Four against one: Russia defeated the Qatar team in a friendly match

The Russian national football team completed the September training camp with a crushing away victory over the Qatar team with a score of 4:1. Matvey Kislyak, a promising young Armenian, scored the first goal of his career for the national team. With this victory, the national team rehabilitated itself in front of the fans for the 0-0 home draw with Jordan, which had happened three days earlier.

Familiar faces

As expected, the head coach of the Russian national team, Valery Karpin, released all our foreign players in the starting lineup for the game against Qatar — PSG goalkeeper Matvey Safonov, Monaco midfielder Alexander Golovin, and Atlanta United midfielder Alexei Miranchuk, who plays in the United States. All three were absent from the application for the match with Jordan, but the coach of the national team informed them in advance that he would give them a break after a long flight from Europe and America.

Together with Alexey Miranchuk, his twin brother Anton, who recently returned to the RPL from the Swiss "Sion" and now plays with Karpin in Dynamo Moscow, entered the field from the first minutes. It is worth noting that the starting line-up of the national team has been completely updated compared to the match with Jordan. Alexander Silyanov, Igor Diveev, Maxim Osipenko and Danil Krugovoy came out on the defensive. In midfield, in addition to Miranchukov and Golovin, the coaching staff released Matvey Kislyak and Alexei Batrakov. And the only striker from the first minutes was Ivan Sergeev.

Of this group of players, some came on as substitutes in the match against Jordan during the second half, but no one was at the start. The match was held at a small 10,000-seat stadium in Riyadh, a suburb of Doha. Therefore, the atmosphere was, one might say, intimate.

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For quite a long time in the first half, the game went goalless, although this time Russia had the advantage in points — this set our team apart from ourselves in the previous match, when Jordan dominated most of the playing time, and only towards the end of the meeting Maxim Glushenkov created a couple of chances to score.

This time, our team had three opportunities to open the scoring in the first half hour, but it was only in the 33rd minute that Golovin scored, using Batrakov's pass. Almost immediately, Matvey Kislyak scored his first goal for the national team, having successfully reacted to Krugovoy's pass. And just before the break, Batrakov managed to intercept the ball from the Qatar players in their half of the field and hit it well from outside the penalty area. The goalkeeper of the hosts saved his team, but Sergeev played the finishing touch and brought the matter to a rout.

A newcomer to the field

During the second half, Karpin made several substitutions, the most interesting of which was the debut of defender Matvey Lukin for the national team. Qatar started pushing after the break, created a couple of chances and in the 62nd minute won back one goal - Akram Afif scored the goal. But seven minutes later, Alexey Miranchuk, having successfully played into the wall with Sergeev, managed to hit the Qatar goal. And the last word remains with Russia, which is heading home with a crushing victory.

"Our team played a very good match and achieved a bright victory — this is exactly what we expect from it, we managed to achieve this due to the fact that we played with a fighting squad," Dmitry Bulykin, a former striker of the Russian national team, told Izvestia. — And I think we should always play with such a fighting team. In my opinion, the reasons for the problems in the match against Jordan were that the coaching staff began to experiment with the squad, which they shouldn't have done. After all, this is the national team of the country, and not the usual Russian championship team. The audience is waiting for the best of the best and wants to see that the national team played to the limit of its capabilities. It is always necessary to produce the best players on the field, even if these are unofficial matches, and we are excluded from major tournaments.

This fall, the Russian national team will play four more friendly matches. Karpin's team will play Iran in Volgograd on October 10, and Bolivia in Moscow four days later. On November 12, we will have a match with Peru in St. Petersburg, and three days later with Chile in Sochi.