How do Armenians play football?

31/01/2006 Armen KOCHARYAN

The incident that happened in Moscow a couple of days ago shows that Armenians can’t play soccer, they can only watch others play soccer. If we pay attention to the broadcast of European football games on our local TV channels, we will see that Armenians watch all soccer games except their own. Please don’t think that I am fond of watching Armenian soccer. Of course, if our players start to play like our team used to play in the 70s, I think a lot of people will start watching Armenian soccer again. But alas, our players are far from that. I think we’d better replace some sport federations with less famous ones, as well as the soccer federation. In this case at least we wouldn’t be afraid of Azeri teams. As for their team, there are only a couple of players there that can play soccer, but the important thing here is that they do their best to improve their quality. The same thing was done by Turkey twenty years ago and that team is already one of the best ones in Europe and won third place in the Europe cup last year.

The fact that our players don’t play well is not a tragedy yet. As the saying goes:“Moscow wasn’t built at once. It is a tragedy that they don’t want to make any efforts to learn to play well because they follow “the Armenian rules” here too. I mean, in order to be able to be included in the team the players have to find a person to back them. But as all the other rules, this rule has some exceptions too. But this is not the end yet. After this incident the head of the Russian football federation, V. Mutko, considered our team as mad players, although it is strange, however, there was no answer from our team.

If the “Pyunik” refused to play with the “Neftchii”, wouldn’t be it better to lose the game with the “Shakhtior” team and be left out of the competition than “run away” from the Azeri team? Usually these kinds of things are very bad for the country representing the relevant team. Only now I understand why our soccer reporters either speak about their own lives or about sponsors during soccer game broadcasts. What else can they do? Another one of the reasons for this is the environment in Armenia, according to which to lose the game with the team of Azerbaijan will mean to betray our country.

In the same period there were concert programs in Moscow dedicated to the opening of the Armenian year in Russia, where we understood that Armenians not only lose the soccer games, but also some other “games”. And this proves once more that a lot of people are not in the place they should be in. I understand that they took hundreds of children to Moscow only for the purpose to prove to them at the end of the concert that the “ambassador is also a composer”. During our childhood, our elder generation used to always tell us: “musicians shouldn’t be involved in politics”. But in spite of this I don’t understand why they kept these children in hunger and in cold at the airport in Moscow. But later when they called Mr. Smbatyan and asked him to help them, he said that the problem was going to be solved soon. And of course as all the Armenian officers, “he did his best too”. He hung the phone after which no one could reach him…

It is snowing hard in Yerevan again. And as an optimist I am sure that this hard snow will wash and take away all the bad things that happened in January from our map.