Final two-three – Newspaper Kommersant No. 181 (7382) dated 09/30/2022

The Russian volleyball championship starting today promises to be quite an exciting attraction. This is just the case when the alignment is unsteady, and there are several contenders for gold at once, and choosing the main one among them without any reservations is an impossible task.

The Russian volleyball championship that opens today, like other domestic championships, has adjusted to the difficult circumstances that have deprived its leading clubs of the opportunity to participate in European competitions, and has compacted the calendar. Firstly, by increasing the number of teams in the tournament from 14 to 16, including thanks to the invitation of the Belarusian Stroitel. Secondly, by changing the format of the decisive part of the championship.

In the two seasons before this, its most notable component was the season-crunching compact Final Six, a mini-tournament for the best teams in which any misfire becomes fatal. Now the All-Russian Volleyball Federation has returned to a more familiar and more conservative system. According to the results of the regular season, the participants of the full-fledged play-off will be determined. The four clubs at the top of the table go directly to the quarter-finals, and four more will be added to them based on the results of the qualifying round. In the 1/4 finals, the series will continue up to two victories, in the 1/2 finals, as well as in the May finals – up to three. And trying to guess who will find himself in it is a hopeless occupation.

A high level of competition has always been a feature of the Russian volleyball championship. Two or three clubs that had the status of real European giants played in it, and the same number of clubs that dreamed of acquiring it and were ready to beat the “paper” favorites. But still, as a rule, some one team stood out. At the beginning of the century, Belogorye was the trendsetter, in the last decade Zenit Kazan dominated.

But before the current championship, it will definitely be incredibly difficult for an objective person to determine the alignment in the fight for gold. It looks insanely unsteady, and the reasons to believe or, conversely, not to believe in a particular club from the squad of the strongest lie at hand.

For example, many people want to bet on Dynamo Moscow. The reason is banal: in the end, it was they who won the two previous championships, and nothing that would hint at an inevitable decline happened to Dynamo in the summer. Coach Konstantin Bryansky remained in his place, none of the leading players from the application disappeared. But here it must be remembered that if Dynamo took the gold of 2021 without question, demonstrating its own superiority over the rest of the season, then in 2022 it won it in a completely different style. Dynamo did not even manage to directly break into the Final Six, finishing third in the regular season, and this time their triumph was based not on stability, overflowing power, but on the ability to squeeze the maximum out of themselves at the right time. But in this regard, for example, Lokomotiv Novosibirsk, which lost to Muscovites in an exceptionally hot “golden” meeting in the spring, is hardly fundamentally worse, and handling, the ability to jump above your head when such a jump is necessary, are its signature properties.

Moreover, such properties are ideal just for the previous format, with the Final Six, and not for the play-off series. In them, the depth of the composition is often of key importance. And in terms of the sonority of names, the two giants-“namesakes” are, perhaps, brighter than those of Dynamo and railway workers. We are talking about the Kazan and St. Petersburg “Zeniths”. Each of them also kept the backbone of the base, formed for the most part of players who are well known to any volleyball fan from playing for the mighty Russian team, for example, at last year’s Olympics in Tokyo, where they got silver. At the same time, fresh foreign acquisitions by Zenith look extremely intriguing. Kazan invited an excellent Belgian player Sam Dera, and St. Petersburg – playing in the same role, sometimes taking on the functions of the diagonal, American Matthew Anderson. This is an unconditional volleyball superstar, for whom Russia is also almost a second home: Anderson helped Zenit Kazan from Kazan win titles for a long time during its almost absolute hegemony, winning the Champions League with him four times, and at the age of 35, it seems, hasn’t lost momentum yet.

Another thing is that anyone who wants to question the idea of ​​the potential of the Zeniths will do it without problems, pointing out, for example, that Kazan has too many veterans for whom the tight schedule of the season is not a plus, but a minus, and to the fact that the whole short history of the St. Petersburg club, created five years ago, is a story about unfulfilled ambitions, about how a team with a chic set of talents always stumbles on the near, and sometimes far approaches to gold, in no way reaching to a prestigious title, as if someone had sewn such misfires into her DNA.

Alexey Dospekhov