October 12
Hello everyone!
Being a
sports junkie, one of the first things I decided to investigate were sporting
fixtures. Astana has a bit of sporting pedigree – it hosted the Asian Winter
Games in January of this year, and is home to the famous Astana cycling team that
Lance Armstrong rode for. Much of the sporting infrastructure has been
recently completed, meaning that national team events are moving up here from
Almaty. The Kazakh national football team is one such entity.
Bizarrely,
and going against the idea of the country being the heart of the Central Asian
region, Kazakhstan competes in European football competition under the UEFA
umbrella. They have done so with…well…very limited success. The fact that Wales
are ahead of them in the world rankings should suggest the quality of my newest
national team. They cannot qualify for next year’s European Championships in
Poland & Ukraine.
Kazakhstan fun fact: Kazakhstan is the
country that is the furthest east in UEFA.
They did,
however, have one final qualifying match at home after we arrived for our
Astana adventure. Their final game was against Austria in the remarkable Astana
Arena. We were always going to go, but once we found out that halfway-line
tickets were 1,000KZT – £4 – we eagerly snapped up the stubs. Like many of the
new, futuristic buildings, it is illuminated at night, and looks spectacular.
It is a 30,000-seater stadium that has a retractable roof amongst many other
gadgets. The roof was closed for this game.
One
potential reason for this may have been to echo and exaggerate the atmosphere
generated by the small number of fans inside the ground. Not even close to a
sell-out. Partly this is due to a sense of apathy and frustration amongst
Kazakh nationals about the standard of their team, but the kick-off time didn’t
help. Due to the time difference and the relative power of Austro-German
television networks, the game kicked off on a Tuesday at 18:00CET. Which is
22:00 Kazakh time. Ridiculous, and thus understandable why there were so many
empty seats. It even seemed like the military had been bussed in to fill out
the ground a little bit.
Considering
this, the atmosphere was pretty good. At either end of the ground were the
hardcore supporters who, often without shirts protecting their precocious
bellies, were dancing, chanting and singing loudly and proudly. The chants
themselves were predictable enough – KA-ZAKH-STAN was the staple roar of choice
– but most of the crowd tried to get involved, which made a change from the
prawn sandwich brigades you now often find in the UK.
Owing to it
being a relatively meaningless match as neither side could qualify (or is
really that good), the match was fairly uninspiring for the first hour or so.
Our local lads seemed content to soak up pressure from the schnitzel scoffers
before ballooning the ball up to a poor man’s Peter Crouch. This all changed in
the second half when, upon realising that Austria aren’t actually that good,
the Kazakh players started to spray the ball around the astroturf surface
majestically and precisely.
It finished
as an ultimately entertaining 0-0 draw, with the last 25 minutes being
end-to-end, chance-after-chance, almost amateurish fun. Kazakhstan’s Sergei Ostapenko name
came closest to scoring when his towering header crashed against the crossbar,
and his side were fully meriting of at least a point from this game. Austria
did put the ball in the net in the first minute of injury time – well, the
Kazakh ‘keeper punched a cross into another player, which ricocheted into the
goal – but our feeling of horror quickly changed to relief when we saw the
linesman holding his flag out for offside.
Of course,
starting at 10pm meant that the game didn’t finish until close to midnight, and
the fact that the ground is slightly outside the city resulted in us failing to
get a taxi and walking much of the way home. 2am bedtime on a school night?
Worth it to hear the booming voices proudly reciting the Kazakh national
anthem. Worth it to feel the energy of being at an international football match
once again. Worth it to see a futuristic, fascinating stadium.
KA-ZAKH-STAN!
Love you all
Matt
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