Chagos
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2015
- Messages
- 35,206
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- 11,645
- Location
- in expatria
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- Male
- Political Leaning
- Private
To add:
Political considerations aside, unlike France (presumably used as comparison here) Russia is not exactly the holiday country where travelling to some of the stadiums can be combined with having a nice sight seeing vacation or beach visit.
Moscow and Petrograd would certainly qualify for that and would certainly be sufficiently near to each other and Sotschi might make for a nice seaside visit, but which fan actually finds Volgograd or (yikes) Kasan worth a visit? That's not even mentioning Nishni-Novgorod or Rostov (on the Don, not its namesake near Moscow).
Add to all that the often enormous distances between stadiums (towns) plus difficulties in finding accommodations and one can see how France of 2016 offered far more diversity in things to do outside of football.
German fans are not exactly represented in similar numbers to the France-Euro either, with Moscow and Petrograd being favourite "t0 go" places for Germans anyway.
The number of South and Central Americans was disproportionately higher, seeing how having to hop a whole continent to even get close probably didn't make the Russia adventure itself all that daunting by comparison.
Lastly Russia is a place where you can't even fart in the street without that being picked up by monitoring, so where one can argue at length over whether the country is a police state or not, it undoubtedly has more means to jump on anyone showing to be unruly than France or Germany does. So why anyone would have thought that the authorities would allow their own thugs to run amuck, thus completely spoiling the image that Russia wants to convey of itself by this championship, must remain a mystery.
I presume (note the bolding) the implication that the lack of violence so far is due to an absence of Brit fans to have been made in (possibly unintentional) irony.
Political considerations aside, unlike France (presumably used as comparison here) Russia is not exactly the holiday country where travelling to some of the stadiums can be combined with having a nice sight seeing vacation or beach visit.
Moscow and Petrograd would certainly qualify for that and would certainly be sufficiently near to each other and Sotschi might make for a nice seaside visit, but which fan actually finds Volgograd or (yikes) Kasan worth a visit? That's not even mentioning Nishni-Novgorod or Rostov (on the Don, not its namesake near Moscow).
Add to all that the often enormous distances between stadiums (towns) plus difficulties in finding accommodations and one can see how France of 2016 offered far more diversity in things to do outside of football.
German fans are not exactly represented in similar numbers to the France-Euro either, with Moscow and Petrograd being favourite "t0 go" places for Germans anyway.
The number of South and Central Americans was disproportionately higher, seeing how having to hop a whole continent to even get close probably didn't make the Russia adventure itself all that daunting by comparison.
Lastly Russia is a place where you can't even fart in the street without that being picked up by monitoring, so where one can argue at length over whether the country is a police state or not, it undoubtedly has more means to jump on anyone showing to be unruly than France or Germany does. So why anyone would have thought that the authorities would allow their own thugs to run amuck, thus completely spoiling the image that Russia wants to convey of itself by this championship, must remain a mystery.
I presume (note the bolding) the implication that the lack of violence so far is due to an absence of Brit fans to have been made in (possibly unintentional) irony.