“Our pain -” Spartak “- MK

Permanent expert “MK” Fedor Kanareikin – about the struggle for tickets to the Gagarin Cup

Less than a month is left before the finish of the regular season of the Continental Hockey League (KHL), which will end on February 26. Most of the participants in the playoffs, which traditionally includes 16 teams, have already decided – either de jure, or at least de facto. The dispute, in fact, is over the last vouchers.

Petersburg SKA was the first to secure a place among the participants in the Gagarin Cup, and the rest of the Western Conference grand clubs have long solved their local tournament tasks. But Spartak, unfortunately for many fans, is no longer one of them – and the team has less and less chances to break into the playoffs.

We talked about this and not only with the constant expert of MK, 2-time world champion among youth teams and the winner of the USSR championship as a player, as well as the champion of Russia as a helmsman of Metallurg Magnitogorsk Fedor Kanareikin.

“There really isn’t much left until the end of the regular season. You can already evaluate the performance of the teams. In the West, by and large, 6 playoff participants are clear. The struggle is for the 7th and 8th tickets between Severstal, Minsk Dynamo and Moscow Spartak. Alas, Spartak, to put it mildly, is not a foreign team for me, has every chance not to get into the Gagarin Cup.

The first thing I don’t fully understand is the resignation of Boris Mironov from the post of head coach. If questions arose from the leadership, in my opinion, it was not at all necessary to bring them to radical decisions. It was more work moments, I think. I personally saw that many hockey players have progressed, that the team is in the playoff zone, taking 6-7th places. Yes, it was possible to work better, but there was definitely no catastrophe.

And what did this resignation give? Yes, at first there were separate victories. But here it can be interpreted in two ways: someone will say that the team shook itself, and someone that they just went on Mironov’s luggage, passed some stage, and then collapsed.

There are no games right now. Neither the majority nor the minority. Acquisitions in the person of Emelin and Chudinov, for example, also cannot be said to have strengthened Spartak. And the most important thing in my understanding is that those new players who appear, for example, those who played earlier in the club system as part of Khimik, they do not grow. Yes, and the same Talaluev, Tsyplakov (I can also name the names of the people who added) are now standing still.

In general, there is something to think about … And the opposite example is Amur, which for many years could not solve the problem of reaching the playoffs, now has good chances to get there. Because the management let Vadim Yepanchintsev work, they didn’t pull the coach. Let’s see how it will be in the end, but the team is competitive, it may well win the fight for 8th place in the East against Neftekhimik, Barys and Traktor.

Whereas Spartak, on the contrary, is slowly deflating. And I’m already confused, to be honest, who is on the bench of the team: coaches change so often! However, there are still chances. Much will be decided in the match in Minsk on Tuesday, February 7th. And if the red-whites lose there … “

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28966 dated February 7, 2023

Newspaper headline:
“Our pain is Spartak”