Judging by comfortable club buses, luxurious foreign cars and formal suits of players at official presentations, one might get the impression that Russian football has reached all the heights of world civilization. Perhaps it would be so, if our clubs could afford to grow stronger like the British, the best legionnaires who have long and successfully played for their teams. But we are talking mainly about the external gloss. The everyday life of the capital's and provincial clubs often resemble the plots of adventure films about the African jungle or action games in the spirit of Quentin Tarantino.
In the first roles here are most often foreign players from abroad. And now, a Frenchman of Cameroonian origin, Serge Branco twirled a plot in Samara's “Wings of the Soviets” that even actors acting in Quentin Tarantino’s films would envy. The fair-haired African was previously unpredictable in his behavior (in the match with CSKA, for example, he sat on the ball right during the game), and recently he has begun to weird at all. The reason was the failure of his attempt to leave the “Wings” in the German “Bochum”. The Samara club was not going to let it go for free. “If you want to solve your problems in Russia, get into a scandalous story,” Serge Branko seems to have deduced such a life formula when playing in our country. And away we go ...
To begin with, the legionnaire did not come to the installation before the Premier League match with FC “Moscow” - they say, overslept, daytime sleep was deep. Head coach Haji Hajiyev, for whom club discipline is a sacred affair, immediately removed the player from the squad, declaring the game only recently arrived in the team Slovene Suad Filekovich.
Branko’s reaction was such that police officers took him out of the room. So he watched the match not from the bench, but from the rostrum of the Samara stadium. The game “Wings” lost with a bang - 0: 4, and the African substitute - Filekovich was especially “distinguished”. And in the evening, Branko, apparently feeling his indispensability, began to sort things out with the coaches right in the club cafeteria. At first he had enough words and gestures, and then he began to destroy furniture by turning the table over. In response, the assistant coach Omar Tetradze took up the stool ... Unwilling witnesses with great difficulty managed to put out the outbreak of a fight.
But that is not all. Tetradze and Branko then mated on the street. Moreover, according to the legionnaire, the trainer of the team got a gun in his hands. As Branko said in an interview with some publications, the weapon was military, so he dashed off the base in fear, preferring to sit out in his office apartment.
However, the Izvestia correspondent became reliably aware that on Tuesday a French national was strolling through the territory of the club base as if nothing had happened. However, now he certainly had nothing to fear. Indeed, not only the entire club leadership gathered at the base, headed by the president of Krylia Sovetov Alexander Baranovsky, but also came the Minister of Sports of the Samara Region Oleg Saitov, who, as you know, is a two-time Olympic boxing champion. So such a representative delegation would certainly not have allowed a scandal to flare up.
All day in the Samara club there were meetings - what to do in this situation. Well, Branco already seems to feel like a winner. Regardless of the outcome of the case in Samara, he is going to appeal to international courts. And then he will surely be able not only to leave the Samara club at any time convenient for him, but also get a penalty for the caused "inconvenience."
Mikhail Shpenkov