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.