The Moscow Whistle

A Russian sports broadcaster last week told his radio audience that the Arsenal eleven, which was about to arrive in Moscow, was the best soccer team in Britain. Twenty years ago, Arsenal may well have been one of the best in all Europe. But by the time it went to Russia last week (at Moscow's cordial invitation), the team stood 15th among Britain's top 22 teams. Before the game with the Moscow Dynamos was half over, the most disciplined Soviet sports fan was beginning to doubt the party line; "Britain's best" were playing like footsore stumblebums. The Dynamos won easily, 5-0.

The match was so one-sided that the stadium rocked to the shrill and scornful sound of the "Moscow Whistle," a nerveracking Eastern echo of The Bronx cheer. English sportswriters found it all terribly embarrassing. "The Russians," said Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express, "are not easily amused. But before battered Arsenal had crawled out of the floodlit stadium tonight, 75,000 Russians were laughing like kids at a pantomime . . . The crowd were tossing peaked caps and laughing fit to bust . . ."

Fed up with a growing list of losses in the game that their ancestors perfected, English soccer fans are getting just a little tired of being told that, at any rate, their teams are the best behaved. The big question in Britain last week: Had the Russians deliberately invited Arsenal in order to set up an easy victory for themselves? England was "sacrificed," snarled Peter Wilson in the Daily Mirror, to "make a Russian holiday."

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