LUSAIL /Qatar/, December 13. /TASS/. Those Were the Days, a romance song originally composed by Russia’s Boris Fomin, was performed by a Qatar orchestra to kick off a semi-finals game between Argentina and Croatia on Tuesday.

The song topped the charts in the West after American musician Eugene Raskin put a new English lyric to the slightly changed tune in 1962. To date, the song has versions in Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Dutch, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Swedish, Slovak, Polish, Belarusian, Croatian, Romania, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, German, Hebrew and Vietnamese.

Videos of the orchestra's performances became popular during the World Cup.

The match between Argentina and Croatia started in Lusail at 22:00 Moscow time.