I hope that this cameo will start a new chapter for Streltsov's fantasy career
Last week, Valentin Ivanov was finally given the gold medal he missed out on at the 1956 Olympics. The Soviet forward had been a key member of the side but was injured in the semi-final against Bulgaria, missed the final and fell foul of the policy of the time that dictated only those who played in the gold-medal match received medals. Inevitably, thoughts also drifted to the other great forward who missed out on the final: Eduard Streltsov. His gold medal will never be awarded.
Streltsov had been magnificent in the semi-final. The right-back Nikolay Tyschenko had broken a collarbone and, with Ivanov also struggling, the USSR were effectively down to nine men when Bulgaria took the lead early in extra-time. Streltsov, though, dragged his side forward, scored the equaliser after 112 minutes and then set up an improbable winner four minutes later.
The Soviet coach, Gavriil Kachalin wanted a front pair who played together at club level, so with Ivanov out of the final, he dropped Streltsov as well. He was replaced by Nikita Simonyan, who offered him his medal after the final. Streltsov refused. "He said to me, 'Nikita, I will win many other trophies,'" recalled Simonyan. He was wrong.
His confidence was understandable. Even at 18, Streltsov was a tall, powerful forward, possessed of a fine first touch and extraordinary footballing intelligence. A year earlier, he had come seventh in the voting for European Player of the Year. Charismatic and good-looking to boot, it seemed that he had the world at his feet.
And then, on May 25 1958, he left the USSR's pre-World Cup training camp at Tarasovka, just outside Moscow, and went to a party at a dacha belonging to Eduard Karakhanov, a military officer recently returned from a posting in the far east. The following morning he was arrested and charged with the rape of Marina Lebedeva, a young woman he'd met at the party.
He confessed, apparently after being told that, by doing so, he'd be allowed to play in the World Cup. He was promptly sentenced to 12 years in the gulag, and was quietly airbrushed from history. Released after seven years, remarkably, he returned to his club, Torpedo - always the smallest of the five Moscow sides - and in his first season back led them to the league title. In 1967 and 1968 he was named Soviet Player of the Year. Whatever happened at Tarasovka that night, his is an astonishing story. The question that won't go away is: was he guilty?
Russian football - and western journalists looking for an easy story - would love to believe Streltsov was framed, and it is not difficult to understand why. He remains the greatest outfield player Russia has ever produced and it is not inconceivable that, given the opportunity to play, he would have outshone even the 17-year-old Pele at the 1958 Word Cup. It would be easier to revere him, though, if he were not a convicted rapist. That is why there is a need to exonerate him, but it is also easy to understand why Russian football is so drawn to a talent who withstood state oppression and emerged triumphant - how it would love that to be an allegory for its own travails.
The obvious question to ask is why anyone would have framed Streltsov. There is a theory that he was targeted for refusing to leave Torpedo, which was based on the ZIL motor factory, to join Dinamo, the team of the KGB, but the more plausible reason has its roots in his womanising. There seems to have been a general concern that Streltsov was becoming rather too much of a celebrity, but the specific problem was his supposed relationship with the daughter of Yekaterina Furtseva, the only woman ever to become a member of the Politburo.
Svetlana Furtseva was 16, and apparently besotted with Streltsov. Her mother, a favourite of Nikita Khrushchev, met the forward early in 1957 at a reception at the Kremlin to celebrate the Olympic victory. She mentioned his likely marriage to her daughter, to which he replied: "I already have a fiancée and I will not marry her." As if that wasn't humiliating enough, he was later heard to say to a friend (depending which account you believe) either "I would never marry that monkey" or "I would rather be hanged than marry such a girl." If the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, it was at that moment his card was marked.
Certainly the reaction to his sending-off in Odessa that April appears excessive. The headline in Sovetsky Sport read: "This is not a hero", and several letters were printed, supposedly from members of the proletariat, condemning Streltsov as an example of the evils of western imperialism.
The Department of Soviet Football seems never to have warmed to Streltsov. An internal memo even criticised the timing of his wedding. "We found out before the important friendly against Romania that he had married," it read. "This shows how weak the educational work at Torpedo is." Communist Party archives apparently reveal a degree of distrust in the player, and Streltsov, having attracted the interest of clubs in France and Sweden following tours with Torpedo, was marked down as a possible defector. His file reads: "According to a verified source, Streltsov said to his friends in 1957 that he was always sorry to return to the USSR after trips abroad."
And then there is the matter of why Karakhanov asked Streltsov to his dacha. While it is certainly possible that he just liked the idea of having a famous footballer at his party, there are those who see something more sinister in his invitation. It is suspiciously convenient, they say, that he had returned to Russia only a few days earlier.
But all that is circumstantial. More concrete evidence of a plot comes from an interview his international coach gave shortly before his death. "When I tried to help Streltsov, I was told by police that Khrushchev himself had been informed about the case," Kachalin told the football historian, Axel Vartanyan. "I then dashed to a regional Communist Party committee headquarters and asked the first secretary to suspend the case until the end of the World Cup. I was told that nothing could be done and they pointed meaningfully upwards. I understood then that it was the end. I heard that Furtseva had it in for Streltsov, but who knows exactly what happened?"
The only certainty is that something did. "They went to the dacha," Ivanov said. "It's a dark story. Who raped whom, it's hard to say. I think if a girl goes to the suburbs for a night ... then a guy is waiting for her, as it were ... and she is the same... but I don't believe it was a set-up, no. Maybe it was the host of the dacha. I don't know who raped her, but she said it was Streltsov. So it's a dark story." Perhaps significantly, none of the players to whom I spoke were prepared, even now, to categorically defend their former team-mate. "I don't remember, but I did hear that he had refused to marry Furtseva's daughter," said Viktor Shustikov.
Most odd, though, was Simonyan's reaction. "What happened with Streltsov you cannot explain," he said. "It is a mysterious thing. He wrote to his mother saying he was taking the blame for someone else. It was the system that punished Streltsov. I don't know for sure if there was a rape on the part of Streltsov, but he and the girl slept together." He shrugged. "He was young, a bachelor, unmarried ..."
Actually, Streltsov had married just under a year before. Perhaps that is an indication that he didn't take his vows particularly seriously, or perhaps Simonyan's memory is just faulty. As he broke off, Simonyan reached into a drawer in his desk and took out a book. He opened it and removed a photograph and handed it to me without a word.
The print showed four images. Two were of a dark-haired young woman - Lebedeva. In one, she was lying back on what seemed to be a hospital bed, apparently asleep, her eyes ringed with bruises. The other two were of Streltsov. In the more striking, his face, captured in profile, was streaked from nose to cheekbone with three parallel scratches. Of course there is the possibility that the photographs were doctored or the injuries inflicted at a later date, but Soviet justice rarely required such damning evidence.
Streltsov died from throat cancer in 1990, and with him went any chance of establishing the truth. Lebedeva has vanished, although there was a sighting of her at Streltsov's grave in 1997, laying flowers the day after the annual ceremony on the anniversary of his death. Perhaps he was the glorious martyr that Russian football demands, but the case is far less clear-cut than some would have us believe.
. I really see no weaknesses there. With harms' defence, though, Lahm is a real weak point. He struggles against quick, speedy players, and Gento is certainly that. I struggle to see how Lahm can remotely contain him. That one weak point is a big concern for harms in a match where the small weaknesses are the ones that can kill you.