Ivan Komarov, captain and goalkeeper of the team “New Russian” from Ekaterinburg, answered questions from the journalists after a tight semifinals against “Lokomotiv” of Robert Ufenok77 Fakhretdinov. The sportsmen from the Urals, after losing to the red&greens in the digital event, proved their mettle on a real pitch. The aggregate score is 5:4.
— You looked excited during the penalty shoot-out…
— For us it was a classical series of penalty kicks. Emotions ran high. I want to thank the organizers from the bottom of my heart for such high level of the whole event. I believe this competition was organized at the very top level. The penalty shoot-out is yet another case in point which proves that all teams are pretty much equal, we just got luckier at some point. We showed more professionalism in mini-football than in esports.
— One can call your team a “dark horse” among all participants, so tell us about your team, what’s your strength?
— We’ve been playing together as a team for several years. Courtesy of our sponsor Evgeny Vorobiev who got together guys with a football background. Usually we play as a team at All-Russian events. It was nice to receive an invitation here. For now we are nowhere near media football in terms of popularity, but we are trying our best.
— What do you make of the format phygital-football?
— Phygital is really cool! I guess there is a future in it, passions are heating up differently here – first, you play on a game console and then you go to the futsal court. This is cyberfuture! To encourage people to join sports physically, that’s really cool, people will get to play more real football.
