My flight back to Moscow was full of police officers, who had been working at the match I had seen. One of them had taken my prized window seat. I didn’t dare challenge him, so I squeezed in between him and a policewoman.
The policeman smiled, shook my hand and said he was Sergei, 22 years old, from a provincial city that I won’t name for fear of getting him into trouble. I introduced myself as a British journalist covering the football.
Armed with a few words of each other’s languages, and translation websites on our phones, we began to chat. Sergei said he had policed four World Cup matches so far, but hadn’t got to watch a minute of play. Still, he said, it had been “very exciting”. This was only his second flight ever. He was also thrilled to speak to a foreigner. How many had he met in his life, I asked. He held finger and thumb an inch apart: almost none. But his unit had taken a language course before the World Cup, and now he was determined to improve his languages. I asked if he had been abroad. Sergei typed a sentence into the translation website: “Police are not allowed to go outside Russia.”