Search: ' Rubin Kazan'

The Russian League plan to switch to playing through the winter, but James Appell wonders if anyone checked the weather forecast

Russia in winter is not an especially pleasant place, even when you’re wearing a thick coat. It can’t be any better wearing football kit. But the Russian Football Premier League (RFPL) have in recent years been considering moving the season of the top two divisions from summer to winter, in keeping with the majority of Europe’s major championships. Russia’s footballers will have been phoning through orders for thermal underwear since July 29 when the RFPL officially unveiled the plan to switch to an autumn-spring season by 2012. “The most important of our goals is the move to an autumn-spring system,” RFPL president Sergey Pryadkin told the press. “It’s difficult to give a fixed time-frame at this moment, but we expect this to occur in an even-numbered year where there will be a break for the European Championship or World Cup. It’s possible that it will be 2012. This is the way forward from a commercial point of view.”

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Russian influence on football is not just about buying clubs, as Garry O’Connor’s move to Moscow proves. He will be the first of many from these shores, predicts Dan Brennan

The transfer of Hibernian striker Garry O’Connor to Lokomotiv Moscow has caused quite a stir. In signing a five-year deal that will make him a multimillionaire, the Scottish international has become the first Briton to play in Russia’s Premier League. Now, instead of meandering off for a midweek trip to Motherwell, he finds himself negotiating tricky away fixtures 8,000 miles down the road in Vladivostok.

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Is Russian football corrupt, internationally and domestically? That’s what Latvia’s captain was reported to have said and some clubs agree, as Dan Brennan reports

Ever since Stalin got together with Hitler to annex the Baltic states in 1940 as part of a secret carve-up, relations between Latvia and Russia have remained strained, something that 14 years of independence has done little to patch over. A Russian newspaper recently called for all good Russians to boycott Latvian tinned sprats – a culinary favourite since Soviet times – in protest at discrimination against Latvia’s Russian community. And August’s World Cup qualifier between the two countries in Riga threatened to spark a new international incident.

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