(23) Traore for Willian
(84) Carcela-Gonzalez
(90) Logashov for Yeschenko

Pomazan
Gadzhibekov
Tagirbekov
Smolov

Referee: István Vad (Hungary). Difficult to remember anything he did to quibble about. A fairly quiet but chilly night for the man in the middle.

 

The (over-priced) view from the away end

That included 73 official away fans and a 30-strong group of Russian Toon devotees who were originally in a section of the main stand and then moved to the section adjacent to the away fans, but still separated by police (see below)

There wasn't a hint of trouble, although army units looked after "home" fans, with Anji's home region of Dagestan suffering from ongoing political unrest, prompting UEFA to ban them from playing Europa League ties at their own stadium. The travelling toon contingent were supervised by Moscow police.

Post-match crowd management soviet style meant that those going towards the stadium metro station were funnelled by two lines of police towards six mounted policemen facing each other with horses pulled back just far enough to allow one person at a time to squeeze through, while trying to avoid the horse's muzzles - and slobber. 

There was a fine pre-game montage on the stadium scoreboard to welcome NUFC followers, which had the soundtrack of the Barrie Brothers Howay the Lads (1974 FA Cup Final record) and Busker's Home Newcastle, along with footage of 1950s Wembley FA Cup Final goals, Bob Moncur with the Fairs Cup and Supermac's home debut against Liverpool alongside more contemporary footage.

An interested spectator was former England boss Fabio Capello, now Russian national team boss. Also in attendance was NUFC MD Derek Llambias.

Roublemakers

Having managed to arrange visas and transportation to Moscow at short notice, those 73 toon fans who bought match tickets from NUFC arrived in Russia to discover that their home counterparts had paid a whopping £22 less for their entrance to the Luzhniki Stadium on Thursday.

That's a clear breach of UEFA competition rules and from what we can gather, at odds with undertakings that Anji had provided to representatives of the governing body.  

There's no suggestion that NUFC made any profit from the tickets they sold and acted purely as an agent for Anji - we've contacted NUFC with our observations and requested that they in turn make a protest to UEFA.

Spot the difference:

Ticket provided to NUFC by Anji with a face value of €30 (£26), bought by NUFC for that amount and sold on for that amount to Newcastle supporters:

Ticket bought at the Luzhniki Stadium on matchday for the Anji section with a face value of 200 Roubles (£4) 

Matchday ticket sales took place from the stadium ticket office pictured below. The price list clearly includes the ticket price for normal admission and the home sections offer a superior view to that which Newcastle fans got - being at the side of the pitch rather than behind a goal. 

Matchday photos:

The significance of the monument explained:

It was following a match in October 1982 that what became known as the Luzhniki Stadium Disaster occurred (the stadium was renamed, from the ‘Central Lenin Stadium’ to the ‘Luzhniki Stadium’, in 1992). It was not an especially cold October by Moscow’s standards; but it was in the middle of a cold spell, on the 20th of the month, with the temperature having fallen below zero, that Spartak Moscow faced Dutch club HFC Haarlem in the season’s UEFA Cup.

In addition to and aggravating the cold temperature, the evening of the 20th October saw much snow, and only 15,000 fans turned up to the Luzhniki support Spartak – joined by roughly a hundred Haarlem supporters. 

With such an expansive stadium set to hold so few fans, for simplicity and security’s sake and to keep out those without tickets, only the East Stand was opened up for the game; and only one exit from the East Stand was left open for the Spartak supporters. 

A goal in the 17th minute from the attacker Edgar Gess saw Spartak leading the match as it moved into its final minutes and supporters began to leave the stadium. The game moved into injury time; Sergei Shvetsov scored Spartak’s second goal of the game; and as some fans attempted to return to the crowd, a bottleneck formed by the stand’s open exit. 

Militia guards, rather than opening up more exits, focused on preventing supporters from returning into the stadium, and in the stampede which followed, exacerbated by the ice and snow which covered steps and walkways, people were trampled and killed. 

The number who died is unclear to this day – the incident was covered up by the secretive Soviet authorities; bodies were removed and only returned to the families of the deceased after thirteen days. Only a few lines appeared in the next day in one local paper, the Vechernyaya Moscow, which noted the disaster, stating merely that after the match ‘an incident occurred...some spectators were injured’.

The official death toll suggests that 66 Spartak supporters died that evening, but other estimates put the toll closer to 340 dead. This would make the Luzhniki Stadium Disaster the most destructive in football history. 

The few Haarlem fans who did attend the match were allowed to leave the East Stand via another exit, and they, and their team’s players, knew little about what happened after the game until an article in the 8th July, 1989 issue of the Soviet daily, Sovetsky Sport, finally revealed all. 

In the meantime, several months after the disaster, Yuri Panchikhin, the stadium’s deputy manager for just three months at the time of the incident, was quietly tried and sentenced to eighteen months of hard labour after ‘confessing’ to bearing feelings of guilt.

In the October days and in the weeks following the disaster, the authorities prevented the placing of tributes outside Luzhniki Stadium. In 1992, a monument, paid for by Spartak fans, was finally unveiled outside the stadium’s East Stand. 

In October 2008, a memorial match took place to commemorate the disaster twenty-five years on. It was organised by Spartak supporters and by, amongst others, Dick Advocaat and Guus Hiddink, the Dutch managers of Zenit St. Petersburg and the Russian national team respectively. 

Featuring players who had played for Spartak and Haarlem twenty-five years previously, money raised from the occasion was given to the families of the disaster’s victims.

(taken from the empower-sport.com website)

City photos:

St.Basil's Cathedral, Red Square

The Kremlin

Moscow street life: Trains, trams, traffic and tower blocks

* Thanks to Stephen Brennan, who climbed the steep hill for this pic. We didn't.