Try to escape to a lakeside gem in the Catskill Mountains, at a farm-bound intersection where no one is zagging since not even a zig was required, and you’d have a clear idea of a match whose data and allures are largely ignored. This is one account of a rare title tussle you have not seen, and could not experience directly in Western media for it was either deemed to be, by most standards, remarkably unsophisticated or simply because of the general broadcasting shortages that affect Eastern European football. (Like a sea-town starved out of firewood by a multiple course of actions and circumstances, it would take a great campaign to restore the supply to its former level, and rescue Russian soccer from the murky plastic tanks and the droning lullabies of its city metronomes.) It is hard to understand why. A resurgence of interest would, I submit, be long overdue. Not only the clash between CSKA and Zenit St. Petersburg offers a cautionary tactical tale about issues of land management—an example of the state-sponsored knowledge production, certainly, but knowledge that is individual, concrete, and local, like Honda’s calm passes or Denisov’s mainland swinging—but it also allows to gather information about a peculiar soccer legislator, Luciano Spalletti, whose strikerless 4—3—3 formation represents one of the most precocious and interesting attemps in the current razionalization of the pitch.
The whole game feels like a month or so after the Revolution, a repository of some kind of wisdom, or power. Fuel snorting off the depot, faces washed gray by routine and fatigue. (Arshavin’s eyelids, however, were drooping since the first half.) The landscape of CSKA is a quiet, calm spring after that intense Russian winter, like a Moravian vineyard echoing the Gypsies who collect the grapes and the monks plastering their chapel on top of the hill; there is purpose of movement, and flashes of brilliance because of Ahmed Musa, who descends on the right wing like a ceremonial dignitary out of an airplane. The Muscovite players rely on Honda, the Japanese play-maker, like odd businessmen gather around ancient oracles and seers whispering deathbed visions. Spalletti’s understanding of his territory is based on a midfielder in holding position, which allowed him to beat Lucescu earlier in the season, and on the relentless movement of Kerzhakov upfront, who opens enormous space for the runs of other teammates, as a frosted King Kong with twin-seated airplanes looping around his fiberglass fur. As most medieval regimes, Zenit is ill-equipped for anything else than counter-reactive football; when asked to perform on the attacking plank, it does so with reluctance—a Cubist collage of flesh and brains, weapons and constructions workers smoking Spartas, held together by a frame of jelly or placenta. ♦
