CSKA reached the main point – Newspaper Kommersant No. 54 (7499) dated 30.03.
[ad_1]
The current holder of the Gagarin Cup CSKA became the last semi-finalist of the current play-off “Fonbet” of the KHL championship, winning the second consecutive series stretching to the maximum distance. In the seventh match with Lokomotiv, the army team defeated the Yaroslavl team very convincingly, with a score of 5:0, and now they will fight for reaching the final with their main opponent – SKA.
The second this spring, the seventh match of the play-off series, in which CSKA fell to play, was not at all like the previous one. The previous one, against Severstal, proved that even players with tons of experience and class are not so easy to enter such games, games in which every second you remember what to fix in which case nothing will work after them. In that match, the army team immediately found themselves in a situation that, if it were a team of not too status, would have to be described as catastrophic: two goals conceded in a bad game. To go further, I had to include all the emotions remaining in the reserve, an anguish.
The seventh meeting of the army team with Lokomotiv proved that cool clubs do not have the habit of stepping twice on the rake planted on the way and draw the right conclusions from each adventure. This time CSKA did not look weighed down by this burden of responsibility hanging on his shoulders. On the contrary, he has probably never been so volatile and energetic in a series with railroad workers.
It was exactly the hockey for which the army team is sharpened: on the one hand, control of the puck, on the other, a garnish in the form of rigidity, density, which sometimes was terribly lacking in the sixth match in Yaroslavl to dampen the impulse of the Lokomotiv hockey players at the stage of its inception . Now Yaroslavl, who were accelerating to slip through the middle zone, were met at the second or third step. The rarest case: for the entire first period, Lokomotiv did not inflict a single sensible shot on the army gates.
The goals of the hosts in this situation looked like something absolutely inevitable. Well, it cannot do without them, given how much time CSKA spends near the gates of Yaroslavl. The first matured after a long attack, taxiing to the throw of Andrei Svetlakov. Or, rather, a sketch, because, of course, he saw that there was Anton Slepyshev on that section of ice that is called the far patch. And Slepyshev knows how to substitute a stick for such throws, perhaps better than anyone else in the KHL.
The second goal was the result of the outbreak of the fourth army link, which for this match has accumulated power and agility as much as any other. In the Yaroslavl zone, a carousel was spinning, turning the heads of the defenders. In the end, Prokhor Poltapov took the puck from the tailgate and sent it to the goalkeeper, where Vitaly Abramov was already on duty. Lokomotiv coach Igor Nikitin, of course, saved a time-out for the end, but was forced to take it, in fact, at the beginning of the match. There was no other way out: it was necessary to urgently reassure the team, to inspire them that nothing had been lost yet.
Timeout at first glance did not change much. In any case, the 0:2 score at the end of the first period could still be considered by Lokomotiv as its success, since it survived, for example, Poltapov’s chic pass, which would not have been lost even among the brightest NHL highlights.
But something changed after the break. For the whole half of the next period, CSKA tried on the skin in which Lokomotiv had just suffered. They took him in a vice, they didn’t let him deploy at least a more or less decent attack, and Maxim Shalunov almost won back one goal by firing into the rack. These few minutes the army team was engaged exclusively in what they endured. And, unlike Lokomotiv, they managed to endure until a respite. And it turned out to watch for their own chance, which was converted into the third goal against the again actually helpless Yaroslavl goalkeeper Daniil Isaev, Vladislav Kamenev, who played impeccably on the rebound.
In the playoffs, incredible plot twists take place. But the state of CSKA in this match reduced the risk of such a turn not even to a minimum, but to zero: it was too luxurious. In the final period, the army team Andrei Svetlakov and Mikhail Grigorenko scored two more goals against Lokomotiv. And already very gracefully, plowing wide open the corner of the gate with a perepasovka.
Thus, both pairs of semi-finalists of the Gagarin Cup were determined. In the final of the Eastern Conference, Ak Bars will play with Avangard, and in the final of the Western Conference there will be a confrontation that has long become almost the main attraction of any KHL season. This is a confrontation between two giants – CSKA and SKA. Usually it is impossible to single out a clear favorite in it. But now, it seems, there is a factor that shouts too loudly that the Petersburgers should be the favorites. And the point is not that they have the advantage of their site, but the colossal difference in the load that fell on the two clubs in the playoffs. CSKA has already played 14 matches in it, SKA has spent only ten matches on Dynamo Minsk and Torpedo. And Muscovites will have a modest rest before the series: it opens on Sunday.
[ad_2]
Source link