Russia setting a new standard in how to pull off a great World Cup

During their win over Serbia, two ethnic Kosovar Albanians on the Swiss team did a naughty thing.

After scoring a go-ahead goal, Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka ran over to the Serbian section of the crowd and flashed a hand signal meant to evoke the eagles on the Albanian flag. Shaqiri also pulled off his shirt and was perilously close to losing his shorts. You needn’t have a deep understanding of recent Balkan history to get why this didn’t go over too well.

The Serbs went bonkers. Their own coach didn’t help matters any by turning a penalty non-call into into an international incident: “It seems that only the Serbs are condemned to a selective justice; once [it was] the damned Hague and today in football the VAR [video assistant referee] … .”

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Clearly, emotions were running a bit high all round.

After the game, Switzerland’s rogue mimes dug in. The Swiss nation dug in alongside them. The Serbian football association filed a grievance. FIFA responded over the weekend by opening an “official investigation.” Presumably, that’s three people in Zurich watching game highlights on YouTube while holding up a picture of an eagle and saying, “Ja, ja, this eagle thing checks out. I think those are the wings.”

If Xhaka and Shaqiri are found guilty of “provoking the general public,” they could face a two-game ban. Since they are arguably their side’s best players, that would be very bad for the Swiss, who’ve been a bit of a surprise package so far.

What’s interesting about all this is that it is the first non-football-related interesting thing to happen in Russia: Eleven days in, and despite all advance billing, this has so far been the clockwork World Cup.

That’s not the usual way of doing things. At or around this point, tradition suggests that something should already be going terribly wrong.

Maybe people have begun to suggest the tournament is fixed (à la Argentina 1978 or South Korea-Japan 2002); that it is being ruined by the horns that announce your passage through the gates of Hell (à la South Africa 2010); or that it’s all an enormous con job meant to financially pillage the host country (à la just about all of them).

Maybe the games haven’t been that great – too cautious, one-sided or poorly officiated. That’s pretty common. Maybe the world has noticed, once again and to its enormous surprise, that soccer players are grubby little cheaters when it suits them and everyone is now talking about that like it’s the most pressing moral question facing the human race.

Maybe some of the favourites have disappointed already and large sections of people have begun to check out.

Maybe someone has bitten someone else or broken someone’s back or been hit so hard in the head they have to ask the referee whether they are, in fact, playing at the World Cup (which all happened at Brazil 2014).

This is not to say that these are bad things (though I wouldn’t like to have my back broken, thanks very much). Or, at least, bad things in the sense that they might turn you off watching. Actually, they are good things because they make you want to see how the bad thing turns out. The best game in Brazil was also worst one – Germany 7, Brazil 1 – because it is the closest any of us will get to watching the Hindenburg go down.

Though we may enjoy them, the bad things are not planned by organizers, nor appreciated by them, and all tend to obscure the point of holding the thing. Which is watching 22 guys be good at kicking a ball for two hours at a time.

But very occasionally, everything will go just right. That’s been Russia 2018.

There have been no headline-grabbing outrages, on the field or off. If a bit of bird signing is the worst we’re going to get, say a prayer for tabloid headline writers.

Crime was an issue beforehand, but Russian police have figured out how to eliminate it – by refusing to tell anyone it’s happening. According to Reuters, an order went down the ranks that security services were to temporarily stop supplying the media with “negative information.”

It’s difficult to be negative without information. So everyone is instead going positive, or not saying anything about Russia at all. The controversial backdrop has faded out of the conversation as the art comes into focus.

That leaves us talking about the games, which have been fabulous. It was hard to imagine anything in the first round could match Spain’s 3-3 draw with Portugal for pure entertainment, and then Germany played Sweden.

Unless it’s an underwear modelling competition, Germany vs. Sweden is not the sort of spectacle to draw a crowd. It’s like watching a pair of drill presses bang away on an assembly line.

But Saturday’s match was an out-of-the-blue classic. A dozen talking points came out of that match – uncalled penalties, unexpected injuries, Toni Kroos being poor for 94 minutes and then ridiculously great for the one that mattered.

If it had been a final, people would be talking about it in a hundred years time.

Even the bad games have been good. While it’s always been the case that very little separates the best teams in the world, it’s now also true that there is less difference between them and everyone else.

The players have been generally well behaved. That calm has spread to fans and officials. Everyone’s putting in an honest shift every day. The result is top-to-bottom watchability.

Hanging above all that quality is an unstable competitive stability. Most of the big names got a scare early, but have come out from under it. The best teams here (thus far, Croatia and Belgium) are not traditional powers, but the old-firm nations are still in it.

Very few (no?) World Cups feel like a genuine toss-up once they’ve gotten going. This one does.

Of course, it could all still go sideways in a hurry. That tension is part of the entertainment value. However, one should not pass up a chance to give a compliment while one can.

Russia should not have been given this World Cup. But having got it, they’re setting a new standard in how to pull one off.