Krasnodar defeated CSKA and retained first place

The Russian football year ended with the match of the 18th round of the Russian Championship, in which Krasnodar snatched a 1:0 victory at home over CSKA thanks to Nikita Krivtsov’s goal at the end. The victory allowed the Krasnodar team to go into the winter break as championship leaders.

This match apparently made those three tens of thousands of Krasnodar fans who came to the stadium tremble with fear in the hope of seeing their team finish the year beautifully at the top of the table. Something wasn’t going well with her. Well, or maybe it worked out too well for the army men who, after snowy and frosty Moscow, found themselves in a football paradise with green grass on the lawn and above-zero temperatures, and were terribly happy about this circumstance. They clung to the ball well. They ran forward well and smartly – as in that episode when Abbosbek Faizullaev and Ivan Oblyakov, accelerating, magnetized the Krasnodar defenders hurrying back, forming a corridor in the center for Fedor Chalov. His difficult shot hit the last obstacle – goalkeeper Matvey Safonov, who had calculated everything with a jump.

And then near the Krasnodar penalty area and even inside it, something like a small fire constantly arose, which could only be extinguished with enormous difficulty. The flames flared up before spreading into it in different parts of the field – in all of them, CSKA had an advantage, albeit a small one.

And these nervous fans probably remembered the loss of Krasnodar. Without John Cordoba, who was disqualified for a rude and stupid gesture, he had already managed to play one match, and in it everything turned out well for the Krasnodar team. But that was a match with Orenburg, and not with CSKA, which is in good shape and feels that it is obliged to fight for medals. With the Orenburgers as a plug for the hole formed at the tip, where the bombardier of Cordoba always tears and rushes, opening, tormenting his guardians with jerks, the youngster Alexander Koksharov with his, of course, much more limited functionality was quite enough. In the meeting with the army team, in which Koksharov remained on the bench until the middle of the second half, and the leading edge in the new version of the base was entrusted to Moses Cobnan, the absence of a dangerous and tireless forward was felt much more acutely: Krasnodar flatly refused to linger for a long time in the opposing half.

This absence was especially painful during the short period at the end of the first half, when the army team finally decided that they could step back and play cat and mouse with their opponents, see what they were capable of if they were given more freedom. It contained two terribly promising crosses – Juan Batchi and Ilzat Akhmetov. In both cases, there was no one near the goal to simply push the ball that was close to them into the net.

Sunday’s problems for Krasnodar seemed too deep, systemic, or something. But coach Vladimir Ivich managed to solve them in a quarter of an hour, during the time that the football break lasts.

The Krasnodar transformation indeed seemed fantastic. The team that had just been rather inert and careless suddenly appeared prickly, angry and knowing how to crush their opponents. Now it was not Safonov who had to be on guard all the time, but CSKA goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev, because any falsehood was punishable by someone else’s unpleasant attack. In the end, simplicity turned into the motto of the army team, which until recently preferred more elegant designs – without hesitation, they kicked the ball away, just to get rid of the hints of impending trouble that were constantly wandering in front of the goal.

However, in terms of patience and ability to cope with their own difficulties, CSKA was in no way inferior to Krasnodar. As a result, at some point – after Koksharov’s exit – the hosts’ adrenaline supply ran out and the game was completely equal, including in terms of chances. At CSKA they were, perhaps, even brighter. Once, for example, Fedor Chalov almost hit Matvey Safonov with a roundhouse shot. And Matvey Lukin even managed to make a perfect longitudinal pass, which cut the Krasnodar rear in two, and arranged for Abbosbek Faizullaev an almost pure one-on-one with Matvey Safonov. Fayzullaev, it seems, was a little confused himself when he discovered what a convenient position he found himself in, and awkwardly launched the ball somewhere to the side.

CSKA, of course, should have considered that they honestly deserved a draw in this match. But I didn’t get that either, because the game saved the most interesting trick for the ending. Already seemingly hooked, Krasnodar found the strength to rush into the attack and earned a corner. And another joker of his, which Ivich pulled out of the deck, Nikita Krivtsov, who had not yet scored in the current championship, fired extremely accurately from the bottom into the near corner. And he brought both his partners and the stands into ecstasy, who realized that for the first time in their history, Krasnodar was going on a three-month winter break in the championship as its leader. It is ahead of Zenit by two points, and Dynamo, which tied 1:1 with Fakel, by six. And CSKA is four points behind Dynamo, that is, the top three.

Alexey Dospehov