The United States may have fallen short of qualifying for the World Cup, but that didn’t stop a group of Vancouver residents from competing in Russia.
When members of a local club soccer team deplaned last week in Russia, host of the ongoing FIFA World Cup, they prepped to play in an international friendly of their own.
Yuriy Dobrodomov, one of the eight members of the 50-years-and-older team “Fat Tuesdays,” which competes in the Greater Portland Soccer District adult league, organized a match against a local club in Saint Petersburg.
The eight men — all over 50 years old — showed up and, to their surprise, were playing a team roughly 20 years their junior.
“We looked and went ‘this is going to be interesting,’” team captain Dave Hughes said. “Oh, yeah, they could have taken us apart.”
But the group of friends, whose fraternization on and off the pitch has spanned around 30 years, were embraced by the Russian adult league team. After splitting up and playing seven-on-seven on a condensed field in an indoor center, the two sides pooled its players, divided into teams and played on a full-sized pitch.
Then following the scrimmage, the Russian team gave Fat Tuesdays matching jerseys with the team name and individual names in Russian and the group posed for a photo opp, which was shared on Russian social media site VKontakte.
“We just showed up expecting a knock-around, and they made us feel real welcome,” Hughes said.
For the competitive group, it capped the trip of a lifetime. The group had planned to go to Saint Petersburg to spectate the group stage of the FIFA World Cup, and Dobrodomov, who is originally from Russia, set up an international friendly of their own.
The team adopted the name “Fat Tuesdays” when it first formed more than 20 years ago, because the players would meet after games at the former bar, Fat Tuesdays Tavern, which was located just off I-5 on 78th street.
Even though the dive bar closed in 2012, the team’s named was too well-established to change.
The team trains at Luke Jensen sports complex next to King’s Way Christian and, according to Hughes, manages to win a league championship every other year or so.
Despite playing in a league based in Portland (it played in a Vancouver-based adult club-level league before that folded) the team is still comprised of majority Vancouver residents.
It still travels to tournaments in cities such as Snohomish and Las Vegas.
The team attended six World Cup games in Saint Petersburg, which concluded with Argentina’s thrilling 2-1 win over Nigeria on Tuesday.
Hughes said his favorite game was Mexico’s upset of Germany last week, made even more special by the sheer number of Mexico fans who made the trip — Hughes estimated at least 10,000 in the stadium.
He expected countries with smaller populations, like Iran and Morocco, to travel smaller numbers of fans, and was shocked to see roughly between 8,000 and 9,000 fans for each side.
“Everybody gets along great,” Hughes said. “No trouble. Russians have been marvelous organizing. There was a lot of concern around the world, would there be trouble, and it’s been real smooth. … Great hosts.”
According to his teammate, Dobromodov still has relatives in Russia and set the game up through his cousin. In the months, and even weeks, leading up to the trip, the game nearly fell through multiple times.
Until it didn’t. Hughes joked that, while the Vancouver-based team was not expecting to play a bunch of young guys, their opponents weren’t expecting to play an over-50 team.
“Both sides got a shock when these bunch of old American guys turned up,” Hughes said.
The Russian club, “Team LFP” said in its social media post that its players signed a Russian flag for the Americans, fitted everyone with T-shirts and that the visitors thanked the hosts for a good game and friendly atmosphere.
Added Hughes: “We’re all Americans from Vancouver. One player is originally from Japan, one is originally from Russia, and I’m originally from England, so we should have called ourselves the American melting pot.”
