Opening
Looking at the result of the match in Grozny is like ordering exquisite stroganina in an expensive restaurant, waiting for its perfect presentation, and then, at the crucial moment, accidentally dropping the plate on your shoes. The ingredients were the freshest, the chef a genius, the appetite ferocious, but all you are left with are wet laces and an oppressive sense of cosmic injustice.
Andrei Talalaev's Baltika came to Chechnya not to play football but to perform surgery. By every canon of medicine and statistics — 0.58 to 2.14 on xG, shots (on target) 7 (1) to 14 (5) — Akhmat should have left the pitch in a deep tactical knockout. Instead of a confident 0:2 or even 1:3 we got a feeling as familiar as the creak of an old door: we handed the opponent the keys to our own goal, having first knocked politely.
