Acrobatics of following Russia 2018

If you are in a football World Cup you will have to always be ready to hit the road. Lighter luggage and fleet-footed flexibility are considered advantages, if you are a fan or a travelling reporter.

And if you are in Russia, a vast country where the distance of one venue from the other is more than twice that of the longest Bangladeshi route, you will have to be athletic. It is not just not about boarding a plane or travelling in a high-speed train, which can run at a speed of 255 kilometres per hour.

You have to do more than managing a ticket, which is not only pricy but hard to get, if you want to watch games on consecutive days at different venues. For instance, if you were to watch both the Argentina-Nigeria game that ended at Saint Petersburg at 11:00pm on Tuesday, and the Brazil-Serbia game at the Spartak Stadium in Moscow the next day, you would have to be very precise in maintaining the whole schedule.

Since we were following both Argentina and Brazil, we headed straight to the central train station after filing our reports to catch the 1:45am train to Moscow. Even though there were about seventy thousand fans who attended the game, the famous Russian Metro flushed them out of the venue in about an hour.

By the time we started, there were still a few thousand Argentina fans singing and dancing in small group. It took us 45 minutes -- which is the standard time even during normal traffic -- to reach the station.

It took us 11 hours to reach Moscow and after spending a couple of hours in the hotel we headed toward the Spartak Stadium. When we left Saint Petersburg, the Argentina fans were relishing the side's progress to the round of 16 from the being on the brink of elimination. And 16-odd hours later, when he reached the Spartak Stadium in Moscow, the Brazilian fans in yellow were hoping for a win against Serbia that will take them to the knockout stage.

It was a tiring journey for us, but it was obviously not the last one with the biggest show on earth only at the halfway stage. And the spectacular caravan will move even faster in the coming days.