Bolivia couldn't stand three: Sadulaev, Miranchuk and Sergeev scored against the team from South America.

The players of the Russian national team successfully completed the October series of matches. Following the victory over Iran (2:1), Valery Karpin's team managed to defeat Bolivia (3:0) on their own field. Read more about the first match in seven years against a South American opponent in the Izvestia article.

Updating the line-up

Even before the match, it was expected that our national team would significantly update its squad compared to the recent 2-1 meeting with Iran. Indeed, the head coach of the Russian national team, Valery Karpin, did not release a single player in the starting lineup who came out from the first minutes in the last match.

Stanislav Agkatsev from Krasnodar took the place in the goal. Almost the entire defensive line was made up of CSKA Moscow players — Danil Krugovoy on the left flank, Matvey Lukin and Igor Diveev in the center of defense. But on the right, for the first time in his career, Mingiyan Beveev from Baltika Kaliningrad joined the starting line-up for the national team. In the middle line are Matvey Kislyak, Dmitry Barinov, Ivan Oblyakov, Lechi Sadulaev and Alexey Miranchuk. Ivan Sergeev played in the attack.

The match against Bolivia was held in Moscow at the VTB Arena. The game was attended by more than 20 thousand spectators. Before the kickoff, the RFU, as usual, organized a series of entertainment events. In addition, the organizers of the meeting celebrated the birthday of Nikita Simonyan, the first vice-president of the Russian Football Federation, the legendary Soviet football player and coach, Olympic champion in 1956, who turned 99 last week.

Both teams took to the field in T-shirts with the image of the legend. And the famous pop singer Lev Leshchenko performed the song "I love you, life" in honor of Simonyan at the stadium. Apart from the unpleasant rain, there were no other negative aspects around the game.

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The course of the match

Already in the first half, Russia had a solid territorial advantage. Most of the playing time was spent in Bolivia's half of the field. However, it didn't often come to potentially scoring chances at the visitors' goal.

In the 13th minute, Sadulaev brought Kislyak one-on-one with the goalkeeper of Bolivia with an excellent pass, but Matvey could not throw the ball over his counterpart. But five minutes later, Sadulaev himself was able to score his first career goal for the national team, successfully closing Sergeyev's pass.

That's not to say that Bolivia perked up after conceding a goal. By the end of the first half, Russia had more approaches to other people's goals. The guests rarely created anything in our penalty area. Another thing is that for a long time Russia could not boast of beautiful episodes. But just before the break, our advantage doubled when Barinov intercepted in the other half of the field and struck from outside the penalty area. The opponent's goalkeeper hit the ball in front of him, and Alexey Miranchuk played the finishing touch.

During the break, Karpin made a double substitution — Maxim Osipenko and Alexander Silyanov entered the field instead of Diveev and Beveev. In the second half, our guys continued to calmly play the game the way they wanted. Once again, they did not allow the opponent to create anything and mostly kept the ball in the other half of the field.

In the 57th minute, Russia scored the third goal. Barinov made allowances for Sergeev, who shot the Bolivians' goal at close range. At the end of the first hour of the game, Sadulaev could have scored again, hitting an empty goal from an acute angle, but the opponent's defender managed to save his team by intercepting the ball flying into the goal. Karpin's team calmly led to victory and is now disbanding until the next training camp, which will be held in November.

"It's not a bad game with a good team as our opponent," Ilya Vakhania, defender of the Russian national team, shared his opinion with Izvestia. — I am glad that we won a good victory. I think we can generally be happy with the last training camp — two good wins over strong teams.

Russia played all four of its autumn matches against teams that either have already qualified for the upcoming 2026 World Cup, like Iran and Jordan, with whom Russia drew at home in September (0:0), or can get there, like Bolivia and Qatar, who beat Qatar a month ago (4:1).

"We played high—quality games against strong opponents," Ivan Oblyakov told Izvestia. — In the fall, we actually got good teams playing in the World Cup. It's always interesting to test yourself against such opponents. And, as you can see, if we play the matches with maximum concentration and fully follow the instructions of the coaching staff, then everything works out for us. Does having a large number of CSKA players in the national team help me? It's clear that we spend more time together at the club. That's why it's a little more comfortable to play with them, and the gaming connections are a little better. But there are no problems with mutual understanding with other national team players either, because we all have qualified players here with a good understanding of the game and how to operate with the ball.

The Russian national team has two more matches to play this year. On November 12, a meeting with Peru will take place in St. Petersburg. Three days later, in Sochi, at Fisht Stadium, our team will host the national team of Chile.