Vladimir Putin left me stuck in traffic so I ditched my car, says former Ireland man Aiden McGeady

Aiden McGeady has revealed that he ditched his car after it took him five hours to drive a 30-minute journey from the Spartak Moscow training ground to his home.

And one of the reasons for the snarl up on the Moscow motorways was a sudden road closure to allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to get through the city.

McGeady joined Spartak from Celtic in the summer of 2010 and he stayed there until his January 2014 move to Everton, playing almost 100 games and scoring 13 goals.

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While he also detailed some of the long flights to play domestic games, the Moscow traffic was something that he really struggled with during his short time driving in the Russian capital.

He said: “The club did amazing things to help you. The club gave you a car and a driver.

“The driver, I felt sorry for the guy, he was driving us about. He’d drop you if you went to go shopping and he’d wait on you. You’d go to a restaurant and he’d wait for you.

“You’d then go back home and you’d say, oh, I’m going out tonight, and he’d sit in the car and wait for you. The guys worked 24 hours a day sometimes.

“So I’d go to training with a driver and my missus would sit in the house. So I was like, I need to get a car so she can do her own thing as well, if she wants to go to the gym or go shopping.

“So I got a car and drove to training a few times. I only stayed about half-an-hour with no traffic to the training ground.

“I drove one day and on the way back it took me about five hours to drive home, because Moscow is a different world. Six lane motorways either side and this was just queued back.

“And obviously when Putin goes about as well, every road in Moscow is shut. See if Putin is about, the policemen just stop the roads and they just stand there, and you are going, what’s going on here? Putin must be going about!

“Then 15 black cars fly by at 70 miles an hour and it’s, on you go again. It took me five hours to go home!

“Whenever there’s a crash over there, what they do here is, if you crash you move into the side of the road, if you bump cars you move into the side and let the traffic go.

“Over there, you are not allowed to move the car until the police come to identify whose fault it was. So if you are blocking a road, you are blocking the road until the police come.

“So it was five hours in my car to go home after training one day. And I just said to my driver the next day, I need to get out of this car, I cannae do this anymore.

“That was my experience of traffic. People don’t realise it’s a different world.”

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