Coach Low praises Russian national football squad’s current progress

Artyom Kuznetsov/. The Russian national football team is currently on the right track and will be showing in the future the same level of game as it demonstrated at the 2008 UEFA Euro Cup, winning the bronze of the championship, German national football team’s Head Coach Joachim Low told TASS on Monday.

Led by Head Coach Cherchesov, the Russian national football team managed to reach the knockout stage of the 2018 FIFA World Cup advancing with a win over the Spanish team in the round of Last 16 and then losing on a penalty shootout in the quarterfinals to Croatia, which eventually reached the final match of the world championship.

"I was really surprised and really glad that Russia was very good at the World Cup," Low said in an interview with TASS. "It was the host country and I know the coach very well."

"They played very well at the World Cup and it was good for the whole atmosphere in the country," the German football coach stated.

Describing Russian football team’s Head Coach Stanislav Cherchesov, Low said: "He is a character - he was a player like that and he is a coach."

Joachim Low served as the head coach of the German national football team since 2006 leading it to the 2014 FIFA World Cup Champions’ title. Low, 58, was also the head coach of the Austrian FC Tirol Innsbruck between 2001 and 2002 and Russia’s Cherchesov was playing as a goalkeeper for that club since 1996.

"He has a professional mentality. I think the [Russian national] team is playing with a lot of emotion and the fighting spirit - this is the character of the coach," Low stated.

"I like him very much because I have a very nice experience with him, when I was a coach in [Tirol] Innsbruck and he was a player," the German head coach said. "He was injured very badly and he was 38 [years old] but he always said to me - ‘at the beginning of the injury I am coming back because I am the best and I will play’."

"What was important, I think, is that Stani [Stanislav Cherchesov] suspended some world players two years before the World Cup and changed the team," Low continued.

"Some players of Russia are very young at the moment," he said. "I think they will have a very good team for the future, because some years ago - in 2008 - Russia played very good."

"At the 2008 European Championship I was impressed with their style, tempo and speed they had," Low said. "I think that it [the Russian football] is going in that direction again."

This summer Russia hosted its first-ever FIFA World Cup, which kicked off in Moscow with a remarkable opening show at Luzhniki Stadium on the evening of June 14 and ended with a spectacular final match, played also at the Luzhniki Stadium, where France confidently defeated Croatia 4-2 to win the much-coveted World Cup Trophy.

Russia selected 11 host cities to be the venues for the matches of the 2018 World Cup and they were Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Kazan, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Samara.

The national football team of hosts Russia managed to make it to the quarterfinals stage of this world championship, where Croatia edged them out in a 4-3 penalty shootout win on July 7 at the Fisht Arena in Sochi.

Cherchesov took the reins of the national football squad in the summer of 2016 signing a contract with the Russian Football Union (RFU) to work as the head coach of the team until August 2018.

The RFU announced in late July that it signed a new contract with Cherchesov extending his work in the capacity of the head coach of the national football team for two more years.