Avangard fired head coach Mikhail Kravets
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To correct the almost catastrophic situation in the quarterfinal round of the KHL championship play-off, Avangard remembered the trick it tried at the beginning of the last decade. After a second consecutive home defeat from Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, this time with a humiliating score of 0:7, the Omsk club fired head coach Mikhail Kravets, appointing instead Sergei Zvyagin, who was primarily responsible for training the team’s goalkeepers and had no experience as head of the coaching staff. . In previous cases, emergency replacements of the coach did not help Avangard. But a similar trick recently worked for the Ivory Coast football team, which then won the African Cup.
Yesterday Avangard announced the termination of the contract with the team’s head coach Mikhail Kravets. Instead, Sergei Zvyagin was appointed acting coach. And the club’s message states that it continues preparations for the third game of the second round series of the KHL championship playoffs with Lokomotiv in “planned mode.”
In fact, the word “planned” in the general context sounds very strange. We are talking about a real emergency. The fact is that in hockey, like any other team sport, it is not customary to fire coaches during the playoffs. In order for a dismissal to take place, something completely extraordinary must happen. The Avangard management considered the start of the series with Lokomotiv to be such an extraordinary event, before which the positions of its coach looked extremely strong.
Mikhail Kravets took over the leadership of the Omsk team in the fall of 2022 and, given the plainness of his background, did not seem the most obvious choice for one of the KHL giants.
Meanwhile, under the leadership of Kravets, the Omsk team had a quality last season (it ended with a defeat in the play-off semi-finals from the then powerful Ak Bars), and this season it seems they have not become weaker. In the regular season, Avangard gave first place in the Eastern Conference table to Metallurg only at the end of the tournament, and in the first round of the Gagarin Cup they dealt with Lada quite easily. The new, “cross” play-off format brought it together in the next round with Lokomotiv, which took third place in the West, and in this confrontation of up to four wins, the Siberian club was rated at least no lower. However, in both of the matches that opened it, Avangard suffered defeats. The first, in overtime with a score of 1:2, was offensive, the second, with a score of 0:7, was simply humiliating. At the same time, what was most striking was the helplessness of Avangard’s excellent attack in the regular season. Its leaders – Vladimir Tkachev and the championship’s best sniper Reed Boucher – were unable to score any points at all.
Avangard entrusted the mission of getting out of a difficult situation to a specialist whose background is even more modest than that of Mikhail Kravets. Sergei Zvyagin, a once famous goalkeeper, has never worked as the head of the coaching staff, but since 2018 he has been responsible for training goalkeepers at the Omsk club. True, this season his powers were slightly expanded, for example, they also included the defensive line.
The story of Kravets’s dismissal, no matter how exceptional it may seem, is in fact not unprecedented. The fact is that the Omsk club changed coaches twice in a row in the KHL playoffs, as if now remembering those experiments.
The first time this happened was in 2010, when right before the cup stage, Avangard, which was unimpressive in the regular season, dismissed Igor Nikitin, now the head of Lokomotiv. With Raimo Summanen taking his position, however, it was not possible to at least compete with Neftekhimik: the Omsk team lost the series dry. A year later, Avangard performed “reverse castling”. His second round series against Metallurg reached the seventh match, and before him Summanen suddenly gave up his post to Nikitin. And again the move turned out to be useless: the Magnitogorsk club won the match.
However, those who are partial to Avangard may be inspired by a much more recent football experiment. At the African Cup held in January-February, its hosts, the Ivorians, played terribly in the group stage and were close to being left without the playoffs. But after the dismissal of head coach Jean-Louis Gasset and the appointment of his assistant Emerson Fahe to the vacated post, the Ivory Coast team, which still made it to the cup stage, won the gold of the tournament.
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