Ekaterinburg Avtomobilist dealt with SKA in the second round of the play-offs

Following Ak Bars, CSKA and Dynamo, another of its grandees became a victim of the Fonbet playoffs of the KHL championship. SKA failed in the second round series against the much lower-rated Avtomobilist, managing to win only one victory and lasting five matches. The fifth and last one, he lost on his own court – 4:5, despite the fact that along the way he was leading by two goals.

With this series, SKA strengthened its reputation as the most unlucky giant in the KHL. A club with enormous resources, always assembling a luxurious squad, it won its second Gagarin Cup in 2017, and after that it invariably stumbled on the approaches to it, failing to make it to the final only once, in 2020, and only because then the draw interrupted due to the coronavirus pandemic. The current misfire was, however, especially offensive. It seemed that fate itself was favoring SKA. In each of these five seasons, which ended in failure in the playoffs, he was invariably stopped in the semi-finals by another monster of the league – CSKA. Now, SKA was spared from the confrontation with the impenetrable Moscow army. Those were defeated by Lokomotiv in the opening round. But the series of failures continued anyway. And it was continued by the club, which, although it demolished Ak Bars in the 1/8 finals, was still ranked much lower than the St. Petersburgers for a very clear reason: the application was much less bright and deep, the background was much more modest. But the sonority of SKA’s names was powerless against the strength of the Ural schemes in this series. All he managed was to catch her fourth match in order to go wrong in the next one.

The fifth game in the series was from the category of those that turn into a pleasure for any observer if he is indifferent to both of its participants. It’s just that those who care spend tons of nerves following plot twists and at some point realizing that it is absolutely impossible to guess the next one.

“Avtomobilist” rushed off the bat. There was, of course, a significant amount of luck in the goal that Alexey Makeev scored. In the end, without the rebound from Vasily Glotov’s leg, she would hardly have reached the net. But subsequent events proved, after the fact, that it was true. “Avtomobilist” played approximately the same as in three victorious matches with SKA, as before with “Ak Bars”, that is, very tightly in the middle zone and very sharply in someone else’s zone. Now it’s worth talking about luck in relation to St. Petersburg residents. Or about the amazing form of their goalkeeper Nikita Serebryakov. He stayed toe-to-toe with opponents Brooks Meisek and Egor Alekseev twice in a row and survived twice.

And then SKA, which was not doing well with team hockey, suddenly restored its balance by using the personal talent of one of its forwards. Arseniy Gritsyuk’s throw between two defenders was incredibly good, goalkeeper Evgeniy Alikin’s reaction was so-so.

And then things worked out for the hosts with collective hockey. For several minutes, SKA tormented Avtomobilist so cruelly that the entire St. Petersburg arena probably believed that it was about to take the lead. And the guests came forward, because Makeev’s luck that evening was in perfect order. He shot from a zero angle, already getting close to Nikita Serebryakov, but the puck somehow crawled between the pads of the goalkeeper, who was taken aback by the extraordinary decision of the forward.

And SKA somehow survived such a blow too easily. The break seemed to inject a huge dose of adrenaline into him. For half of the second twenty minutes, Avtomobilist seemed to be decent, but sank after the first failure – a goal from Mikhail Vorobyov conceded in the minority. Literally two minutes later, the Ekaterinburg team, having parted with the puck in someone else’s zone, watched as Marat Khairullin rushed with it into their own to deal with Alikin.

And what happened immediately after this breakthrough suggested the collapse of the guests. Nick Ebert, receiving the puck after a face-off in the center circle, jerked as if he had stepped on the ice for the first time, not knowing what to do with this black disk. In the end, it went to Gritsyuk, and he, of course, did not miss the opportunity to show off his shot again.

Alikin rolled to the bench, giving up his post to Vladimir Galkin, and SKA fans probably no longer doubted that the worst was behind them. But no, they were wrong, because Alexey Byvaltsev, going one on one with Serebryakov, forced the goalkeeper to foul and then converted the power play himself. And at the beginning of the final period, Avtomobilist’s rolling attack led to the merciless shooting of Serebryakov by Ebert, who was correcting a recent mistake. And it all started again, with an equal score.

The denouement of the meeting came in the middle of the period, when the resurrected Avtomobilist regained the lead with a perfectly accurate shot from Alexey Obidin. And then the guests did what they know how to do smartly on good days – they defended themselves carefully and tenaciously. And the most unlucky giant of the KHL in this defense is elm, like in quicksand. He was eliminated from the playoffs, and Avtomobilist moved on, joining another sensational semi-finalist from the Eastern Conference – who destroyed Dynamo Traktor in four matches.

Alexey Dospehov