Magomed Ozdoyev - the rise of a midfield phoenix
Magomed Ozdoyev is special. He is very special because of his background. I have been watching him all along since he first admitted into the Russian national team. But he is more than a player - he is everything, a phoenix of the time. He was born in Grozny, November 1992. At the time, the city was the epicentre of the widespread Chechen uprising, demanding the Russian government to go out and Chechnya to be an independent country. One of the leading figures was Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former pilot who served in Afghanistan. When he only aged two, the Chechen War officially broke out, forcing the Ozdoyev family to flee to Sunzha, in the neighbouring Ingushetia. Magomed survived the war, but it was a difficult experience for the player. Magomed himself was born in Chechnya, but he is ethnically Ingush, a close relative of the Chechens. Unlike the majority of Caucasus families, the Ozdoyev family had a nice, low-profile yet proud and tragic past. His grandfather was the pilot Murad Ozdoyev...