Russia manager Fabio Capello has criticised his team’s poor finishing in the recent 1-1 draw with Norway. This was one of the few pretournament friendly matches left for the team before they take part in the World Cup 2014. Capello has been given the task of getting the team back into the eyes of the world in this competition. However, preparations were hampered after managing two draws in the last five friendly matches. This includes a 1-1 draw against Norway on Saturday. Despite taking the lead after just three minutes on the clock through Shatov, Russia were held back by a late goal from the opposition.

However, they have the better of the opportunities over the course of the 90 minutes. Due to this disappointing result, Russia will now be hoping to get a win from their final friendly against Morocco. Following this friendly, they will be taking part in the World Cup with matches against Korea Republic, Belgian, and Algeria in the group stages. Capello is also expected to take Russia to the Euro 2016. They started the qualifying campaign with a match against Liechtenstein. Capello was especially disappointed with the four clear-cut opportunities that Russia had to score.

Capello is yet to name his final squad for the World Cup, but he does not plan to do so until the last moment. “The game was played in hot conditions and we did not expect that. The Norwegians have a quick team and I had an excellent opportunity to once again look at my players, playing at international level. I must say that we have been lucky as none of the players have picked up an injury. We created four good goal scoring opportunities, but we weren’t able to take them. The Norwegian goalkeeper and their defense managed to keep them out,” said Capello.

Russia’s national team manager Fabio Capello has stated that the upcoming World Cup 2014 will be a difficult campaign for his team. Russia will be coming up against the likes of Algeria, Belgium, and Korea in the group stages of the competition. Compared with the likes of Germany and Brazil, these represent easy opponents for Russia. Hence they are regarded as one of the favourites to reach the knockout stages. Fabio Capello, though, has rejected suggestions that this will be anything easy. Capello already has the experience of managing teams in the World Cup.

The squad for the World Cup was only recently announced by Capello. He took the England team to the quarter-finals of the World Cup 2010 where they were extremely unlucky to reach the semifinals after having a goal disallowed. The former Real Madrid manager appears to have done extremely well in his position as the Russia’s national team manager. The team are undefeated in the last five matches and they will go into the start of the pretournament friendly matches with a lot of confidence. They come up against the likes of Slovakia, Norway, and Morocco in the three matches before starting the World Cup campaign against South Korea on June 18.

“I think Russia has a good team. We should remain realists because nothing will come easy for us at the World Cup. I expect our group opponents to play flat out against us, both physically and mentally. We need to be ready for that and I believe that three warm-up matches will help us a great deal. Of course I will thoroughly study the video footage of our group rivals’ matches. But I’m also set to watch Belgium in their warm-up match against Sweden in Stockholm on June 1 and to attend the match between Romania and Algeria in Geneva three days later,” said Capello.