Costa Rica’s male national soccer team “La Sele” scored a 4-3 win in their friendly match against Russia’s national soccer team in Krasnodar, Russia.

Costa Rica dominated the first half of the game although missed a lot of good opportunities to score, a Russian team without some of its main players including their goalkeeper, didn’t take advantage of the dead ball and set piece opportunities they had. The first goal of the game came from Costa Rican Randall Azofeifa at minute 21’ of play, just 8 minutes later Bryan Ruiz will score the second goal for “La Sele”; but Russia immediately responded with their first goal by Aleksandr Samedov when the clock marked 31’ minutes and Costa Rica’s defense failed to do their job in helping goalkeeper Keylor Navas. At times Costa Rica seemed to have confused intensity with roughness causing some unnecessary faults by the Costa Rican players. The first half came to an end with an own goal by Vasili Berezutski in minute 45’ making the score 3-1 in favor of La Sele.

Russia’s coach made some changes in his lineup for the second half of the match, with just two minutes into this stage Artem Dzyuba scored for the Russians, both the defense and Keylor Navas failed in this play, the score was then matched 3-3 in minute 60’ with another goal by Dzyuba a clear error by Keylor Navas who seemed out of it and insecure throughout the whole game. After this goal and some changes in “La Sele’s” line up, Costa Rica managed to contain the Russians, defending well but not generating any more opportunities to score. As the game was coming to an end in minute 90’ a penalty was called in favor of Costa Rica on Joel Campbell who executed the penalty with no problem and scored the fourth and last goal of the game for Costa Rica.

Without a doubt Costa Rica’s head coach needs to figure out which players really deserve to be part of the main line up, he has done enough testing at this point and should know which combinations work right instead of just playing it safe like he usually does. Credit where credit is due, Russia is a tough team and they were playing at home, scoring four goals as an away team is no easy task, actually Costa Rica is the first visitor to score 4+ goals to Russia in 104 years; yet, plenty of errors were made and will need to be analyzed and avoided as La Sele heads to the hexagonal phase of the Russia World Cup Qualification in November.