To play or to win?

Sixth day of the XXIII Commonwealth Cup was remarkable with a lack of interest to... the opponents' penalty area. While the group stage resulted in quite a high statistic of scored goals – 2.22 per game (40 goals scored in 18 matches), the passed Wednesday saw the index changed. The eight quarterfinalists have scraped together only 7 goals in total – less than a goal per team! Only the goalscorers from Turkmenistan and the RSA managed to distinguish two times, the exotic team winning whitewash the Russian band of Nikolay Pisarev.

Why, all of a sudden, has the goalscoring draught arisen at this quite a fine scoring tournament? The answer is that the stage of decisive matches began. No matter how much the coaches are convincing the press representatives in "collaterality of the sporting results" and "supremacy of revising the players brought" – there is always a touch of slyness in such affirmations. Doubtlessly everybody needs to train playing for "the coming qualifications" for Cups of different continents – Europe, Asia, or Africa – and watch the first reserve. But what coach, being commonly an ambitious person eager to reach the highest results, will refuse to "rise as high as possible" at such a representative tournament featuring 12 youth teams? So the pragmatic defense gets over the reckless attack on the soft SCC pitch...

A significant improvement was brought into the quarterfinals' figures by the members of "the expanded Baltic Cup" – the teams of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, joined by the team of Moldova. These teams don't need to play defensive football in the matches for 9-12th places. So, the match Moldova – Estonia (3:2) features the highest performance at the tournament so far, five goals being scored for the first time. Then two goals scored by team Latvia in the final of the match against Lithuania drew the Commonwealth Cup scoring statistics to the normal level: two and the quarter (goals per game at the average).

Unfortunately the struggle for the title of the best striker of the tournament doesn't prove to be very active. The "shooters list" is so far headed by Alexey Yevseev, FC Zenit (the usual position of the 21-year-old Petersburger is far from attacking, but he was moved to the offence line due to the injury of his compatriot and contemporary Yevgeny Markov who now plays for FC Yenisey Krasnoyarsk). He heads the list of none. He is quite uncertainly followed by 9 players with two goals in their assets, three of them playing for Turkmenistan which unlike team Russia managed to get into the semifinals. They now can count on pragmatic football, too. Therefore Yevseev may get a good opportunity to win the strikers' competition. Team Russia should win something at the Commonwealth Cup, shouldn't it?