“Guys become men”: the coach of the RK “Bogatyri” about the performance of the team in Sochi

Krasnodar “Bogatyrs” occupied fifth place in the second round of the Russian Rugby Championship 7 season 2022/23. This is the team’s best result of the year.

Details about the performance of “Bogatyrs” in Sochi, where the tour took place, for “MK in the Kuban” was told by the head coach Anton Levchenko.

Yes, this is definitely progress. In the championship of Russia, the opponents were stronger than in the recent Cup of the country. There we did not show the result we expected, because the team crippled injury. But now some guys were able to recover and helped us. Great joy from the results of the competition. Moreover, in first round championship, many teams played with non-basic teams, but here they brought the best forces. Against this background, we were able to show ourselves, – said the specialist.

At the same time, the group stage was quite difficult for the Bogatyrs, where the team won only one victory in four matches.

– We lost big to Strela and Zastava. There are a lot of our former players in these teams, in Zastava about 80 percent are Alexei Solovyov, the Skachko brothers, Artur Solomyany, Vladimir Aksenov, Sergey Bondarenko. By the way, here 2 brothers met on opposite sides, Nikita Bondarenko played for us. In “Strela” Krasnodar pupils are Roman Roshchin, Oleg Kinosyan. I think the matches did not turn out psychologically anymore, because the older ones played against the younger ones. In general, now in every team of the Russian championship there are our pupils. I think there were about 20 people at this tournament in total.

In “Rostov” half of the team of our pupils – titled Yuri Gostyuzhev, Maxim Savostin, Mikhail Kudinov, Alexei Zakirko, Anatoly Skokov. We lost with a minimum score of 0:5, but I think we played the match, in general, not bad. Unfortunately, almost all the “standards” lost, so a lot of them acted in defense. And in the attack they did not take advantage of their chances. In the match for the 5th place, they managed to take revenge on the Rostovites with a score of 14:10. But the most memorable game was in the semi-finals for 5th-8th places against Enisey-STM. The Krasnoyarsk team arrived with the main team, with foreigners. Almost everyone predicted that it was the Siberians who would win this tour. But they did not work out from the first meeting. The Krasnoyarsk team lost to VVA-Podmoskovye and Lokomotiv-Penza and did not reach the top four. They started the match with us confidently. 7:17 we were losing after the first half, but our team managed to turn the game around and beat the favorite – 19:17. The guys completely completed my installation. We were the youngest team in the tournament and played with real giants. For our composition, I think they even jumped above their heads. I want to thank the guys for having a worthy tour. They began to believe in what we are doing, to believe in ourselves, to show their character, their teeth. Slowly become men. Remove the authorities in the head and show their game.

Anton Levchenko told about the next competitions.

– The Russian Championship will continue in 2023. 2 final rounds will be held in a row at the end of March and beginning of April. Most likely, they will be in Sochi again. Let’s see what lineup we’ll be in. We’ve been losing a lot of players lately. Someone goes to other teams, someone stops playing rugby. Therefore, we perform as young guys, many of them try themselves at this level for the first time in their lives. There is psychological pressure, but we try to cope with it and show a quality game that we are working on. And very soon we will have the championship of Russia for students in the classical discipline. It will start on November 22 in Kislovodsk.