accurate passes out of 19, three interceptions.
The hall reacted to the goal as if the ball had flown in two metres away from it. A big screen has an interesting property: it brings the penalty area closer than a seat in the stands does.
The half-time break that decided the match
In the 46th minute Offor came on for Gil. In the 53rd Baltika took off two at once - Murid, the goalscorer, and captain Mendel. On came Petrov and Belikov.
Replacing the goalscorer and the captain at 1:0 looks strange until you look at the cards. Referee Yevgeny Kukulyak was reaching for yellow all match, and Baltika finished the first half with three of them: Murid in the 26th minute, Beveev in the 30th, Mendel in the 44th. The visitors ended up with five yellows in total (plus Petrov in the 72nd and Titkov in the 77th), Rodina with three - Pozo, Reyna, Meshchaninov. In the hall every whistle was greeted with the same sound - a mixture of an exhale and a nervous jab at the referee.
And this is where the double substitution stops being a mystery. In the 53rd minute they took off precisely the two players on cards in the middle of the pitch - Murid and Mendel. Five fouls, two ground duels won out of ten and a yellow in the 44th - the risk of a second card for Mendel was getting too high. Murid had added two fouls in a little over half an hour. When you're leading away from home and the coach isn't on the touchline, a second yellow in the holding zone is the last thing you need.
There was a rumble in the hall. Twenty minutes later the rumble became a roar: Offor scored after Maksimenko's botched pass back, with Petrov assisting. In the 85th minute Petrov scored himself - from a corner routine, off a delivery from Titkov.
Here's what the substitutions added up to: two goals and an assist. Petrov in 37 minutes - 4 shots, the most in the match. Offor in 45 minutes - 0.79 xG and 5 aerial duels won out of 6.
The second half, according to FotMob, was even harsher than the first: 1.32 xG against 0.28, 10 shots against 5, 6 on target against 1. And 10 interceptions against one - even though the ball was still with Rodina.
The nicest part was the ending. For the last twenty minutes Baltika didn't sit back to protect 2:0 but kept pushing forward: four corners in the half, 17 touches in the opposition box. Watching that on the big screen was a pleasure in itself.
Five details I didn't expect in the match report
The shots were better than the positions. Baltika had 2.22 xG and 2.56 xGOT. Usually it's the other way round: good chances, worse execution. Plus 0.34 means they struck more accurately than the situations allowed. Rodina had 0.46 xG and 0.17 xGOT - their entire match fit into two shots on target.
Baltika's best creator was the left-back. Gassama had 0.58 expected assists and two chances created - and at the same time 11 defensive actions and 8 aerial duels won out of 13. With 31% possession that is an indecent amount of work in both directions.
Gil played 45 minutes with zero accurate passes. Seven touches, zero duels won out of eight, two turnovers. One shot on target - and that's it. It's the most expressive zero of the match, and the half-time substitution surprised nobody in the hall.
Rodina's most dangerous moment fell out of xGOT altogether. Early in the second half Pozo hit the crossbar after Bakaev's cross. A shot against the frame doesn't count as a shot on target - so it isn't in xGOT, even though visually it was just about the most alarming episode at Latyshonok's goal. Hence the goalkeeper's 0.17 goals prevented: the metric describes only what was flying on target. Although, as it seemed to me, Yevgeny did get a touch and diverted it onto the bar.
Latyshonok himself had a calm match: three saves, two of them from shots inside the box, one high ball claimed, 10 accurate passes out of 18, zero fouls. Not a single episode where the hall tensed up because of the goalkeeper. That's a particular kind of confidence - when the keeper is barely shown in the broadcast.
The zero on the scoreboard is the work of a back five. Anderson had 12 defensive actions and 8 clearances, Varatynov 79% pass accuracy and not a single foul in 90 minutes. The difference between platforms is telling here: FotMob gave Anderson zero turnovers, Sofascore counted eight possessions lost - simply because it counts any loss of the ball, not just a giveaway under pressure.
Now one by one. And allow me to say this not in the language of a report but in the language of a man who spent an hour and a half in a soft seat and saw all of it.
Petrov - 8.1 (FotMob 8.4, Sofascore 7.8), 37 minutes, goal + assist. Petrov came on brilliantly, or so it seemed. Four shots in thirty-seven minutes - more than anyone who played ninety; eight accurate passes out of nine; a goal from a corner and an assist. The only thing he didn't do like a grown-up was pick up a yellow, plus he could have had a hat-trick but didn't =) And there was one serious giveaway - good thing Gassama covered.
Murid - 7.9 (8.1 / 7.7), 53 minutes, goal. He scored exactly when the hall had started to suspect it was watching a documentary about the opponent keeping the ball. At the second attempt, inside the box, matter-of-factly. He managed to clutch his head, agonise for a moment, and then score. Fifteen accurate passes out of nineteen and three interceptions in under an hour - and a departure in the 53rd; the yellow in the 26th was, in his case, not compulsory.
Gassama - 7.8 (7.9 / 7.7), 90 minutes. A left-back who turns out to be the team's best creator is, of course, a story not about Gassama but about how Baltika is put together. But it's about Gassama too: 0.58 expected assists, two chances created, eleven defensive actions and eight aerial balls won out of thirteen. In ninety minutes he managed to work as a full-back and a centre-forward.
Titkov - 7.65 (7.9 / 7.4), 88 minutes, assist. Man of the match according to Match Premier's expert Grigoryan, and I don't feel like arguing: five corners, seven crosses, eighty-five per cent accuracy, an assist on the third goal. Sofascore rated him lower because it counts possessions lost, and Titkov played with risk all evening. Both are right, and the hall was on Titkov's side.
Latyshonok - 7.5 (7.6 / 7.4), 90 minutes. A perfect goalkeeping evening looks like this: the goalkeeper barely gets shown. Three saves, two from shots inside the box. Pozo's crossbar didn't make it into his rating at all: a shot against the frame formally isn't a shot on target, but in fact he saved it, got his fingertips to it, and here, for the first time that evening, the statistics turned out to be dumber than the spectator.
Anderson - 7.5 (7.5 / 7.5), 90 minutes. Both platforms gave the same figure, which happens about as often as two commentators agreeing. Twelve defensive actions - the most in the match, eight clearances, nineteen accurate passes out of twenty-six. He's the player nobody tells stories about after the match, and that's precisely why there's a zero on the scoreboard.
Offor - 7.4 (7.5 / 7.3), 45 minutes, goal. Baltika started the second half with him. Six touches in the opposition box - the best figure of the match, five aerial balls won out of six, 0.79 expected goals and one real one. Two accurate passes out of six - well, what did you expect, the man had other tasks. Mind you, he started the half in such a way that people wanted him substituted.
Belikov - 7.35 (7.3 / 7.4), 37 minutes. Came on for the captain in a match where the referee already had his cards at the ready, and played those thirty-seven minutes as if nothing special were happening: nine defensive actions, seven ground duels out of eight, three out of three in the air, zero fouls. The only one Sofascore rated higher than FotMob did, and I'm probably with Sofascore.
Beveev - 7.2 (7.5 / 6.9), 90 minutes. The most divisive man of the evening. Eleven ball recoveries and three tackles - that's a right-back who ran all match. Fifty per cent pass accuracy and twenty-seven possessions lost from fifty-five touches - that's a right-back who made a lot of mistakes. Both sentences are true, and that's Beveev in a nutshell.
Varatynov - 7.1 (7.2 / 7.0), 90 minutes. Seventy-nine per cent accuracy, two interceptions, not a single foul and not a single episode where he was beaten. Players like that don't make the highlight reels, but they do make the team.
Mouyokolo - 6.8 (6.9 / 6.7), 90 minutes. Zero tackles, three fouls, twenty-two touches in ninety minutes. In the air he won three out of five, and that saves him. In one episode he rescued the team with a sliding tackle, poking the ball away from Onugha, and that episode is still being chewed over on TV by people who think it was a foul.
Pospelov - 6.65 (7.1 / 6.2), 72 minutes. Here the platforms diverged by almost a full point, and both are honest in their own way. Sofascore looks at the finishing: one shot, never on target, a missed chance - and drags the rating into the red zone. FotMob looks at the work: four tackles, eight ground duels won out of thirteen, three fouls won. Nineteen years old, a lot of running and forty-four per cent pass accuracy.
Moufi - 6.45 (6.2 / 6.7), 18 minutes. Eighteen minutes, ten touches, a shot on target, a tackle and an offside. Rating that seriously is a bit like judging a film by the credits, but since the aggregators had a go, so be it: Sofascore is kinder to late substitutes, FotMob is stricter, and the truth is somewhere around "played and did no harm".
Mendel - 6.3 (6.3 / 6.3), 53 minutes, captain. Both platforms gave the same mark, and this is the case where agreement doesn't cheer you up. Five fouls, two ground duels won out of ten, beaten three times, zero interceptions, zero clearances, a yellow in the 44th. Substituted in the 53rd. As I found out later, Andrei was unwell before the match, feeling seriously under the weather, but even in that state he battled like a man and was directly involved in the move for the first goal.
Gil - 6.05 (6.0 / 6.1), 45 minutes. Zero accurate passes. Not few, not a handful - zero. Seven touches, zero out of eight in duels, two turnovers, one shot on target. The only plus - he fought well in the first goal. There are halves after which the substitution isn't discussed by the player, the coach or the hall, and all three understand each other without words.
Shiltsov - no rating, 2 minutes. Neither platform gave him a mark, and formally they're right: minutes threshold. In substance - a shame. Six accurate passes out of six, two chances created and a shot in two minutes plus stoppage time.
The end of the show
On the third goal the hall stood up. Not all of it, but half for certain, and in a cinema that sounds completely different from a stadium: the sound doesn't drift off into the sky, it bounces off the walls and comes back to you. Scarves over heads in a room with dimmed lights look almost solemn, though there's nothing solemn about it - people just travelled to Khimki without leaving the city, and were given three goals.
The lights didn't come on straight away, and that turned out to be the best decision of the evening, because nobody was planning to leave anyway. That's how people sit through the credits of a good film: the popcorn gets finished without any interest in the popcorn, someone retells a goal to a neighbour who has just seen it with his own eyes, kids argue about which of the three was the prettiest, and nobody can agree. The screen still read "ROD 0-3 BAL", and people looked at it the way you look at a photograph you want to keep.
And here's what matters: the people leaving the hall weren't bewildered, they were completely happy. No "how on earth did we do that with thirty-one per cent", no urge to dig into the numbers immediately. Simple, pure, almost childlike joy that your team went to someone else's city and won 3-0, while you sat in a soft seat among your own people. The man in front of us kept repeating "what a bunch of beauties, what a bunch of beauties" all the way to the exit, and honestly, that's the best post-match analysis I've heard in a long time.
That, I suppose, was the main storyline of our screening. In the first half, on a giant screen, 31% possession, one side passing the ball back and forth without any threat, the other standing firm. An hour and a half later the same screen read 0:3, and there was no contradiction in that any more - it turned out that it wasn't Baltika who had been suffering; it was Rodina who had spent the whole evening playing someone else's script.
There was no desire whatsoever to argue with the screen.
