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Russia scrambles to save face with Confed Cup looming

The new World Cup stadium in Saint Petersburg was meant to boast a state-of-the-art pitch and be a showcase for Vladimir Putin's Russia, when it hosts the 2018 football bonanza.

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The new World Cup stadium in Saint Petersburg was meant to boast a state-of-the-art pitch and be a showcase for Vladimir Putin's Russia, when it hosts the 2018 football bonanza.

Instead the USD 800 million venue, which took a decade to build, has caused more embarrassment than pride as Russian authorities scramble to salvage its pitch less than a month before it hosts the opening match of the Confederations Cup, a World Cup warm-up tournament.

Uprooted chunks of turf and bald spots on the playing surface in the first match last month at the 68,000-seat arena -- a 2-0 win by home team Zenit St Petersburg over Ural Yekaterinburg -- sparked concern that the stadium would be unsuitable for Russian Premier League matches, let alone the 2018 World Cup.

While officials played down the situation, the stadium received wide-ranging criticism including from Zenit manager Mircea Lucescu.

Now, less than a month before Russia face New Zealand at the venue on June 17, workers have begun replacing the turf in a desperate battle against time.

It is the latest chapter in a decade-long saga of spiralling bills, missed deadlines and scandal surrounding the World Cup in Russia.

"We were supposed to receive a fairytale stadium, the best in the world, in ideal condition," opposition firebrand and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny said in an April video post.

"It was one of Russia's most important construction projects, and money was stolen nonetheless." Last year the former deputy governor of Saint Petersburg, Marat Oganesyan, was arrested over a fraud scheme with a firm that was supposed to provide the stadium with a video scoreboard.

- 'Save the grass' -

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Even before the issues with the grass, problems with the stadium's retractable pitch made the playing surface vibrate and threw doubt on whether it could host games.

Then when officials gave the go-ahead for Zenit -- eventually expected to move into the stadium -- to play games there, even those trial attempts had to be abandoned.

After just two of three planned games authorities and football officials moved the team's May 17 match against FC Krasnodar to the club's old Petrovsky stadium to "save the grass from extra wear".

In an interview with RBK business daily last month, Zenit's chief agronomist Konstantin Kreminsky blamed Bamard, a Russian company hired to deliver the pitch.

Kreminsky said that the pitch had been poorly prepared for Saint Petersburg's unforgiving winter and that there had been "fungal diseases" and "a lot of mould" on the grass in late February.

A Bamard representative told

 

(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)

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