“Khimki” bypassed “Chelsea”

Khimki, heading straight for relegation from the Russian Premier League (RPL), beat Chelsea’s achievement. Andrey Talalaev has already become the fifth specialist who will have the opportunity to coach the Moscow Region team this season.

The fact that Andrei Talalaev became the head coach of Khimki was announced by their general director Nikolai Olenev TASS And “RIA News”. With Talalaev, according to him, a contract was signed for a period of five years. However, the formal term of the contract in this particular case is unlikely to have at least some significance.

The fact is that with this appointment, Khimki set an interesting achievement, having outdone one of the European giants. Before them, the undisputed symbol of personnel turbulence in European football was Chelsea.

Frank Lampard, who now heads the London club in crisis, is the fourth specialist who happened to serve as a team coach this season. But Khimki has already got one more such mentors.

Sergey Yuran started the season in this status. However, it was unexpected, despite quite decent indicators for those who were used to fighting for survival in the top division of the club, fired already after four rounds, in which the Khimki team scored seven points. Yuran’s replacement Nikolai Pisarev held out not for long – less than a month. Khimki played only four official matches with him and lost all of them. After Nikolai Pisarev, their leaders entrusted the team to Spartak Gogniev. He has been sent resigned a week ago, since there were no radical improvements under him in Khimki. Conflicts between the players and the club’s coaching staff continued to be constantly reported by various sources, and his performance after the winter break went from mediocre to disastrous. Gogniev left against the backdrop of a defeat – 0:6 – from Krasnodar.

Finally, last Sunday in the 22nd round, Khimki was led by Rinat Bilyaletdinov. In this match, the Khimki team extended their losing streak to four, losing – 0:3 – to CSKA. After another misfire, they were caught up in points by Torpedo, which, as it seemed until recently, had reserved the bottom, 16th, line in the table. At the same time, a fairly solid distance of four points separates two outsiders from Torch, which occupies the 14th position.

It was Torpedo that was the previous place of work of Andrei Talalaev, who was used to teams that did not pretend to much (his already rather long track record includes Wings of the Soviets, Akhmat, Tambov, Kuban, Nizhny Novgorod Volga , Armenian “Pyunik”). Talalaev worked at the modestly staffed Moscow club from October 2022 to the end of March 2023, and it is believed that the reason for the break in relations with him was not so much poor results as disagreements with management over his preparation.

Alexey Dospekhov