An ambitious manager with an ice-cold demeanour on the pitch, Stanislav Cherchesov has withstood two years of criticism to shape Russia’s most successful World Cup squad from what once looked like its weakest in history.

Resembling a mustachioed police captain sent down to clean up a crooked precinct, the Osettian-born former goalkeeper has instituted his physical, inexhaustible style of football while rarely cracking a smile at pitchside. “I believe this is only the beginning so I have to save my emotions for the future,” he told reporters after Russia’s shock defeat of Spain, a match that looked thrilling in retrospect but largely came down to 120 minutes of football comparable to a war of attrition.

In that upset’s wake Cherchesov has seen his stock rise, going from a whipping-boy of the Russian press to the recipient of congratulatory phone calls from Vladimir Putin. “[Putin] called me several times,” Cherchesov told journalists in Sochi on Friday before the quarter‑final with Luka Modric’s Croatia. “The president’s support is important for us, the guys know about it, and it’s additional motivation.”

He was pilloried in the press for his decisions to leave out of the squad key Russian players with whom he has feuded in the past and for a decision to shift to a four‑man defence weeks before the tournament. But his defensive tactics have taken Russia further in the World Cup than they have gone in a generation, including under prestigious foreign managers such as Guus Hiddink and Fabio Capello.

“The biggest thing you could say he has done is to withstand the criticism,” said Sergei Kiriakov, a former teammate who played with Cherchesov on the post-Soviet CIS national team in 1992 and for the Russian squad in 1994. “He was always very ambitious, very sure in himself.”

Born in Alagir in Russia’s North Ossetia region, he began his career at Spartak Ordzhonikidze – now known as Spartak Vladikavkaz – already sporting his trademark moustache, before moving up to Spartak Moscow in 1984. There he served as understudy to Rinat Dasayev, the Soviet goalkeeper in the famed 1980s squad, under the Russian coaching legend Konstantin Beskov, who became the first coach to lead a Soviet club side to a European final.

His career took off just as the Soviet Union was crumbling, starting as a goalkeeper at Spartak from 1989 and earning a spot in the national team in 1990. “He was very disciplined and he’s bringing that to the players now,” Kiriakov said.

The duo were in the side in 1992 going through one of the toughest periods in Russia’s history, playing under the flag of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Cherchesov left for Germany soon after, playing several seasons for Dynamo Dresden and then for six years for the now defunct Tirol Innsbruck, ending his career at Spartak in 2002.

He began managing Austrian teams in 2004. He was devoted to fitness and never drank or smoked, said Kiriakov.

“He never wanted to give away his place in the starting lineup, as the starting keeper,” Kiriakov told the Guardian. “He fought for that position. There was a really strong lineup of competitors.”

Still it was a surprise, Kiriakov said, that Cherchesov had risen to his role as leader of the Russian national team. “I never imagined I was playing alongside the future manager of the Russian team.”

His rise as a manager has taken him from Austria to Moscow to a defunct Sochi squad, Perm and even Grozny (Ramzan Kadyrov once complained on Instagram that Cherchesov favoured foreign players during his term at Terek).

It has also been notable for his locker-room feuds with some of the league’s biggest stars. Fyodor Smolov in an interview to Sovetsky Sport spoke about being pressured to leave Moscow Dynamo by Cherchesov, despite feeling he was “no worse than a number of the other players”.

But the biggest scandal to follow Cherchesov has been over not calling up Igor Denisov, the talented but testy Lokomotiv midfielder, after the two blew up at one another after a high-stakes defeat by Dynamo.

“Get in the showers, I’m going to break your neck there,” Denisov recalled the coach saying during one exchange, sparked by a decision not to play a teammate.

Commentators before the World Cup believed the team was a mess.

“It’s impossible to understand the logic of an unprofessional,” Vasily Utkin, a well-known football commentator, said of Cherchesov on Sport-FM before the first game against Egypt.

“The team has now been trained for a long time by this brass statue. I don’t know what else to say. I would like to speak as little as possible about the national team.”

Now Cherchesov is ascendant. Critics say that Spain’s poor play was the deciding factor in Russia’s victory last week. But a win against a dangerous Croatia side on Saturday would put that criticism to rest.