Mikhail Kravets: Avangard played well overall, but was unlucky twice during the match.”

“Avangard” in the KHL championship on September 7 defeated “Avtomobilist” on its ice 3:2 in overtime. The head coach of the team, Mikhail Kravets, assessed the meeting at the post-match conference as generally positive.

The coach also noted that the players need to improve everything at the end of the periods.

– We expected the game to be difficult, and it turned out that way. Avtomobilist is a very good team. All of her links and combinations are strong. The guys there are fast, with technology. Therefore, it was not easy for us.

Well done to the guys for maintaining the momentum, starting to win the fight, playing well overall, but were a little unlucky twice – both in the third period and in the second. You have to play until the end. Still needs some improvement here. But overall, everyone tried and worked. Congratulations to the guys on the victory and two very important points.

– When in overtime, after the power play, Avangard had to play without a goalkeeper and it was dangerous, there was a suspicion that this was even on purpose, such a development of a certain model for the future, just in case. How true is this suspicion?

– These are just rules, we couldn’t do it any other way. We didn’t know until the end and tomorrow we will clarify whether in such an episode we can change the goalkeeper back, and the linesman already said that we cannot. But then it was necessary to make a forward pass, probably. So that there is a pause and it can be released. However, on the other hand, I was confident in the guys, they kept the score thanks to their skill. I hoped for them. And then another shift went and scored an important goal. Decisive.

– Is the fact that in the end the opponent managed to equalize the score and send the game into overtime a wake-up call for the future, or is there already an attitude of “Well, what can you do, this is hockey, it happens?”

– For me, it was even more alarming in the last match, when Sibir hit the post in the last seconds. But here we need to work on the “5 on 6” game, let’s decide, watch the video. The season is just beginning. There weren’t many such cases at the preseason tournaments; we didn’t have time to work them out. And then do the job correctly.

We previously published an opinion about the forward’s match Ivan Igumnova.