Dispatches From the Road: The World Cup From the Couch

The team had played poorly in the run-up to the tournament, which saw them plummet in the FIFA rankings and enter the tournament as the lowest-ranked team.

Then again, most fans and pundits take the FIFA rankings with a bucketful of salt. To wit, even though they didn't make the cup, Chile was ranked 9th. Peru, dumped out in the first round, came in at 11th. Even though they too got knocked out in the first round, Poland took the 8th spot. Peru and Chile play in one of the hardest confederations to advance from, and Chile had won the last two South American tournaments. Poland combined a) adequate performances in past tournaments, b) winning a qualifying group that included such soccer giants as Armenia and Kazakhstan and c) a refusal to play exhibition matches, thereby gaming the system and further improving their ranking. How sporting, and telling.

The United States for the record watched the 32-team tournament from home, ranked 25th.

Back to the plucky team with the storied history. They played well. Or at least well enough to beat Saudi Arabia and Egypt in the first two matches to advance to the knockout round.

Attentive readers know by now that I'm talking about Russia. I watched the games closely in part to see how the team would react to the pressure of being host, but also to see if I could spot anything unusual, like blatantly bad refereeing decisions going their way or players who seemed to have more energy or could jump higher or run faster than seemed normal.

This is Russia after all, not long removed from a large doping scandal in an Olympics the country hosted.

But I didn't note anything odd. Instead I saw a hard-charging, gritty team feeding off the home support that increased each game, a team that played to the level its talent indicated it should, unlike, say, Germany, Argentina – or the Yanks during qualifying.

The Russians rode their luck in the first knockout round match, though their opponent Spain perhaps should have been awarded a penalty in added extra time.

This tournament featured video assistant referees, or VAR, for the first time. And though many joked on social media about Putin controlling the VAR booth in Moscow, their job was to assist with, among other things, clear and obvious refereeing mistakes.

One can argue the Spanish team's penalty claim was clear and obvious. One can also argue it was not. It was close, but not too different from other penalties that were not given and not close enough to set off alarm bells.

And somebody still would have had to convert the penalty shot.

After checking again for smoldering firework material on my property that morning, I clicked on a column from a local rag about the cup.

The columnist found it "suspicious" that lowly ranked Russia made it through the group stages. The columnist indicated the story could be read as that of the plucky underdog, or interpreted as something sinister before acknowledging that Russia had a ridiculously easy group draw and host countries often exceed expectations.

But Russia is different, the columnist wrote, and then mentioned just a few of the objectively terrible things the Russian government has done in recent years and the connections between the Olympic doping scandal and the soccer federation.

Believe me, dear reader, I'm not here to defend the Russian government. Far from it.

But, I ask, if the team involved had been from anywhere else, would the columnist have written such an article?

Before someone screams “that's exactly the point,” and that I too watched for the nefarious because of who the host was, I would say fair point. But I would also ask, should we not try to focus on the awful acts the Russian government has committed for which there is ample evidence, instead of trying to shoehorn a geopolitical conspiracy into the actual soccer matches if there is no indication, let alone proof, of anything untoward happening on the pitch, though geopolitics were admittedly impossible to ignore on the periphery?

Anything else smacks of that much abused term fake news.

Though we are a maligned and beleaguered lot, we members of the media can hold our heads up and know history might hold us in high regard if we stick to what we know.

Otherwise we're playing into the hands of those who would like us to believe we're living in a post-truth world.

Or maybe I'm naive.

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