Kaliningrad

Day -9 WorldCup2018

Oh. My. God. Single digits. Nine days. Please excuse me for getting a little excited. Not only is the World Cup really close but I am nearing the end of many, many nights of thinking up something to write about to keep this going. 986 nights. And the odd morning when I called in the favour of being on Niue time, the Island nation in the Pacific Ocean.

I've always used football as my geography teacher. Yesterday I discovered Ekaterinburg in eastern Russia. It may be the easternmost host city but even though it is 1,000 miles east of Moscow there is still another 3500 miles to go east to get to Vladivostok. I knew Russia was big, but that is huge.

Today I'm wondering through Kaliningrad. I needed reminding of why there is a World Cup stadium that, on a map, doesn't look like it's in Russia. But then I remembered some geography lesson, or news story about the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithunia. I cannot say it was because I had heard of the local football team, FC Baltika Kaliningrad.

The Kaliningrad Stadium does not have as fascinating of an architectural story as that of Ekaterinburg. There are no stands oustide the stadum here. But there is one similarity in that time restraints (aka construction delays) meant that the planned 45,000 capacity stadium with a retractable roof had to be scaled back to one of 35,000, the minimum required capacity, with no roof.

After the World Cup 10,000 seats will be removed and it will be the new home of FC Baltika. Their average attendance last year was 3,500.

One of the major landmarks in Kaliningrad is the Konigsberg Cathedral, built between 1330 and 1380. When it was constructed and until 1945, it was in the city of Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia and the easternmost large city in Germany. The city was captured by the Soviet Union in 1945 and renamed Kaliningrad in 1946. The cathedral and the thriving city centre of Kneiphof Island where the cathedral is located was mostly destroyed by British bombers in 1944.

Kaliningrad will host 4 group matches, the first of which is Croatia-Nigeria on June 16th The last one is Belgium-England in their final group match. I can't help but be reminded of Italia '90 when England were assigned to play in Sardinia to keep their fans safely away from the mainland. "Keep them away from Russia". It's, of course, not true because England's other two matches are in Volgograd, 585 miles away from Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod, 265 miles from Moscow. So, "keep them away from Moscow."

But back to Kaliningrad and FC Baltika. The second division team will be hoping their new stadium will inspire them to a return to the Russian Premier League where their 7th place in 1998 in a three year stint in the top division was their highest finish ever. In 1998 they reached the third round of the Intertoto cup (remember that?) where they lost to Serbia's Vojvodina.