The Russians aren't happy. Not with the British media anyway. The largely middle-class and educated people who have come over from St Petersburg are appalled at the way they have been portrayed in the Scottish and English papers. Their gripe: the constant carping about racist elements within the support of Zenit St Petersburg. Some fans were already suggesting there was some bigotry in the reporting itself: stereotyping, they said, all Russians with the bad behaviour of a tiny minority.
I happen to speak Russian. Within a few seconds of chatting to Zenit fans, a small crowd gathered of supporters wanting to get their side of the story over.

"This stuff about the Zenit fans all being racist, it's not fair," said Pyotr Piskur, a 43-year-old manager from St Petersburg. His friend Alexei Kuplinov,30, agrees. "Of course, we have some hooligans, some idiots, unfortunately every club has.

"But do they really think they are the class of people who can afford to buy a 1500 euro airticket at short notice?"

Would the press do that with Rangers fans, I was asked.
"We have heard a lot of bad things about Rangers fans and what they did when they played Dinamo (Moscow Dynamo) all those years ago," said Alexei Semenoga, referring to scenes in Barcelona in 1972 which were widely reported in Russia and which still, to this day, define how many Russians see Scottish football fans. "They have heard lots of bad things about us too.

But the truth is this is all idiocy. Everybody has been getting on fine."
One fan - a clearly well-heeled gent - clutched a national tabloid, read out the headline about "Russian racists" and summed up the best English word he could find for it.

"This is Bull****," he said.