Andrey Bukhlitckiy

There was the time when I played big-time football. And there was the European Cup held in Moscow. Nobody could believe it: it was December, snow was everywhere, and there’re people playing beach football in “Luzhniki”. Their preceding goalkeeper wasn’t able to participate, so they invited me. I became the most valuable player in this tournament, and my beach career began.

Beach football is about positive emotions, music, girls and mojito. And no aggression.

Music plays during our matches. It is an awesome atmosphere: you play, and music plays too. It was unusual for me, but then I got used to it and stopped paying attention to it.

I graduated from the football school “Torpedo-ZIL”. Berezutskiye brothers trained there too. And now they the play for Russia’s national team and CSKA.

One day they found sand in my kidneys during a medical examination. I don’t know how it has managed to get there, but of course, it is possible. Besides you get quite a lot of it in your eyes, but I am already used to it. When somebody’s got sand in his eyes during the game, the match is topped, and then a doctor comes and clears the sand out of the player’s eye.

We played in Rome once, and there was a moment when I bent down picking up the ball. And a guy passing by threw some sand right into my eye accidently. I felt like my eyelid hung down — it was that much of sand in it! Then the doctor came up and scraped it all out with his finger. Seems awful? There’s no other way.

I can’t watch football games while being alone — it just doesn’t get me going. So I watch it only with my friends. And I don’t pull any team in bi-time football. I just love good high-quality matches. Of the Russian football say nothing but what is good, but even CSKA doesn’t play interestingly every time.

Running on the sands is the fundamental of our trainings. Sand is the safest surface. Besides while training on sand you work at the whole muscle complex: ahill, calves, adductors, dorsal and frontal muscles. This is because you don’t run over the plain surface all the time — you fall through continually and you need to poise.

After they had begun to show me on TV more often I became more recognizable. When we just came from Spain where the qualification for world championship had been held, we met a man on a parking lot near the FUR office. He was quite reputable and he was getting into a Land Rover, when he saw us. Then he came out and told us: “Guys, I saw you yesterday! Thank you!” Of course, there’re no glorious feelings here: in fact we did nothing special.

I suffer so much now, because my CD player has conked out and now there’s only a radio in my car. The radio sickens me. It’s good that there’s “Radio Jazz”, all other broadcasting stations get turned off. And sure thing I don’t like pop music. I’m fond of drum&bass, rock, jazz, hip-hop. And I also like ska — I’m even friends with Moscow ska band “Distemper”. They are the genre’s classics.