Rabbajanks
Registered
A fantastic post on FT from one of the lads who made it over to Moscow yesterday. Well worth a read
It’s Friday morning. I’m averaging 3.5 hours sleep for the past couple of nights and the greeting at the Russian visa application center is as Russian as you can imagine: about as surly as Nigel Pearson in a post-match press conference.
Just a couple of hours prior, I’d touched down in London fresh from a disappointing Leicester City defeat to Legia Warsaw which left our European adventure looking in real jeopardy. European campaigns haven’t come around too often as a Leicester fan and we’d all mourned the loss of trips to Athens, Braga and Prague last season thanks to Covid so - although we’d been handed a group which felt like karma’s payback for a Champions League campaign in picture postcard destinations - I wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to see us playing European football away.
“Why nobody ever bring fast track forms?”. The lady behind the desk at the application center is exasperated now. She’s muttering under her breath in Russian and if looks could kill she’d be reading me my last rites. Admittedly, I’ve been complacent here. I’ve turned up at the visa application center in the mistaken belief that a £170 fast track application (the only option for anyone who went to Warsaw given the time you’d be without your passport for the standard application) means they do the leg work and things just get sorted there and then.
I’m glancing a checklist now that she’s printed and tossed at me across the desk. The four critical things she tells me I need for the fast track application: two blank pages in my passport (check), a letter of invitation to Russia from either a hotel or a stamped and signed form from an authorised Russian travel agent (no check), a hard copy of a passport photograph (no check) and a completed and printed visa application form (no check). It’s going to be a long day.
What follows next is an Apprentice-style task. Ringing round travel agents in London asking if they do the stamped and signed Russia form, walking to the nearest ones I can find on Google only to find they’re closed down (with the pandemic having curtailed a good number of the smaller/niche offices). Eventually, I get through to a lady who tells me “we don’t do it, but I think I have the details of someone that has done one for us in the past”.
I’m now 15 minutes across London in an Uber at a small office - The Russia House - down a back alley off Borough High Street. A nice old chap is asking me when I need this by. The answer is yesterday. He puffs his cheeks and tells me we need something back from Moscow and they’re not so responsive on a Friday afternoon. “Give me £50 and one hour and I’ll get this done”. This visa process is getting even more expensive.
True to his word, an hour later I have an invitation letter from a hotel I haven’t even booked yet with the stamps and signatures that should hopefully appease the surly Russian lady back at the visa center. Some passport photographs of a dishevelled looking post-Warsaw version of me and we’re flying through this now.
I’m in the corner of the visa application center again, three and a half hours after I first arrived here and tapping away on a computer filling in the final piece of the puzzle: the application form. Categorically the most ridiculous form I’ve ever completed in my life. “List every country you have visited in the last 10 year with entry and exit dates”, “give us details about your parents and where they were born”, “tell us if you have social media”, “declare here whether you’ve ever said anything negative about the Russian Federation”.
I’m tired, I’m done with this and I’m back in front of the surly lady from earlier who hates me slightly less now that I have what I need. Just the payment needed now. Oh, and all of your biometric data. Thank you.
Anyone who travelled to Moscow will have their own either more or less stressful version of this story. Many had tied their application center visit in with the away trip to Millwall. All had had to take a day off work to get this done and all had done it without any news from the club about tickets.
Flights had been booked (some flying direct, others priced out of those routes and having to do 9/10 hour stopovers) - £400 return for me - and hotels were a requirement for the visa application so everyone also had some form of reservation. The final piece of the jigsaw that we just couldn’t get our hands on: details from the club about a match ticket.
The next couple of weeks were a waiting game. Waiting to get your passport back in the post and waiting on any form of communication from Leicester City Football Club about the ticket situation. One week before the game, we’re asked to “register our interest” and word starts to circle that there might not even be any tickets. Communication from the club has been about as effective as in a Leicester City back four without Jonny Evans. “We’ve been speaking to Spartak Moscow for the past three weeks” we see in an email shared online - the fixtures were announced six weeks ago…
Eventually, we get a one day window of opportunity to buy a ticket. Another £13 on the Moscow (a) bill. Just hours before the tickets go off sale, it looks like about 14 have sold. There could be more Leicester players than Leicester fans in the stadium at this rate.
Our final pre-departure hurdle after the tickets is a PCR test in the 3 days before flying - throw another £78 on the cost list for that (with many having done it in Leicester before the Manchester United home match) - and then we’re on our way to Moscow.
Knowing that the away following was so small, I’d set up a WhatsApp group via the Foxestalk messageboard to arrange a pre-match meet so that we could have some beers together and head to the stadium en masse (if we even qualified for being a ‘masse’). The night before, Spartak Moscow announced 25 away end tickets had been sold and I realised I had about 50% of the away end in the group there and then. The beauty of a football messageboard in action.
It’s game day and in dribs and drabs Foxes fans start walking through the door of the bar. Some have come in groups, some alone, some are Leicester lads living in Moscow who just wanted a couple of hours hearing a familiar accent and some have family in Moscow that they’ve been visiting. Everyone has their own tale of getting here and the hoops they had to jump through to do so.
A couple of hours later, we’re on our way to the stadium. Some Russian journalists have come down to the meet up to interview us for tv and online articles and one of them escorts us on the metro. We’re even singing Leicester chants in the street now with the confidence a couple of beers and being with your own fans gives you.
At no point is there any hint of danger or trouble. Colours are kept under wraps but the group of blokes discussing whether Jannik Vestergaard is slower than a Russian visa application process or if Brendan Rodgers is really good enough for the elite is probably a bit of a give away. Some Russian lads offer a swig of their brandy and tell us that, if Leicester score, they hope it’s Jamie Vardy. Global icon.
The Russian police have laid on a shuttle bus (a minibus) from the metro to the away end and as we get off outside the turnstiles we’re greeted with the standard Covid document checks and two ladies in full traditional Russian dress (looking like when they’re done one will be stored inside the other and that if we opened the smaller one of the two up we’d find a series of progressively smaller Russian women inside) and offering us a local bread based delicacy. I sincerely hope any Spartak fans doing the return leg get greeted with a massive pork pie and Stilton cheese on toothpicks outside the away end at the King Power.
Up in the seats, the players are out on the pitch for kick-off and we arrive to find about 20 Zambians in the away end. Some claim they’re Daka’s family, others that they’re Zambian students in Moscow, others just that they are here for Daka and had bought tickets in the home end but then been offered a move to the away end. That’ll be two goal scorer global icons we now have in our ranks (more to come on that later).
Less than 10 minutes into the match, it’s +1 for the away end attendance. A Spartak fan has jumped the fence into the away section. The stewards look worried and fairly swiftly grab him and start to bundle him to an exit. As he’s being pulled away, he desperately shouts in Russian that he’s here to swap scarfs. We all look at each other like “anyone want to swap scarves?” and one of the guys eventually makes the trade. At least, with his Spartak Moscow scarf, one of our guys now has an alibi if the metro gets tricky post-match!
It goes without saying that the match itself was great to witness and a bit of an “I was there” moment. Patson Daka, to the delight of our Zambian friends, properly announces himself in a Leicester shirt with four goals which leave us asking each other if a Leicester player has ever scored four in a single game and if that makes him our highest ever scorer in Europe (the answer is ‘yes’ - although not exclusively - to both).
And with the 4-3 thriller we’ve given ourselves a shot at more trips like this.
Competing vocally with thousands of home fans as an away end of 25 put us on a hiding to nothing but everyone gave it a good go and hopefully we were heard once or twice. The Zambians joined in with anything Daka-related and anything simple, but ‘When You’re Smiling’ was a bit of a stretch for them. Leaning over the railings at the front of the stand shouting “we want five” with accompanying hand gesture did however rattle the home fans on Vardy’s behalf given that he didn’t get on the pitch.
Reports from a Leicester fan in the WhatsApp group who was in the home end tell us we were heard a couple of times and the players acknowledged the away end at the full time whistle. Soyuncu was the first over and we saw that post-win James Maddison basking in the glory of it all in a way we haven’t seen for a while.
After a short wait in the stadium we’re escorted on foot back to the metro by the Russian police (at least one copper per Leicester fan/Zambian) and off into the center of Moscow to drink the night away with new found friends. Social media sees a flood of appreciation for ‘The Moscow 25’ from seemingly everyone but our own club.
The club were, undoubtedly, about as helpful as Jon Moss with this trip and, having been in Warsaw and Moscow and seen nothing on the club’s official social media feeds, as you typically do with an away game, there is definitely something going on with them not wanting to publicise the following in Europe. It felt, many times, that the club didn’t really want us to be there both before and during the trip. Truth be told, it does leave a little bit of a sour taste.
That said, none of us were there for the recognition or the acclaim, we were there simply to see our football team try and earn the right to give us more trips like this, regardless of whether the club really want us there. Because this trip showed that if you bring like-minded people together, with a shared passion or interest, then, regardless of the logistical or administrative hurdles, good memories will be made.
The Moscow 25 are dead. Long live the Naples 1500
It’s Friday morning. I’m averaging 3.5 hours sleep for the past couple of nights and the greeting at the Russian visa application center is as Russian as you can imagine: about as surly as Nigel Pearson in a post-match press conference.
Just a couple of hours prior, I’d touched down in London fresh from a disappointing Leicester City defeat to Legia Warsaw which left our European adventure looking in real jeopardy. European campaigns haven’t come around too often as a Leicester fan and we’d all mourned the loss of trips to Athens, Braga and Prague last season thanks to Covid so - although we’d been handed a group which felt like karma’s payback for a Champions League campaign in picture postcard destinations - I wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to see us playing European football away.
“Why nobody ever bring fast track forms?”. The lady behind the desk at the application center is exasperated now. She’s muttering under her breath in Russian and if looks could kill she’d be reading me my last rites. Admittedly, I’ve been complacent here. I’ve turned up at the visa application center in the mistaken belief that a £170 fast track application (the only option for anyone who went to Warsaw given the time you’d be without your passport for the standard application) means they do the leg work and things just get sorted there and then.
I’m glancing a checklist now that she’s printed and tossed at me across the desk. The four critical things she tells me I need for the fast track application: two blank pages in my passport (check), a letter of invitation to Russia from either a hotel or a stamped and signed form from an authorised Russian travel agent (no check), a hard copy of a passport photograph (no check) and a completed and printed visa application form (no check). It’s going to be a long day.
What follows next is an Apprentice-style task. Ringing round travel agents in London asking if they do the stamped and signed Russia form, walking to the nearest ones I can find on Google only to find they’re closed down (with the pandemic having curtailed a good number of the smaller/niche offices). Eventually, I get through to a lady who tells me “we don’t do it, but I think I have the details of someone that has done one for us in the past”.
I’m now 15 minutes across London in an Uber at a small office - The Russia House - down a back alley off Borough High Street. A nice old chap is asking me when I need this by. The answer is yesterday. He puffs his cheeks and tells me we need something back from Moscow and they’re not so responsive on a Friday afternoon. “Give me £50 and one hour and I’ll get this done”. This visa process is getting even more expensive.
True to his word, an hour later I have an invitation letter from a hotel I haven’t even booked yet with the stamps and signatures that should hopefully appease the surly Russian lady back at the visa center. Some passport photographs of a dishevelled looking post-Warsaw version of me and we’re flying through this now.
I’m in the corner of the visa application center again, three and a half hours after I first arrived here and tapping away on a computer filling in the final piece of the puzzle: the application form. Categorically the most ridiculous form I’ve ever completed in my life. “List every country you have visited in the last 10 year with entry and exit dates”, “give us details about your parents and where they were born”, “tell us if you have social media”, “declare here whether you’ve ever said anything negative about the Russian Federation”.
I’m tired, I’m done with this and I’m back in front of the surly lady from earlier who hates me slightly less now that I have what I need. Just the payment needed now. Oh, and all of your biometric data. Thank you.
Anyone who travelled to Moscow will have their own either more or less stressful version of this story. Many had tied their application center visit in with the away trip to Millwall. All had had to take a day off work to get this done and all had done it without any news from the club about tickets.
Flights had been booked (some flying direct, others priced out of those routes and having to do 9/10 hour stopovers) - £400 return for me - and hotels were a requirement for the visa application so everyone also had some form of reservation. The final piece of the jigsaw that we just couldn’t get our hands on: details from the club about a match ticket.
The next couple of weeks were a waiting game. Waiting to get your passport back in the post and waiting on any form of communication from Leicester City Football Club about the ticket situation. One week before the game, we’re asked to “register our interest” and word starts to circle that there might not even be any tickets. Communication from the club has been about as effective as in a Leicester City back four without Jonny Evans. “We’ve been speaking to Spartak Moscow for the past three weeks” we see in an email shared online - the fixtures were announced six weeks ago…
Eventually, we get a one day window of opportunity to buy a ticket. Another £13 on the Moscow (a) bill. Just hours before the tickets go off sale, it looks like about 14 have sold. There could be more Leicester players than Leicester fans in the stadium at this rate.
Our final pre-departure hurdle after the tickets is a PCR test in the 3 days before flying - throw another £78 on the cost list for that (with many having done it in Leicester before the Manchester United home match) - and then we’re on our way to Moscow.
Knowing that the away following was so small, I’d set up a WhatsApp group via the Foxestalk messageboard to arrange a pre-match meet so that we could have some beers together and head to the stadium en masse (if we even qualified for being a ‘masse’). The night before, Spartak Moscow announced 25 away end tickets had been sold and I realised I had about 50% of the away end in the group there and then. The beauty of a football messageboard in action.
It’s game day and in dribs and drabs Foxes fans start walking through the door of the bar. Some have come in groups, some alone, some are Leicester lads living in Moscow who just wanted a couple of hours hearing a familiar accent and some have family in Moscow that they’ve been visiting. Everyone has their own tale of getting here and the hoops they had to jump through to do so.
A couple of hours later, we’re on our way to the stadium. Some Russian journalists have come down to the meet up to interview us for tv and online articles and one of them escorts us on the metro. We’re even singing Leicester chants in the street now with the confidence a couple of beers and being with your own fans gives you.
At no point is there any hint of danger or trouble. Colours are kept under wraps but the group of blokes discussing whether Jannik Vestergaard is slower than a Russian visa application process or if Brendan Rodgers is really good enough for the elite is probably a bit of a give away. Some Russian lads offer a swig of their brandy and tell us that, if Leicester score, they hope it’s Jamie Vardy. Global icon.
The Russian police have laid on a shuttle bus (a minibus) from the metro to the away end and as we get off outside the turnstiles we’re greeted with the standard Covid document checks and two ladies in full traditional Russian dress (looking like when they’re done one will be stored inside the other and that if we opened the smaller one of the two up we’d find a series of progressively smaller Russian women inside) and offering us a local bread based delicacy. I sincerely hope any Spartak fans doing the return leg get greeted with a massive pork pie and Stilton cheese on toothpicks outside the away end at the King Power.
Up in the seats, the players are out on the pitch for kick-off and we arrive to find about 20 Zambians in the away end. Some claim they’re Daka’s family, others that they’re Zambian students in Moscow, others just that they are here for Daka and had bought tickets in the home end but then been offered a move to the away end. That’ll be two goal scorer global icons we now have in our ranks (more to come on that later).
Less than 10 minutes into the match, it’s +1 for the away end attendance. A Spartak fan has jumped the fence into the away section. The stewards look worried and fairly swiftly grab him and start to bundle him to an exit. As he’s being pulled away, he desperately shouts in Russian that he’s here to swap scarfs. We all look at each other like “anyone want to swap scarves?” and one of the guys eventually makes the trade. At least, with his Spartak Moscow scarf, one of our guys now has an alibi if the metro gets tricky post-match!
It goes without saying that the match itself was great to witness and a bit of an “I was there” moment. Patson Daka, to the delight of our Zambian friends, properly announces himself in a Leicester shirt with four goals which leave us asking each other if a Leicester player has ever scored four in a single game and if that makes him our highest ever scorer in Europe (the answer is ‘yes’ - although not exclusively - to both).
And with the 4-3 thriller we’ve given ourselves a shot at more trips like this.
Competing vocally with thousands of home fans as an away end of 25 put us on a hiding to nothing but everyone gave it a good go and hopefully we were heard once or twice. The Zambians joined in with anything Daka-related and anything simple, but ‘When You’re Smiling’ was a bit of a stretch for them. Leaning over the railings at the front of the stand shouting “we want five” with accompanying hand gesture did however rattle the home fans on Vardy’s behalf given that he didn’t get on the pitch.
Reports from a Leicester fan in the WhatsApp group who was in the home end tell us we were heard a couple of times and the players acknowledged the away end at the full time whistle. Soyuncu was the first over and we saw that post-win James Maddison basking in the glory of it all in a way we haven’t seen for a while.
After a short wait in the stadium we’re escorted on foot back to the metro by the Russian police (at least one copper per Leicester fan/Zambian) and off into the center of Moscow to drink the night away with new found friends. Social media sees a flood of appreciation for ‘The Moscow 25’ from seemingly everyone but our own club.
The club were, undoubtedly, about as helpful as Jon Moss with this trip and, having been in Warsaw and Moscow and seen nothing on the club’s official social media feeds, as you typically do with an away game, there is definitely something going on with them not wanting to publicise the following in Europe. It felt, many times, that the club didn’t really want us to be there both before and during the trip. Truth be told, it does leave a little bit of a sour taste.
That said, none of us were there for the recognition or the acclaim, we were there simply to see our football team try and earn the right to give us more trips like this, regardless of whether the club really want us there. Because this trip showed that if you bring like-minded people together, with a shared passion or interest, then, regardless of the logistical or administrative hurdles, good memories will be made.
The Moscow 25 are dead. Long live the Naples 1500
